Jennifer Headley - 1972-2006
I walked up the 1,776 stairs of the world's tallest building yesterday, and it got me thinking about religion and what I believe.
For the last two years, my friends Jennie, Sherry and I have climbed CN Tower stairs in order to raise money for the World Wildlife Foundation in memory of our friend Jennifer Headley. Jenn was working for the WWF in Nepal when the helicopter that was bringing her and twenty three others home from a conservation site crashed into the mountains in September, 2006.
Losing Jenn was a terrible shock. We lived a few doors away from each other in high school, and Jenn was a huge influence on me in my teenage years. I had been relentlessly bullied in elementary school, and the thought of going to a big high school full of strangers terrified me. We met in the school photo line, and I don't remember our conversation, but I do remember that the photographer was furious with us because we just couldn't stop laughing about whatever it was that we had been talking about. That laughter became a cornerstone of our entire friendship.
Jenn inspired me in several ways. She encouraged me to join a local theatre group, which was the starting point for a lifelong passion. We both loved music and singing, and participated in school choirs together. She was incredibly politically aware at a young age, and I started reading the newspaper to try to keep up with her. Perhaps most importantly, Jenn's appreciation of my qualities gave me confidence in them myself, confidence that I had never had before. And it wasn't just me - she did this for everyone she knew.
When you walk up 1800 stairs, it gives you time to think (particularly because it is far too difficult to speak.) I thought about how grateful I am that I am able to do the climb with two people who knew and loved Jenn. I thought about how angry I still feel that someone who dedicated her life to helping others and healing our planet should be taken from the world so prematurely. And I thought about my religious beliefs (or arguable lack thereof) and yearned for some answers.
I have always had an uneasy relationship with religion. I was raised in the Anglican church, but really learned by rote, and didn't spend a lot of time considering the real implications of the Christian faith. Later in life I attended a Baptist church at a time when I was yearning for answers, yet became disillusioned with their strict stance on various social issues, particularly same-sex relationships. Now I don't think very much about religion at all, to be honest. But around flight 75 of the CN tower stairs I began to think about the afterlife. I don't know if there is such a thing as Heaven; if there is, then Jenn is certainly there. But here's what I do know:
I believe in an "afterlife" here on earth. I mean this in a few different ways.
The force of Jenn's personality remains after her life so strongly that people are united and inspired by her memory. Sherry, Jennie and I live different lives in different cities, stretched to our limits by jobs, travel and family, and it is Jenn that brings us together for this event every year. It was Jenn that motivated me to turn off all of the electrical appliances in my apartment for 12 hours instead of 1 during the "Earth Hour" campaign. It is Jenn that inspires me to travel and discover new parts of the world while living responsibly in it.
But it goes further than that. I met Jenn at such a formative time in my life that she truly affected the way that I developed into a young adult. If I examine the roots of my political interests, my first stirrings of courage in adolescence or the factors that led me to becoming a drama teacher, I find that Jenn has influenced all of those qualities.
I don't know if Heaven exists or not. But I do know that a part of Jenn still lives, here, in the people that knew her. The influence she has had on my life is so profound that I think that it is impossible to separate the parts of me that developed independently of her from the ones that she helped to cultivate. Now it is my responsibility to live up to the this challenge: to take the gifts she has given me and to do something productive with them.
Jenn, I miss you. But you are not gone. You have left within me the unique and beautiful aspects of who you were, inexorably intertwined with who I now am. And for that, I am forever grateful.
I hardly knew her. But there was a poem, which I still remember now, verbatim, twenty years later (twenty years!). I was editing Lucas's poetry journal, Between the Lines, that year. And I took a very elitist approach: I published maybe one in twenty of the things I got (in the past they published basically everything.) I decided to close the volume with this lovely and serene and meditative little poem Jenn submitted:
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In a voice known only
To me.
Welcome home.
Okay, it's not Auden (she was seventeen, after all) but it’s better than half of what Emily Dickenson wrote, and it taught me something that I haven't ever forgotten. You see, I thought of the poem in Darwinian terms. I thought it was about evolution - about the sea having a sort of primordial resonance in all of us, since it was our "home" for so much of our evolutionary history. So one day I was waiting for you, Al, in the music room, and Jenn was at the piano, and I stopped to tell her that I was publishing the poem, and that it would be on the last page of the edition, as it seemed like a fitting poem for a last page, and I told her what I thought it was about. She said, "Oh, no. It's about my cottage," and laughed. But what I've always remembered about that - and this was long before I knew anything about literary theory - was that a work of art, like a life, has a resonance beyond itself, and that the poem meant something to me that was very different than what it meant to her, and that that was okay, too. So that small thing - the poem, the laugh, the lesson - is my only memory of Jenn. But that's more than most people I knew then - including some teachers - left me with, and so that small thing is more than I could have asked for or expected.
Just wanted to say I knew Jenn and worked with her at WWF-UK for a few years. She was an incredibly impressive human being, an inspiration and a joy to be around. The fact that my thoughts strayed here shows I still think of her and miss her. Thanks for your memories,.
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