It Ain't Over (35 page)

Walking into the massive church, filled to the rafters with more than 300 mourners, “I was surrounded by people who knew me before I was Jennifer Otter from Interscope, before I had this whole persona of
music executive,
” she says. Without the mantle of her job to hide behind, Jennifer’s confidence faltered. She wasn’t sure anymore why, or if, people liked her outside of what she could do for them.

“I felt like I did not exist unless I was glued to my corporate black AmEx card and had a backstage pass around my neck,” she says. Suddenly she was embarrassed to be seen at a memorial service for someone she didn’t know well—so embarrassed that she couldn’t even bring herself to say hello to anyone from her past. She’d been back to her hometown many times, but (except for the best friend who accompanied her) this was her first time seeing all of these people she had known back in high school.

Sitting in the church, listening to Hunter’s family and friends tell loving stories about him, Jennifer felt incredibly sad. Sad for his close-knit family. Sad that the world had lost this young, handsome guy who “really seemed to know what was important in life—enjoying every moment of everything and letting all of the people who were important to him know how much he loved them.” (“He was the most caring, loving, likable, humble, God-loving person one could ever meet,” his family later said in a statement after the gunman was convicted.) Hearing their words, Jennifer also came to see Hunter as
someone who was tenacious, who took chances with his life. They described how “Hunter would always shoot beyond what he thought he could accomplish, and just go, go, go for it,” says Jennifer. One friend recalled him saying: “If you’re going after Moby-Dick, make sure you bring the tartar sauce.”

Jennifer couldn’t help comparing Hunter’s optimistic, fearless life to her own. After college, she had entered the music business full of hope, determined to make a difference in a business that often seemed to value money above artistry. But “people told me early on that I was just too idealistic and naive, that I needed to accept things as they were and relish the perks,” she says. So she did, losing herself in the process. “The values I had at the outset of my career had been pushed down,” she says. And she had ignored her own dreams outside the music industry, like going back to grad school.

When the service ended, just before dark, Jennifer exited quietly and made her way with her friend to dinner at the beach, where they sat watching the waves roll in and out. The funeral had made her realize “I was alive, and I had a choice that Hunter had been robbed of, an opportunity to breathe and dream and act, to pursue even the most seemingly outrageous, against-all-odds ideas,” she says. “I had been so busy trying to ‘re-create’ myself, that when I was confronted with my past, I realized I was just fine from the start. I could see what was really important.”

Jennifer awoke the next day like it was the first day of the rest of her life. On the drive back to San Francisco, she called her off-again, on-again boyfriend, a guy who couldn’t choose between her and another woman. She broke up with him, for good.

In her apartment, she hung Hunter’s picture from the funeral program on the wall. “Every day when I looked at that picture, it was a reminder to keep moving forward,” she says. “My goal was to find a new way to be happy with
me
.”

She applied for a master’s program in humanities at San Francisco State University, which she began that fall, scheduling night classes around her job. “Humanities encompasses so many different mediums that had such a powerful influence on me—writing, literature, art, film, music,” she says. “I wanted to learn more.” Halfway through the school year, she knew it was time to cut the connection to the job that had kept her from being who she really was. So she quit.

“Afterward, I had so many friends who disappeared overnight,” she says. “When I called a band I had traveled the country with—I’d even been there when their kids were born—to tell them that I was quitting, I thought they would say, ‘Don’t leave us!’ But all that mattered to them was who was going to help them now. It gutted me. It illustrated how replaceable I was, and how I now had to do what was right for
me
.”

She’d always dreamed of one day earning her PhD and becoming “Dr. Otter,” but after being rejected from six elite graduate programs (Harvard, Stanford, Brown . . .), she hit rock bottom.

“After I got my last rejection letter, I drank an entire bottle of Jack Daniel’s and got a bad tattoo,” she says. “The next day I applied for a job at Banana Republic and they told me I wasn’t Banana Republic material. I couldn’t even get a job in retail!”

To figure out her future, Jennifer looked to the past: Ever since she was little, she had been “totally obsessed with all things British.” She fell in love
with Jane Austen as a child and later devoured Charlotte Brontë. Her parents would let her stay up to watch PBS period dramas. (“It seemed so exotic,” she remembers.) And she especially loved music from the UK: The Smiths, Morrissey, Joy Division.

And then Jennifer thought about Hunter.

“He really seemed to know what was important in life.”

“He would always shoot beyond what he thought he could accomplish.”

“And he would just go, go, go for it.”

So Jennifer decided to go for it. She would combine her two dreams, move to London and get her PhD.

She applied to two British doctoral programs and got accepted into the prestigious Center for Cultural Studies at London’s Goldsmiths University.

At 37, Jennifer sold almost everything she owned and prepared to move across the ocean to start her new life. She thought of bringing Hunter’s picture to England to hang on her wall there, but instead stashed it away in an album. She didn’t need it anymore. She was finally being true to herself.

“Hunter helped me get to the next chapter,” she says.

Today, Dr. Otter teaches arts and cultural management at the University of East London, where she was named Best Lecturer of the Year out of 300 professors. “I’m getting paid to talk and write about the things I’ve been passionate about my whole life,” she says. And speaking of passion: She found love at age 40, marrying an Englishman.

“Leaving behind everyone and everything from my old life was hard, but it has also been the most liberating experience I could ever have asked for,” she says. “Now nothing scares me. Nothing is beyond my grasp. You only get one shot at this life, so I try to rock every opportunity.

“I’m no longer hiding behind a business card. I am just me.”

Diane Dennis, 62

Aurora, Oregon

D
iane Dennis felt like there was an elephant sitting on her chest. Her second marriage was ending, and she couldn’t breathe. “Before the separation, I was hiding our problems from the rest of the world, trying to patch it together and keep it going,” she says. But now a different kind of heaviness had taken hold. “I went from feeling safe and secure to not knowing how I was going to pay for gas,” she says. “I was in terror.” And though she had always been told she
looked
10 years younger, at 50 she felt “washed up, middle-aged, menopausal—discarded.”

Over and over, Diane asked herself: “How did this happen? Why have both of my marriages ended up in this place?” Oh, and the guilt. It had been only five years since she’d uprooted her kids, asking them to move in with a new stepdad, go to a new school, and make new friends. Her daughter was now off at college, but Diane’s 13-year-old son, Max, had suffered from living in a dysfunctional home. “He was good at covering it up, but he was emotionally frozen,” she says.

When her husband moved out, Diane had bills to pay, but she couldn’t just snap her fingers and get a job. During her marriage, she had let her nursing license expire and, for fun, began writing a family column for a community newspaper and hosting a local radio show based on it, but neither job brought in much money. So to pay for groceries (and attorney bills), she took out a line of credit on the house.

“I knew I was dipping into the equity that would be part of my settlement, but I had no choice.”

Depressed, Diane stopped exercising, subsisting on a “divorce diet” of three small meals a day and losing ten pounds off her already small frame.

“My appetite was gone,” she says. “Eating wasn’t on my mind.”

She cried all the time. “I called my girlfriend every day, and she would just sit on the other end even if I didn’t have anything to say. It was a comfort just having the phone up to my ear, knowing there was someone else there.”

For months, Diane felt like she was suffocating. But she didn’t realize it until one day when she was crossing the Willamette River on the way to her mom’s house—a route she had taken “thousands of times” over the years.

“I looked down at the water and suddenly I could breathe again.”

When the same thing happened two more times, Diane says, she “followed the feeling” and turned down the road that ran alongside the river. It was sprinkled with houses, some dilapidated, some newer, some cheek by jowl, others sitting on wide parcels of land.

If I could just live near this water
, she thought
, everything would be okay
.

Diane spent a year thinking about living there, wondering how it could happen,
if
it could happen. “I figured I could take some cash from the settlement for a down payment, then sock the rest of it away in a savings account to use for the mortgage and other living expenses. Then I’d set up a strict budget
and shop only at discount stores. I was determined to carve out a new kind of life for me and my son.”

Diane had her heart set on one particular three-bedroom house that was for sale. It wasn’t large but it seemed perfect for them, with wide windows overlooking the river and a dock.

“The sellers had built the house themselves and had such an emotional attachment to the river, they cried when I met them,” she says. “I told them that I was also living a dream, and that I would love their property the way they had.”

After Diane moved in, she felt a transformation. Where once family life had been crowded with turmoil and unhappiness, now there was room to breathe.

And her love of the river was always a part of it. When she heard people say it wasn’t as clean as it used to be, she and Max would go down to the dock and pour Epsom salts into the river to cleanse it. They’d stand there in silence looking out over the stillness.

“We were healing the water; we were healing us.”

And on the weekends, the river came alive—boaters blasting music, children tubing and squealing with joy. Diane’s relatives and her kids’ friends descended on their new home and its “backyard” playground. “It was a juicy life.”

When a relative offered Diane a good deal on a small, used boat, she decided to buy it, dreaming of sitting on its deck on quiet mornings, drinking coffee and writing. But one morning she saw other boats zipping by, pulling strong-looking guys on wakeboards who would go airborne as they jumped the wakes. It was beautiful to watch.
I want to do that!
she thought.

So what if she was in her fifties? Diane knew nothing about the sport, so she found an instructional video and watched it over and over until she felt she knew the basics. She taught her son how to drive the boat—“before he even had his driver’s license”—and waded in.

Max called it “Driving Miss Crazy.” But when Diane was “in the zone,” the boat speeding along at 30 miles per hour with the wind whipping through her long blond ponytail, it was a pure rush.

“I felt free, like I was flying.”

Each time Diane “caught air” was another opportunity to get lost in the moment, feeling the elements—the air, sun, water—and catching glimpses of blue herons, bald eagles, and hawks. And her son at the wheel.

“There was so much to be thankful for,” she says. “There was also a lot of crash and burn.” She got sore muscles, bruises, whiplash. One time she face-planted so hard, she wondered,
Is the left side of my face still there?

But the more she was out there, the more she built muscle. “I felt strong, empowered.”

Diane wasn’t just getting stronger physically; she was gaining strength
mentally, too. She began to examine the dynamic of her second marriage: How had she ended up feeling so disempowered? When she’d worked as a nursing manager, she’d felt like she could do anything. But after her second husband swept her off her feet, “I unintentionally became totally dependent. I realized that there had always been a little girl inside me looking for a rescuer. I began to see that the rescuer was only a myth, a fantasy.
I
had to rescue me.”