All this week, I’ve been trying to process the news that I received this past Tuesday morning that Jenny Hampton, my undergraduate classmate, former Hope College colleague, and from my same hometown, had been killed in a car accident. The freak accident occurred when another driver ran a red light at a high speed at a notoriously dangerous intersection in Holland, Michigan.
I was not close to Jenny, but the seemingly unreal news hit me hard. Jenny’s lives and mine had intersected in many ways over the years, stemming back to our high school years in Northeastern Ohio. As a high school student at a neighbouring rural high school, I often read Jenny’s name in the local newspaper, The Daily Record, when she was listed for various academic honours and extracurricular activities. I still remember coming across her name very clearly many times. I wondered who she was. Jenny was obviously an academically talented and engaged young woman.
Several years later, Jenny began her undergraduate studies at my same university, Oberlin College. I was a year ahead of her at Oberlin. She didn’t know that I already was familiar with her name from our hometown newspaper. However, we soon met as part of the college’s campus Christian fellowship group. As a first-generation university student, I approached my studies with an earnestness to do everything thoroughly and correctly (as I saw it). I can still remember Jenny sitting next to me at one of those fellowship meetings as I took detailed notes from the speaker’s talk in my little notebook. Now that I look back on it, the note-taking must have looked over the top and a bit strange, but she never said a word.
During my years at Oberlin College, my outlook on the world changed quite a bit and I soon drifted away from evangelical conservative Christianity. I stopped attending the campus group within the next year and soon found my way to an ecumenical group run by Revs. Steve and Mary Hammond. Through Steve and Mary’s group, I found my calling in social justice activities and a politically left approach to spirituality. I soon began writing about the intersection of churches and LGBTQI issues as a student journalist in the early 1990s, during the AIDS crisis and much discrimination around that.
Shortly after graduating from Oberlin, I moved on to journalism school and my M.A. studies, and then on to Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, where I completed a post-graduate fellowship in cultural studies. Still, I learnt occasionally about Jenny’s amazing life through her younger sister Ellen’s beautifully-written blog, Stranger in a Strange Land. Jenny pursued her M. Phil at Cambridge on a Churchill Fellowship, one of ten such fellowships given each year to students in the US. I then followed her studies and travels loosely as I pursued my own further post-graduate studies at Indiana University.
Fast forward a few years, and Jenny and I were both working for the same academic employer: me as Communication faculty and she in Physics. We interacted often through a group of common professor friends at barbeques, movie nights, friendsgiving gatherings, international pie-day events, and many other occasions.
Our paths have converged and diverged sharply at times. Both from the same area in Ohio, though we had quite different upbringings in some ways. Similar educational backgrounds. Both of us were drawn to the same employer, in part from our wonderful educational experiences ourselves as students at a liberal arts college, Oberlin. I choose Hope College as my first employer out of other job offers because I wanted to teach small classes and mentor undergraduates, just like my Oberlin College professors had gifted to me.
Jenny truly loved Hope College and Holland, the city where it’s located. I watched as she thrived on Hope’s campus, in the small town, and in the Holland church that she loved so much. I was so happy for her that she had landed there.
Our experiences diverged sharply at Hope. I felt myself slowly slipping away from my colleagues and friends at Hope and Holland by 2011. I soon realised that I wanted to experience my dream of moving permanently to Australia or New Zealand. I also experienced workplace bullying at Hope from three administrators, which later led to me developing panic disorder during my last year at Hope.
Among other important reasons that I won’t go into here, I decided to leave my tenured position at Hope and move to Wellington, New Zealand in 2012. I am now in my New Zealand city, ever thankful for a new start in an academic career that doesn’t often give second chances. However, it took a tremendous amount of courage (and the support of my husband) for me to make the decision to leave a very safe life and move into the unknown.
Because Jenny and I have some common friends and (former) colleagues, I was loosely aware of her activities even after I moved to New Zealand. She continued to thrive at Hope as she moved into the position of department chair and eventually full professor. Many students experienced her enthusiastic mentoring and she loved her colleagues and community.
I am still in shock that she is gone. I always saw Jenny as larger than life in some ways. Her death is a reminder to me that life is not only fleeting, but that I should also be present everyday. I have a tendency to get lost in my to-do list and focus on reaching the next goal. Her death reminds me to just stop and be grateful for another day.
Even more importantly, from Jenny I learnt the importance of living with integrity. I always admired Jenny’s cheerfulness and willingness to share her gifts with others, without posturing or arrogance. With Jenny, she was straightforward, with a quiet confidence to just be herself. The example of Jenny’s life, and the many ways she used her gifts to help others, reminds me why I am here to do the work set before me, to help others and to share my joy in living and learning.
Jenny Hampton, thank you for all the things you have taught me. I will take what I’ve learnt from you to help others with joy and care. Through the ways in which you’ve touched others, often in unknowing and countless ways, you left the world a better place.
Teresa Heinz Housel, 21 March 2021
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