AUTHOR’S NOTE

On a late Sunday afternoon in May 2011, the city of Joplin, Missouri, was hit by a deadly EF-5 tornado. The twister was nearly a mile wide and carved a six-mile gash through the city, the 200-mile-per-hour winds destroying everything in their path. Homes were leveled and businesses devastated, causing billions of dollars in damage. More than 150 people died. Many others lost everything.

For months, I had been scheduled to speak at the Joplin Public Library. My appearance was supposed to happen just weeks after the tornado, in late July. Of course, upon seeing the news coverage of the tornado, I was sure my program would be canceled. Who could expect the people of a ravaged town to have time for an author event? I e-mailed the librarian, telling her that my thoughts and prayers were with them and I’d be happy to reschedule whenever they were ready.

How shocked I was when I received a response just days later, informing me that the show was to go on. Our community needs this, she told me.

Joplin is not a long drive from my town of Liberty—only 165 miles or so. As I drove the two and a half hours, I couldn’t help thinking what a very short distance those 165 miles would be for a tornado. Had things shifted only slightly, had the tornado raged north for another couple of hours, it could have been my town that was destroyed. I could have been one of the people who lost everything.

A study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration discovered that many Joplin residents failed to heed the tornado warnings that day, because they’d become desensitized to the sound of tornado warning sirens. I get it. I’ve lived my whole life in the Midwest. Tornado watches and warnings are a way of life. I don’t want to say we don’t take them seriously, but when you get so many of them, you can become complacent, and complacency can be deadly.

Just like Jersey, who didn’t want her cooking to be interrupted, you sometimes get skeptical or lazy or just too darn busy to be inconvenienced by what you imagine will be yet another false alarm. Sometimes you just assume disaster is never going to happen to you. How could the people of Joplin have foreseen what was going to happen to them on May 22?

After my library visit in Joplin, I took a tour of the devastated area. Even after weeks of cleanup, the destruction was knee-buckling. Whole houses, gone. Street signs and other landmarks, gone. Trees, gone. Everything, just… gone. I was speechless, and my heart ached for the people who had lost so much.

But even more shocking than what I saw in the tornado’s path outside was what I saw inside the library that day. It was busy, bustling, and a full crowd turned out for my event. I couldn’t believe that in the midst of tragedy, people were still dedicated to living their previously scheduled lives. The librarian was right: The community did need the show to go on, not necessarily to hear me speak, but to do something normal. To do something planned. To be with one another, to laugh and smile, to show that they may have been down but they were definitely not out. Far from it.

After what I saw in Joplin, I began to think about what it means to “lose everything.” Everyone has his or her own version of a tornado—fire, earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, war, illness, terror attack. An unexpected disaster rages; someone loses everything.

But is it really possible to lose absolutely “everything”? Can we lose our spirit? Can we lose our drive? Can we lose whatever it is that makes us continue in the face of overwhelming adversity? Can we really lose that uniquely human ability to hope?

Or is it possible to step up to the enormous task of redefining “everything”?

These were the questions I wanted to put to Jersey Cameron. I wanted to strip her of absolutely everything and see what she did with the bare bones that were left. I had a feeling she could answer the call to adversity with strength and integrity. And in the end, I think she did. Her path wasn’t easy or straightforward, and she wasn’t without her hiccups and undignified moments. But the point was that she kept going, she kept fighting, she kept trying to remember what and where her “everything” was.

Every so often, I think about those people in Joplin who came to hear me speak. I can still picture some of their faces. They were grim but open. They were tired but interested. If ever there was a visible spark of hope, it was in that room. I imagine Jersey sitting among the crowd, her own face grim and weary, her own spark of hope glimmering behind her eyes, her own redefinition of “everything” writing itself on her heart.

This book is for all of those in Joplin who showed me firsthand what survivor spirit looks like, and for the countless others out there who have suffered devastation and tragedy and have managed to build on. It’s for all of you who unexpectedly have found yourselves forced to redefine what “everything” means to you. To those of you called to rebuild a life you didn’t plan on living. And did it anyway.

Thank you for reading Jersey’s story.

Jennifer