Ten Years Later

Introduction

Amy Barnes

Lindsay Beck

Patrick Weiland

Diane Van Deren

Ron Clifford

Roxanne Quimby

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

About the Author

To Sami, Abdel, Judi, and Jim

~

And for anyone who needs hope

Ever asked it? With your nose pressed up against a mental crystal ball, your eyes
squinting and your heart pounding, have you ever asked:

What will happen if I
 . . .
?

Fill in the blank:
get a divorce, win the lottery, am diagnosed with cancer, quit my job, suddenly lose
someone I love
.

We’ve all wondered about a what-if and wished for time’s guidance. We want time to
say to us, “Yep, you’ve made the right decision.” Or “Everything’s going to work out
just fine.” But (hmph!) time won’t tell. Not until we take a first step. Time then
takes over, slowly turning our what-ifs into realities. The days, months, and years
eventually reveal, like a Polaroid, a clear picture of how significant events and
decisions ultimately shape our lives.

From time to time, I’ll look back through the personal journals I’ve scribbled in
throughout my life, the keepers of my raw thoughts and emotions. The words poured
forth after my dad died, when I went through a divorce, and after I was diagnosed
with breast cancer. There are so many what-ifs scribbled on those pages. I was desperate
to know whether one day I would feel happy again, that I would find love again, that
I would survive. How intriguing to look back at those past fears now that I have the
benefit of hindsight. It made me think,
What if I asked other people to take a look back at their greatest challenges with
a decade’s worth of perspective? What an interesting concept for a
book.
Plenty of us, including me, have struggled to take a first step toward an uncertain
future. We’ve all prayed for the patience required to heal our pain, one excruciating
day at a time. We’ve all wondered, in our darkest hours, how life could possibly change
for the better.

Ten Years Later
is about the journey six extraordinary people take with time. Each has experienced
a game-changing event—perhaps a life-threatening illness or a catastrophic personal
loss. Some of the challenges will make you wonder how the person got through the next
ten minutes. Others will make you think a lifetime wouldn’t be enough to overcome
the damage done. Following the game changer, you’ll find out what steps (or missteps)
each person took and how each has fared over the next ten years. Did her decision
turn out to be wise? How did he navigate the pain? Has she truly changed? Throughout
the book, Time curls its pointer finger, beckoning Curiosity, “Come with me. See where
I took this life.”

In my own life, I’ve had numerous personal and professional game changers. Some broke
my heart, others made me braver. One of the earliest game changers happened along
an interstate. In 1987, I was driving around the Southeast in my mom’s car, looking
for my first job out of college. I had a degree in communications from Virginia Tech
and a twenty-minute videotape résumé. I bought a new green suit for the one interview
I so ignorantly assumed it would take to land a television reporting job in Richmond,
Virginia. Well, I was off by about six suits and a hundred TV market rankings. Richmond
told me no. Memphis said no. Three nos from Birmingham. My résumé tape got ejected
from VCR after VCR, and my one day on the road turned into eight, then nine, then
ten. “No, sorry.” The maddening cycle of ejection, rejection, and dejection started
in Virginia and continued all the way down through the Florida panhandle. A total
of twenty-seven news directors told me no. I was devastated. My dream of working in
TV news was now looking more like a career in public relations. I turned the car around
and headed north back
toward Virginia. And then, somewhere in Mississippi, I took a wrong turn. GPS systems
and cell phones did not exist; I was officially lost. As I drove around looking for
a way to get back on track, I noticed a billboard for WXVT featuring the CBS Eye.
The station was located in Greenville, a TV market I hadn’t considered. I figured,
What do I have to lose?
I drove to Greenville, digging deep for one last shred of hope. That very day, Stan
Sandroni was promoted from WXVT’s sports director to news director, and he agreed
to see me. In went my résumé tape, and out came the words I so desperately wanted
to hear.

“Hoda, I like what I see.”

My wrong turn turned out to be one of the best mistakes I’ve ever made. Stan hired
me after nearly thirty other people would not. Gutting out the challenge of rejection
paid off. That chance meeting would prove to be a game changer in my life.

Ten Years Later
profiles six people who’ve faced a series of life’s game changers and challenges—abuse,
illness, addiction, grief, job loss. These people didn’t just fight their way through
adversity, they forged better lives because of the battle. Their journeys are measured
in the very small steps that painstakingly result in change and the big, bold leaps
of faith that launch dreams. The book is meant to inspire you, wow you, motivate you,
and move you—and maybe even do all those things within the same chapter. In the pages
ahead, the courageous people who share their life stories have done so in hopes of
enriching yours—now or ten years later.

I’ve met plenty of inspiring women on the
Today
show’s Joy Fit Club who’ve lost a significant amount of weight. But when Joy shared
with me the profile of a particular club member, Amy Barnes, I knew she was special.
In the short story Amy wrote about her journey, it was clear that her astounding 340-pound
weight loss was not her proudest accomplishment. This woman wanted to share what she
considered the more important message. She wanted people to know that she had shed
and survived an even heavier burden.

In the spring of 2001, twenty-seven-year-old Amy Barnes was working as a paralegal
at the Anoka County Public Defender’s Office, thirty miles north of Minneapolis. Her
career was solid, but her personal life was vulnerable, not that Amy recognized it.
There were too many distractions. She had two sons from different fathers, a cheating
husband, and a hundred extra pounds on her five-feet-eight frame. On a sunny April
day, Amy walked next door to the courthouse to pick up new client files. As she headed
back to her office, a handsome man her age started up a conversation.

“It was his smile, it was his eyes, it was the way he smelled, it was his voice,”
Amy recalls. “He was just smooth. He was well groomed and very well spoken. This was
in the midst of me finding out my husband was having an affair. I had low self-esteem,
and all of a sudden this really hot guy is paying attention to me.”

(We’ll call “this guy” Robert throughout.)

“I had this stack of file folders in my hand and he asked if he could help carry them
back,” she recalls. “He was a gentleman and nice, so he helped carry them back, and
he saw that I worked at the PD office.”

The tall, well-built Robert asked Amy for her number. She told him no; she was not
interested.

The next day at work, a huge bouquet arrived for Amy.

“There must have been two to three dozen red roses, and all the card said was,
Dinner?
”

Robert called right as the flowers arrived. “I told him, ‘Thanks, but no.’ ”

He called Amy’s office every day for a week. She finally said yes to lunch. Robert
drove them in his luxury sedan to the Coon Rapids Dam Regional Park along the Mississippi
River.

“He went into the trunk and pulled out a blanket and this huge picnic basket,” she
says, “and we had a picnic in the park. That was our first date.”

Amy grew up just thirteen miles northwest of the park in Elk River, Minnesota. She
describes her parents as hardworking and her upbringing as loving and middle-class.
She and her younger sister were raised to go to church and to get an education. In
1992, Amy graduated from high school and enrolled for a year in a small Christian
liberal arts university in Saint Paul. By nineteen, Amy had met and begun dating her
first boyfriend. She then transferred to Saint Cloud State University in Saint Cloud
on a golf scholarship. But in
1994, at twenty-one, Amy became pregnant, making her ineligible for the grant. She
lost her funding and her boyfriend, who was not interested in a relationship with
his new son, Marcus.

“He was twenty-five and told me he didn’t want to be a dad. He said, ‘I’m not ready
to be a dad.’ I told him that being a dad was not a matter of convenience,” she says,
“and you either choose all or nothing. And he said, ‘I choose nothing.’ ”

Amy got a part-time job on campus and a full-time job as a single parent. Ten months
later, she met her second boyfriend. Over the next two years, school, work, a relationship,
and the baby kept Amy very busy. In May 1998, she graduated with honors from Saint
Cloud with three degrees—a bachelor of arts in criminal justice, minority studies,
and human relations. She walked across the stage carrying her diploma and nine months
of baby beneath her black gown. She gave birth to her second son, Terrell, a month
later. Amy spent the next two years working toward a master’s degree and raising her
sons with Terrell’s father. In June 2000, she got an MA in psychology and a certificate
of marriage; she wed Terrell’s dad after dating him for six years. But soon after,
trouble began. Amy says her parents clearly taught her right from wrong, but for some
reason, she kept making bad decisions when it came to men.

“I found out he was having an affair,” she says, “and we were married for less than
a year.”

Amy admits the affair was not a shock. She says the relationship was broken from the
start. She describes her then-husband as a frequent drinker and herself as a pushover.
He was an absentee partner, but she welcomed help with the boys whenever he came home.
She’d also become obese, gaining seventy pounds with Marcus and another seventy with
Terrell, who weighed nearly thirteen pounds when he was born. Plus, Amy had a history
of bad relationships with food.

“I’ve been on a diet since I was fourteen. My mom has been on a diet since I can remember,”
she explains. “There was never a time that I wasn’t taking a diet pill, that I wasn’t
trying some crazy diet.”