Jennifer Lynne Hover

Jennifer Lynn Hover, March 13 1948 – October 6, 2026

Jenny Hover died on October 6th, 2026 in Kent, Washington. She is survived by two sons, Jonathan Hover and Daniel Laurison, Daniel’s wife Hannah Laurison, and two grandchildren, Ingrid and Charlie Laurison.

Jenny was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and its suburbs, one of two adopted daughters of Hazel and Ira Reaves. Her name growing up was Gail; as an adult, she took the name Jenny after the wife of Karl Marx.

She attended Swarthmore College in the1960s, working part time to pay her tuition. She left just one semester shy of a degree to dedicate her life to fighting against US imperialism and working for economic, racial, and gender justice.

Across her life, Jenny lived into her values. She became a Marxist in college and joined a small US communist group called the Line of March in the 1970s, and was a member until its demise in 1990. She taught the fundamentals of Marxist-Leninism to interested adult students many Sundays each year. She always said her work to make the world a better place was her calling; the work that paid her was just a job. Those jobs, however, were also always about helping people. She worked at the first legal abortion clinic in Boston, and was part of a successful effort to unionize the workers there. In Seattle, she worked as a secretary for attorneys who helped people who had been denied social security disability benefits; part of her job was interviewing people who were dealing with severe injuries or illnesses alongside often desperate financial circumstances, and then supporting them through the legal processes of appealing their cases. In the late 1990s, she went back to school to finish her BA and then to get a Master’s in Social Work (remotely through Antioch). When she had her credentials, she took a substantial pay cut in order to work in supportive housing for people with mental illnesses, AIDS, and/or drug addictions who had been living on the streets.

All through her life, she attended (and often took her kids to) protests against US wars, against South African apartheid, and for the renaming of a street in Seattle after Martin Luther King, Jr (to name just a few of the many causes she cared about). She worked with Line of March for justice for Filipino labor organizers who had been killed by the Marcos regime.

She went to Pride parades starting in the mid-1980s because she believed it was important for straight people to show up for LGBTQ+ rights, and was entirely supportive when one of her kids (Daniel) came out as queer and later as trans, at a time when few parents were. Over the course of a decade beginning when her own children were teens, she took in at least 10 additional teenagers as unofficial foster children, many of whom needed a place to stay because they had been kicked out for being gay or lesbian.

In addition to her passion for social justice and her dedication to helping those in need, Jenny loved nature, gardening, and dogs. She took the family hiking and camping regularly, and valiantly struggled to grow tomatoes in the damp Seattle weather.

Jenny was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2012, at which point she was already severely impaired. She was cared for at home by her son Jonathan until 2015, then moved into the first of two small, Medicaid-supported memory-care homes where she received kind and compassionate care. We are enormously grateful to the staff of both facilities.

She has been missed already for many years by those who knew and loved her.