#37 John

I really appreciate your inquiring after my health. It means a lot. Where are you right now? You're on your chair? What does that mean Paris? Oh excuse me, madame. There was a time when you were to have referred to it as a balcony. Falcony la la, Okay, listen, I have to I just have to say one thing, just one thing. One can I tell you you're my wonder From Gimblet Media. I'm Jonathan Goldstein and this is Heavyweight Today's episode. John right after the break.

I'm happy to do a three two one start if it'll be helpful, but I also don't need to.

Let's do a three two one start.

I'll do it, and then you just do the work.

This is John Green, the author of some of the most popular and beloved YA novels of the twenty first century, books like The Fault in Our Stars three two one start. We were so in sync it was like we were singing do wa. But there's a version of John's life in which none of his books exist. Because as a young man in his twenties, John wanted to dedicate his life to the church.

I wanted to become an ordained minister. I wanted to go to Divinity School.

At the time, John was struggling with feelings of dread and depression. He was searching for meaning and purpose. He thought a life in the ministry might offer a way forward. So that was the road that you were on. You were going to go to Divinity school.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I got in and then I didn't go because why because of my time as a chaplain.

In anticipation of Divinity school, John began an apprenticeship as a chaplain and an Ohio children's hospital. Up until then, John's relationship to his faith had been mostly philosophical. He do a lot of thinking about God in the abstract, but at the hospital his faith would be put to the test as he dealt with actual people experiencing actual tragedy. John was assigned to the children's cardiac and neurology units.

But I was twenty one years old. I mean it was my first job. Like, it was my first job other than working at Stake and Shake, and like I was a shitty chaplain.

Why do you feel that way?

Oh? I mean I fainted, which is like you don't. It's bad. You can't faint. You can't, you can't you can't faint.

John Hope that with time he'd grown too the job, but then came a night that made him question whether he was suited for the job at all. A quick word of warning, some of John's descriptions here are pretty graphic.

I think it was my third night on call, so I was still really new at being a chaplain, and I was reading a grief Observed by C. S. Lewis, which is about the death of his wife, and the trauma pager went off and it was a burn injury three year old boy. I went downstairs to the emergency department and there was this social worker who was like a character out of a noir mystery novel. She was just hard as fuck, and she handed me a mask and a piece of gum. Why gum, because this the

When John went back to work the next day, the little boy, whose name was Nick was no longer there, and that was the last John heard about him.

I couldn't see I couldn't see God within those experiences. I just couldn't. And I thought, you know, if how can you do this as a job if part of you is sitting there thinking, you know, the God I am calling to be present in this moment. I don't feel present in this moment.

John was losing his faith.

Spent the last months of my period as a chaplain knowing full well that I wasn't going to go to Divinity School and I wasn't going to become a minister. Well, I was never I wasn't going to be a minister.

Without Divinity School, John had to rethink his whole life. He'd always seen his writing in service to the sermons he planned to give, but now there would be no sermons. In fact, John had stopped going to church entirely, yet his love of writing remained, so he got temp work at a magazine and eventually found his footing as a writer, but his time as a chaplain at the children's hospital, and specifically that night with Nick, kept finding its way

There are versions of me trying to make sense of that time in my life.

Throughout the years of trying to make sense through writing, through therapy, John still couldn't get Nick off his mind.

I knew I could google him, you know. I knew I could google the family. I remembered the parents' names. They have an unusual surname. I knew it would not be hard. I would think, I should just know, I should just it would be better to know if he died, And then I would go back and I would say, like, no, you don't. You don't want to know. You don't like, you don't want to know that he's dead. You definitely don't.

But it was more than just John thinking about Even after he'd stopped going to church, had told himself that he no longer believed. Every night during those twenty years, John prayed for Nick and his family.

I've prayed for them, even in periods when I didn't really believe in prayer. I don't think I literally don't think I've prayed for anyone every day, excep this one kid, Like I don't know that I've prayed for my children.

Then one day, after years of obsessing over Nick's fate, John had a new thought.

You know, maybe he is maybe he is alive. You don't know, how do you know? Like you're basing this decade plus of worry on one thing that one distraught doctor said to you, like while heaving into a trash can, Like you don't know.

So once again John type Nick's name into the search bar, but this time he hit search.

And it was quite easy. You know, I was the thirty seconds between when I googled him, and when I was at his Facebook and he was alive, alive, and his parents were married, and I I just just sobbed. I just felt like I was just so glad that he was alive. And I also felt like it reminded me of how glad I am that everyone is alive, if that makes any sense.

What do you mean?

That is just just an absolute fucking miracle that any of us is here. And I just I was just so I was relieved, but I was also like just overjoyed and and and so sad. I I can't I can't describe how it felt. I just remember like going into his like Facebook likes at just like laughing and crying and being like this kid and I have nothing, nothing in coffee and I and I'm so glad that he is here.

You know, with the relief of knowing that Nick's out there living alife, John has begun considering a new question, is it a good life?

I want to I want to know that. I want to know that he's he's he's okay, that he's doing that, he's doing okay.

Yeah, and what what what does that? What does that mean for you? Because like you've seen his Facebook.

Yeah. Do you know anybody with a Facebook who's unhappy though, or like who has like a tough I don't know.

So John wants to talk with Nick, but at the same time, he's plagued by worry what would be the outcome of his reaching out? What did be in it for Nick? John tries to answer those questions by putting himself in nick shoes.

I can see how maybe it's helpful to him to know that there's this person out there who, you know, thinks about him every day and and and hopes that he's well every day, and you know, like I know, it means something to me to hear that there was someone out there who was who was wishing me well, even from a great distance.

After the break, reaching out from a great distance.

I think I can hear you now, Can you hear me? Yeah?

I can hear you?

All right? Hi, here's a clap just in case that's useful.

Later John had written Nick a letter and Nick was up for talking. It's the middle of the pandemic, so a video call is arranged.

I feel nervous, really nervous. I didn't sleep well last night, and I just boy.

John is seated in his Indianapolis basement and I'm in my Minneapolis recording closet. We both stare anxiously at our laptops waiting for Nick to appear on screen.

I mean, I'm excited. I want to talk to him, you know, It's just I just have no idea how it's going to go.

You interviewed Obama, did you not? I did, so this is more nerve racking. Less nerve racking.

Oh no, this is much more nerve racking.

In a bid to distract John from his nerves, I regale him with episode recaps of a TV show that went off the air in two thousand and six, Deadwood. It was like the scariest town in the world. If I lived in the Old West, I would just like slither on my belly, like just staring at the ground and apologizing, like just to stay out of trouble, like no pride. And I'd get a family, teach them to slither on their bellies and stare at out.

Here we go.

It's in this moment that Nick enters the video call Nick, Hello.

Hi.

Nick is now in his early twenties. He has brown, tussled hair and big eyes. His face is contemplative, as he studies John carefully seeing Nick from the shoulders up. There aren't any scars or burns.

Can I can I start by just asking like, how how you're doing? Are you? Are you at home right now?

I am school online, finish my undergraduate last year, and I'm in graduate school. So everything's going well.

Yeah, that's great. Wow. So you're so school's all online? What are you studying?

Masters in Business administration at the moment?

Oh that's great, congratulations, thank you.

Unlike John, Nick seems very much at ease. He's calm and attentive, waiting to see where the conversation will go. John asks some questions about himself, and Nick answers. He lives in a small rural town, he's enrolled in Bible College, and in fact, Nick is a devout Baptist.

I wanted to ask what you thought when you got the letter.

When I initially got your letter, I called one of my friends from school and asked who this person was. So he said, oh, yeah, they made a movie from a book. He wrote, Well, oh okay, Well after.

Google that, Nick never got around to googling that. So to Nick, John is a stranger. Well to John, Nick's a presence he's lived with for the past twenty years.

So I was the chaplain at the hospital that you came into, and I don't do you remember anything about that day?

Well, you know, I can remember being burned. Where my memories of that day start were at the back door of the garage and my mother's going to the store. I was going to stay with my father, and my father was going to clean up some stuff, you know, burning boxes and trash and other things like that. I can remember being in the field and the flames and my father carrying me to the house. I can remember my father trying to put out the fire and putting water on me in the garage, and flashes of being

After the night of the fire, Nick was sent to recover at a hospital for burn victims, and in the years afterwards, tissue was always getting infected. Throughout his childhood, Nick was constantly in and out of the hospital. There was always the fear that he might not survive. To this day, Nick's right hand is so stitched together that there were parts of it he can't feel.

It is what it is this point, This is.

Nick's refrain when talking about the fire and its effect. It is what it is.

Are you still in pain?

It's one of those things where anybody else would probably say yes, And I don't mean to sound that way. They've never been burned. They don't understand what that constant background noise of pain is like. But at a certain point you just ignore it or it's just a constant so it's normal. It is what it is. I would definitely like to not have been burned and to not deal with the daily things that come with that, but it brought my family to Christ in a way that it would not have otherwise.

It was only after the accident that a friend invited Nick's family to a local church. They began attending with regularity. Before that, they've been Christian in name only. So to Nick, the fire brought him to the most important thing in his life. It brought him to God. Because of that day in the er, Nick and his family's faith was made stronger. Well, John's was made weaker.

One of the things I wanted to ask you is how you knowing that terrible things can happen to kids, to innocent kids, having experienced that yourself, how you how you square that with your faith?

It took quite a long time for me to reconcile that with God, and I spent a while quite angry. I guess the way I look at it, it was a harsh mercy. Theologically speaking, for those who love God, everything is supposed to work for their good, and if you look at it in that light, the world definitely makes more sense. The Lord does allow some evil, but in the end, the evil works for.

Good, and Nixy's a lot of good in his life. He's grateful for his parents, who stood by him all throughout his recovery, his grandfather, who tirelessly combed through stores searching for a lotion that might offer relief, the teachers who helped him in and out of his pressure garments.

You know, the Lord put certain people in my life for a reason. I grew up in public schools, and yeah, there were some people there that didn't quite understand why I looked the way I looked. But the community did everything they could to educate the kids around me as to why I had scar tissue, why I had plastic face mask on.

I think that it's so easy to be merely angry after that, And I think I might be merely angry, to be honest, I might be merely angry if it happened to my kid. I might be mere angry if it happened to me.

You know. It's just, you know, the Devil's always trying to tempt you and draw you astray, and and I think that's one of the things he uses against me, is, oh, how could this happen to you? You know, why would such a merciful and loving god let this happen to you? You know? And if you look at it like that, then you know the Devil's won.

You know, I don't. I don't usually think about it in in uh terms of good and evil really, but a lot of life is a battle against despair because I have serious mental health problems. Nick despair, nihilism, hopelessness, there forms of this this why that my brain sometimes tries to tell me about out being a person, being alive, consciousness, that it's all empty, it's all meaningless, and I have to find ways of holding on to hope.

Good the sadness and the you know, the desperation about it. I don't know that that'll ever go away entirely. I struggle with, you know, feeling down sometimes. But then again, I don't want to be that lonely person sequestered in a house somewhere. So you know, I'm going to move on and I'm going to just be the person I want to be.

So an answer to John's question, has it been a good life, the answer is yes, because Nick is determined to make it one.

From what the doctor said, I thought, I thought that that you were likely to die, and h most of the last you know, eighteen years, I thought that I thought that you had died, and and and so I would, I would. I would pray for you every night and for your family, and I wanted to get I wanted to get in touch with you. If I could to say that I think of you often and I and I hope that's okay. I hope it's I hope it's okay that I pray for you and your family. If it's not, I'll stop.

You know, I'm just I'm glad that somebody was always praying for me. Is there Definitely, We're definitely times where it was necessary.

Without doubt, Nick is grateful for John's prayer, but overall, I get the feeling that some things, some crucial things, are in place in Nick's life. His family is close knit, his life has purpose, He's secure in his faith, but he can tell John is struggling. To him, John's not this famous writer, but someone who came to him heavy hearted. So as to John's prayers, Nick points out someone else who might have benefited from them.

John praying for me, I really hope that's helped keep the dialogue between you and the Lord fluid and going.

You know, I never thought of it that way, Nick, But it is true that on the days when I prayed for nothing else and felt no real meaning in prayer, that I still prayed for you and for your family, and that that was a point of connection.

At a time when religion stopped making sense to John, at a time when he felt like he couldn't reasonably pray for himself or his family, he still hungered for something that went beyond reason, And in those moments there was Nick. As we near the end of the call, that moment when hands would be shaken or hugs exchanged, John and Nick instead stare at each other through their computer screens.

It's definitely remarkable to see, you know, an individual that came into my life at such a dramatic event and for such a short amount of time, and to have made such an impact in this I can definitely see the Lord working.

Part of what's wild is that you, you know, you don't look like you did when you are three years old or whatever, but like you look, I recognize you. I recognize you. But at the same time there's the shock of looking at you and seeing an adult, and so it's just it's really great to see you grown up. Thank you. How old are you now? Twenty four? God, it's crazy to think that I was younger then than you are now. I was just a kid.

What is the rest of your day looking like Nick?

Well, I have some schoolwork to do, and I'm gonna go get a cup of coffee, bring my grandmother's horse in for the evening, and feed the chickens and just hang out with the family and you, John.

I also need to feed the chickens this afternoon. I'm going to pick up my kids from school and then we're going to go over and I'll probably I'll probably tell them about this, to be honest with you, Nick Good.

After getting off the call, John picks up his son Henry from school. He tells Henry about talking to Nick, and Henry has questions like where does Nick live and how is Nick doing. John thinks back to when we first spoke, how all he wanted was to know that Nick was doing okay. I'd asked what that meant and he couldn't say for sure, But in retrospect, he realizes he wanted to know that Nick was loved, and now he knows he is by his family and through his

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This episode of Heavyweight was produced by Senior producer Khalila Holt along with Stevie Lane, Moheeny mcgouker, and me Jonathan Goldstein. Special thanks to Emily Condon, Reverend Patricia Sheldon, Alex Bloomberg, Caitlin Kenny, Gabby Bulgarelli, and Jackie Cohen. Bobby Lord mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson and Bobby Lord. Additional music credits can be found