#37 John

How are you?

I really appreciate your inquiring after my health.

It means a lot.

God, you're really annoying.

Where are you right now?

On my chair.

You're on your chair?

What does that mean?

My terrace.

Oh, excuse me, Madame.

There was a time when you would have referred to it as a balcony.

Balcony?

Ooh, la la.

Don?

Okay, listen, I have to tell you.

No, no, no.

Are we there?

I just have to say one thing.

Just one thing.

No, there's one.

Can I tell you?

Bye.

You're my wonder wolf.

From Gimlet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and this is Heavyweight.

Today's episode,

John.

Right after the break.

This is an iHeart podcast.

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I'm happy to do a 3-2-1 start if it'll be helpful, but I also don't need to.

Let's do a 3-2-1 start.

I'll do it, and then you just do the one-to-one.

This is John Green,

author of some of the most popular and beloved YA novels of the 21st century.

Books like

The Fault in Our Stars.

3, 2, 1, Start.

31 start.

We were so in sync.

It was like we were singing doo-walk.

But there's a version of John's life in which none of his books exist.

Because as a young man in his 20s, 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, 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 at an Ohio children's hospital.

Up until then, John's relationship to his faith had been mostly philosophical.

He'd 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 21 years old.

I mean, it was my first job.

Like, it was my first job other than working at Steak 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, that's bad.

You can't faint.

You can't, you can't, you can't faint.

John hoped that with time, he'd grow into 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 burn injury,

three-year-old boy.

I went downstairs

to the emergency department, and there was this social worker who was like a character 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 smell of burns is so

is so terrible.

And then this kid, they wheeled this kid in,

you know, paramedics on either side of him, and the kid was screaming,

just screaming, like just

in obvious agony, and was very, very small.

It was a brush fire.

And

my

understanding

is that his dad had been like burning leaves.

And like, it had like just

gotten a little bit out of,

it had just spread a little bit.

And then he went inside, he dialed 911, he came back, and the fire had like surrounded the kid.

There was this like staff room, and I'd gone in there to just have a

cup of coffee.

And this young doctor was throwing up in the trash can

and really upset.

And she said, That kid's going to die.

And

I remember his pediatrician came in.

She went in

to the ICU, and she came out, and she was just sobbing.

And that free, it just freaked me out so badly because I'd never seen a doctor

react like that, you know?

And so

that night was a very long night.

Took the parents into this windowless family room

after a while.

I stayed up all night

with his parents.

And

the next morning,

at 8 a.m., I handed over the pager and

I drove home and

I got in the shower and I sh was in the shower for like an hour and a half and

I couldn't stop

smelling the burn and

I just couldn't stop thinking about this kid

and his parents.

And

I was also frankly really relieved not, you that I got to go home.

I got to hand off the pager.

And I knew that

they wouldn't.

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 God

within those experiences.

I just couldn't.

And

I thought, you know,

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.

But 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 into his books.

In Looking for Alaska, the death of a young boy's friend raises questions about the meaning of life.

In The Fault in Our Stars, two teenagers with cancer fall in love.

They're versions of me trying to make sense of

that time in my life.

Throughout the years of trying to make 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.

I mean, there were a few times when I literally typed his name into the Google search bar and then didn't hit search.

And now I have, you know, and now I have kids of my own.

And when my kids were that age, I saw them both on that

on that gurney again and again.

I still think about...

him and his parents every single day.

And I have for

20 years now, so half my life.

But it was more than just John thinking about Nick.

Even after he'd stopped going to church, he had told himself that he no longer believed, every night during those 20 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 except for this one kid.

I don't know that I've prayed 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 typed Nick's name into the search bar, but this time he hit search.

And

it was quite easy.

You know, it was the 30 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 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 it's just an absolute fucking miracle

that any of us is here.

And I just, I, I was just so, I was relieved, but I was also like, just overjoyed and and and so sad.

I, I, I, I can't, I can't describe how it felt.

I, I just remember like going into his like Facebook likes and just like laughing and crying and being like, this kid and I have nothing,

nothing in common.

And I, and, and I'm so glad that he is here, you know?

With the relief relief of knowing that Nick's out there living a life, John has begun considering a new question.

Is it a good life?

I want to know that

he's okay, that

he's doing okay.

Yeah, and

what does that mean for you?

Because you've seen his Facebook.

Yeah, do you know anybody with a Facebook who's unhappy, though?

Or who has

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 would be in it for Nick?

John tries to answer those questions by putting himself in Nick's 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

hopes that he's well every day.

And, you know, like, I know it would mean something to me to hear that there was someone out there

who was wishing me well, even from from a great distance.

After the break, reaching out from a great distance.

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Adam Brody, for example, uses WhatsApp to plan his grandma's birthday using video calls, polls to choose a gift, and HD photos to document a family moment to remember, all in one group chat.

Makes grandma's birthday her best one yet.

But Adam Scott group messages with an app that isn't WhatsApp.

And so the photo invite came through so blurry, blurry, he never even knew about the party.

And grandma still won't talk to me.

It's time for WhatsApp.

Message privately with everyone.

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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 it i'm excited i i want to talk to him

you know it's just

i just have no idea how it's gonna go

you you interviewed obama did you not i did so that this is um more nerve-wracking, less nerve-wracking?

Oh no, this is much more nerve-wracking.

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 2006.

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.

Oh, here we go.

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

Nick.

Hello.

Hi.

Nick is now in his early 20s.

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 start by just asking

how you're doing?

Are you at home right now?

I am.

School online.

Finished my undergraduate last year, and I'm in graduate school, so everything's going well.

Yeah, that's great.

Wow.

So school's all online.

What are you studying?

Master's 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, uh, they made a movie from a book he wrote.

I went, Oh, okay.

Well, I'll have to 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 20 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 on the helicopter.

One of the things that stands out to me is a memory of how cold the scissors were that they cut my clothes off with.

The day I was burned, I was wearing the small lace-up cowboy boots, you know, that you see at rural supplies.

They're more of a novelty than anything.

I remember that.

um but because i had leather shoes on you know you can actually see where the fire stopped melting my leg right at the line of those boots on my right foot and if it hadn't been for those it would have been much much worse

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 the fear that he might not survive.

To this day, Nick's right hand is so stitched together that there are parts of it he can't feel.

It is what it is at this point.

This is Nick's refrain when talking about the fire and its effects.

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'd 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, while John's was 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 square that with your faith?

It took a 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 Nick sees 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 merely 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

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 usually think about it in 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, they're forms of this lie that my brain sometimes tries to tell me about

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, in 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 that you were likely to die.

And

most of the last

18 years,

I thought that you had died.

And

so

I would pray for you every night and for your family.

And

I wanted to get in touch with you if I could to say

that I think of you often and I hope that's okay.

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 because there definitely were definitely times where it was necessary.

Without doubt, Nick is grateful for John's prayers.

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

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

don't look like you did when you were 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?

24.

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?

Um,

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 uh need to feed the chickens this afternoon.

Um, I'm gonna pick up my kids uh from school, and then we're gonna go over and uh

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 faith, by God.

John struggles for a way to share all this with Henry, but he doesn't quite know how to say it.

So instead, he tells Henry that it looks like Nick is doing okay.

Now that the furniture's returning to its goodwill home

Now that the last month's rent is scheming with the damaged deposit Take this moment to decide

if we meant it if we tried

But felt around for far too much

This episode of Heavyweight was produced by senior producer Khalila Holt along with Stevie Lane, Moheni McGowker, and me, Jonathan Goldstein.

Special thanks to Emily Condon, Reverend Patricia Sheldon, Alex Bloomberg, Caitlin Kenney, Gabby Bulgarelli, and Jackie Cohen.

Bobby Lorde mixed the episode with original music by Christine Fellows, John K.

Sampson, and Bobby Lord.

Additional Additional music credits can be found on our website, gimletmedia.com/slash heavyweight.

Our theme song is by The Weaker Thans, courtesy of Epitaph Records.

Follow us on Twitter at heavyweight or email us at heavyweight at gimletmedia.com.

And if you're looking for something new to listen to, I would heartily encourage you to check out John's podcast.

It is called The Anthropocene Reviewed, and it's a personal favorite of mine.

I really love it.

As for us, we'll be back with a new episode in two weeks.

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