John Green is writing a novel and I’m thinking about my dead friend

John Green is writing a new novel and the first thing I do upon finding out this news is text my high school best friend. She and I met and bonded over John Green books, and while years have come and gone and we’ve both grown up and moved on since then, our primary form of communication still continues to be literary references to the great novels of our youth.

I’ve written before about those teenage years, and how those years and the people in them forever changed my life. They influenced who I am and my work in the world in ways I can’t fully explain. I was introduced to these huge concepts of living and dying through these years, and these people, and while we’re grown ups now something about the memories of those years remains untarnished.

I sat in a meeting this morning where a coworker made a comment about walking through this medical journey alone, in reference to the individualization in most patient experiences, and I immediately thought of this friend, and our now disbanded group of no longer teenagers, and how because of them I never felt alone.

We talked about survivors guilt, about being the one who survives when someone else doesn’t, and how this knowledge shapes your psyche. Because of them I learned memento mori: you too must die. We’re all going to die, and there’s no stopping it. I watched my friends die and something about it made me braver. It makes me brave in the way that knowing you are loved makes you brave. It makes me brave in the way that life is short, and when you stand so close to death that it mixes with life nothing feels quite so scary.

I think part of this work, and this life, is holding two things at once. Holding the horrors of growing up in a hospital, and the blessing of the people who made it better. Holding the grief and the gratitude for all of it.

And as I sit in all of this, I think of the me of 15 and the me of 30 and how there’s a common thread running through both versions of me even though so much has changed. Both versions of me excitedly text the same girl about John Green’s new releases.

I used to think there was nothing about me that survived the wreckage, that who I was before transplant and who I am now are entirely different people, but I’m learning that isn’t entirely true. There are tiny momentos that pop up, like boards in a shipwreck, that offer resemblance to the girl I used to know. Some things never fade entirely, I guess. They just change shape.

I am one of those things.