Loving John

I read in our local newspaper that John Godinet, diagnosed with ALS, was a celebrated long-distance runner and that a group of his closest friends were planning to push him in a racing wheelchair through his favorite races. Intrigued, I attended an ALS fundraising event where hundreds of runners crowded around John and pitched cash liberally into a basket.

I have always been drawn to stories about “community”. My fascination hearkens back to a day in my Iowa childhood when my father was in the hospital with a heart attack and a throng of neighbors arrived to harvest all our fall crops in a single day. But what was especially striking to me when following John was the degree to which this American Samoan “outsider” in a predominantly white, suburban community commanded everyone’s affection and devotion in a way that challenged stereotypes.

As I spent more and more time with John, his husband Peter and their closest friends, the story moved into deeper expressions of love, complicated by ALS and then by Covid. It reawakened in me an appreciation for how we all embrace mortality differently, though most certainly better together than apart – something I’d experienced with similar intensity years ago when my older brother fought and succumbed to multiple sclerosis.

It was two years into my journey with John that he first shared with me the intense traumas he had experienced growing up. I began to understand more deeply the complexity of John’s makeup, and how his American Samoan upbringing not only subjected him to pain and discrimination, but also equipped him with a personality and emotional makeup that made him a survivor, and often a “thriver”.

But as his health declined and the choices before him became more and more stark, evasions of feelings weren’t possible. It was then that he summoned within himself new strength to take control of his life and death.