227: What if you faced a terrifying beast?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. It was like what I felt and what I was watching never synced up. It didn't even look like it was happening. It didn't look like anything. But what it sounded like was awful. And then what it felt like was, I am absolutely here, but this is not happening to us. This is not happening at all.

From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 227, What If You Faced a Terrifying Beast?

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So I grew up in Overland Park, Kansas, which is a suburb of Kansas City. It was a home charged with like big emotions. I was loved by everybody. I was sort of like the sweet, sensitive, youngest child. I could make old people smile. We played a lot of board games competitively. We had dinners together. We watched movies together. We went to church together. We were a Catholic family. All of my friends went to Holy Cross Catholic School with me.

I grew up wanting to be a soccer-playing priest was like my ambition in life. So I had, you know, this really kind of wonderful, expansive sense of myself as a little kid. I was just a large child, physically looked a couple years older than I was, and I was very sensitive. And so I think the combination of the two and maybe a tendency to be very kind of cavalier and confident in my manner, you know, led to some bullying in middle school.

My dad had gone to the Navy and had been an officer on nuclear submarines. My parents sort of say now like, "Oh, I was the first kid that they raised together without these interruptions of military service." But when I was 14, my dad took a job in New York and we moved from suburban Kansas to suburban New York City, like Westchester County.

It was a really hard transition for me. I felt confused and insecure and just didn't know how to plug into anything really. And I think, you know, I was a giant corn-fed Midwesterner arriving to suburban New York City and tried incredibly hard to connect in any way I could.

So I did things like I wore a magnetic earring and a denim jacket from The Gap. And I did like all these things, like styled my hair like Zach from Saved by the Bell. I was like really eager to simultaneously fit in and stand out. I used to skip down the halls singing show tunes and join the jazz band. And I did theater and I ran cross country and I got involved in the newspaper. Like all these great things happened that I don't know that would have happened if we hadn't moved from Kansas to New York. But at the time, it was really hard.

I also felt very alone, and I think I cultivated a melancholic disposition that involved a lot of time alone. I think that I just had this feeling of outsidership, of being an outsider, trying to be distinct on purpose. Like, I wore a trench coat and a fedora, and I wondered why no one wanted to kiss me. But it was this whole feeling of sort of, if I wasn't going to fit in, then darn it, I was going to not fit in more than anyone else.

Maybe it was just a fundamental experience of adolescence, but it just felt huge. And looking back, it seems positively narcissistic. This is only happening to me. No one knows what I'm feeling. But I think also a function of the isolation was I didn't have a lot of people to bounce the feelings off of.

In middle school and in high school, I was always very desperate to have a girlfriend. And yet I think I was terrified of having a girlfriend. I think I believed that being in a relationship would save me or whisk me away to a new reality where everything would be perfect and magical and I would be understood and loved. And yet I think I had realized

ridiculous standards. I don't know if they were high or low, but I was always finding reasons to disqualify pretty much anyone who wanted to get close to me. I did walk over to someone's house on Valentine's Day in the rain and read her a poem. She was like, that's great. That's really great. But I don't feel the same way. And I was just crushed because I was certain it was going to play out exactly the way it had in the movies. And it didn't. Looking back on it, I feel a huge, huge...

contempt for who I was then because my failures were so public. And I always just, I had this feeling that there was something wrong with me. I just have this perpetual memory of just feeling like I wished I was someone else. My dad is an engineer. He was very loving and very supportive, but I think he also felt very sort of confused by the huge expressions of emotions that I felt, the huge feelings I needed to express. And I think that it was just kind of overwhelming to him

It felt for a long time like there just must be something wrong with me that I have all these enormous feelings and, you know, and I just wanted to fix it. And I think that as I got a little bit further into my high school education, certainly in college, I started to go, OK, there's actually some other paths forward that might suit me really well. I was really lucky to have a phenomenal, wonderful English teacher in high school my junior year.

He was a big influence on me, and I felt like he gave me some permission to think about doing things that I wouldn't have ever felt the confidence to do on my own, like write and care about ideas. I went to college, and around my junior year, I discovered writing and creative writing. When I took a poetry workshop, I had never found something that I loved doing as much as I loved analyzing how a poem worked.

Feeling like nothing was as wonderful as breaking this poem down and then trying to imitate it in some way. I felt like I'd found the thing I wanted to do. I wanted to read and write poems. And I just, I left college with a passion to get an MFA. I was like, I'm going to go be a poet.

I asked a different teacher, Jim Armstrong, what MFA program should I go to? And he said, you know, the last thing I would do in your shoes is go get an MFA. Because once you do it, you'll never leave academia and you'll be really unhappy. He said, go live in the world for as long as you possibly can. And I didn't apply to any MFA programs. And instead, I looked around and the most interesting people I knew were all applying to the Peace Corps.

My goal was I want to see the world. I'm going to be all in on doing this wild thing, but I'm also going to continue to read and write and grow so that I can ultimately be a poet. I got my placement to go in June of 2000 to Bangladesh. I arrived with a sense of wonder and fear, but pretty quickly developed a really dark sense of humor about the experience that was bulletproof insulation against feeling too much

So I sort of found my place in the group as the guy who was sarcastic, but also cared a lot and suddenly felt like I was in this group of like-minded oddballs. I was the only white person walking around my village and I was six feet, six inches tall. It was very isolated. I was very homesick, but I learned Bengali and I got to know all of my neighbors and I wrote lots of grants and I taught lots of English classes.

About a year in, we had a big party for the new group of volunteers. And Katie LaPlante, who had been in my group, who I'd always thought was like super wonderful and cute, she came up to me really drunk and danced with me. And then she looked at me and she said, like, John Evans, how come we never got together? And I said, oh, because you can't stand me. She laughed and walked away.

A couple months later, we all got together again and I sat down next to Katie and we were talking and chatting. It was kind of nice. And then at one point she lifted my arm and put it around her. My arm fell asleep, but I didn't want to move it because I thought I don't want to stop having my arm around Katie. We started dating and I made a commitment to the Peace Corps. I said, "Hey, I'm going to come back and be a third year volunteer."

September 1st of 2001, I went and met my family for like a five-day vacation in Paris. And then I flew back on like the 6th or the 7th, and then Katie flew back on the 10th. I stayed in the Capitol, and we met up and woke up the next morning and turned on the news, and September 11th had happened. And they ultimately decided to shut down the program.

We were evacuated to Thailand for six weeks, and then Katie and I traveled through Korea and China for another few weeks and then ultimately flew back to the United States. And Katie came home with me for Thanksgiving. We moved to Chicago and continued dating and ultimately moved in together.

I adored Katie. Like, I just thought she was awesome. She was smart. She was tough. She didn't like take any bullshit from anyone, but she was also very loving person.

Katie was the sort of person who would go to a party and she would find the person who felt like they weren't fitting in and she'd go and she'd chat them up. And she wouldn't do this for five minutes. She would do this for like an hour. Like her job was just to take care of the misfits and the people who were the outcasts, even the people no one else could stand. A big part of how she saw the world was like, enjoy where you are now and what you're doing now.

Her line about my family had always been like, you guys haven't really been through a tragedy. So you get kind of worked up over things that really aren't that important. Whereas she had had her parents had divorced. She had not had a great relationship with her dad. Her brother had died while we were in the Peace Corps after having some pretty significant health struggles, mental and physical health struggles. She was just the apple of everyone's eyes.

I think she really knew how fragile life was. People would say, Katie, what do you want to be when you grow up? And she'd say, I want to be happy. She knew who she was. I think she liked who she was, but she was also very loving and accepting. And I always felt very seen by her. I loved living in her world and just felt like she had the presence and the wherewithal to really exist in the world as it was, as opposed to what it was going to be a few years down the road.

So everything about our life was just the present moment. And we were, you know, we were John and Katie. We got engaged in the fall of 2003 and married in the summer of 2004. And then we moved down to Florida and went to graduate school. She gets there and she applies for Masters of Public Health. So we both had like full funding to go to graduate school and get our master's degrees.

She applied for an internship to work with the International Orthodox Christian Charities for HIV AIDS education in Romania. We had known each other in Bangladesh. We lived in Chicago. We lived in Miami. And now we're in Romania. Of those places, I think we loved Romania the most. Katie loved her work. I got a job teaching at the English Language High School, public high school in Bucharest.

And we just, you know, instantly kind of settled into a social life kind of organized around her work and around my work and a lot of weekend trips to see parts of Romania. We had a kind of whirl of just like colors and sounds and fun. And that year, it just kind of flew by.

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So Katie's work was wrapping up and we didn't know where we were going to go next, but we decided that, you know, part of what we were going to do was go see the parts of Romania that we wanted to see. And so on June 23rd, we're going to go take this week long trip through Romania. She and I and our really close friend, Sarah, we're going to go see the parts of Romania that we wanted to see.

So on Saturday, June 23rd, we got up early. We met Sarah at the train station and we took a train to the city of Bustan where we were going to ride the gondola car, the cable car to the top of the mountain and then stay at a hostel where we had reservations. When we got off the train, it was raining. We bought some rain jackets and some ponchos and went to, you know, the cable cars. And they said, yeah, the cable cars are closed.

There was this Israeli couple that was there and there was this Romanian guy who was there. All six of us were kind of getting the news at the same time that the cable cars were closed. I think I had the idea that, hey, why don't instead of taking the cable car, why don't we just hike to the top of the mountain? The Israeli couple is like, well, we'll come with you. And the Romanian guy was like, I'll come with you. And so we started off. It was beautiful, beautiful mountain hiking up a mountain, just beautiful trees. And, you know, the tree line thinned out.

And we finally got to the top of the trail and we were celebrating. We got to this guest house and they said, oh yeah, you're not going to find a room anywhere up here. All the rooms are booked because nobody's been able to go down the mountain because the cable car isn't running. But they said you could sleep here for the night, but you're going to have to sleep on the floor. There's no rooms. You can just sleep on the floor and then leave in the morning. They said, or you could hike another kilometer and a half or so. And there's a really nice guest house that has like a full kitchen. So we hiked to the second guest house.

On our way from the first guest house to the second to have dinner, we had run into one of my students and his dad who were hiking up in that area. And they had warned us that they had seen a bear and we should just really keep we should keep an eye out. We had this dinner of soup and bread and meatballs and just we had this feast. And we went and asked them, I said, oh, do you have any rooms? And they said, no, all our rooms are full.

So we said, OK, we'll hike back to the first guest house. And now it was getting dark. It was like close to when the sun was going to start to go down. As we left, we took a bunch of photos by the big guest house. And then Katie fell. She had always had a weak ankle. She had injured it when we were hiking in Korea right after the Peace Corps. And it had never really healed right. So she sprained her ankle and was crying. And we were by this lake and crying.

This Israeli couple that we were with, they said, you know, we're getting worried. It's getting kind of dark. Let's hike ahead. And I said to Katie, would you want to go? And she said, yeah, I'm just going to rest here for a minute. But Sarah is going to stay with me and the remaining is going to stay with me. So the Israeli couple and I started hiking back to the first guest house. And it was it was dark. It was windy, getting cold. We got to this place and the woman in the Israeli couple said, you know, I'm worried that they haven't caught up to us yet. And I said, well, I'll hike back. Why don't you guys go ahead to the guest house?

I'll make sure they're okay because this crossing that we were at anyway was like just rocky enough that you needed a flashlight for sure to get across it. And I didn't know if Katie had a flashlight. So I hiked back along the trail and I couldn't find them. It was dark now. I couldn't see where we were. There was a lot of wind, but I started calling out for them. And I, you know, Katie, Sarah, you know, I couldn't, no one was calling back.

I had called Katie on the phone, and her phone had gone right to voicemail. Where are you? And I thought they were lingering and just hanging out by the lake and taking their time. It was just kind of like Katie being Katie. At some point, I looked down, and there were the pages of the Lonely Planet Guide just kind of scattered on the ground. That was the first time I thought, oh, something's not right here. I was calling out, and then I heard Katie yell, Katie.

There's a bear. Don't come any closer. Go to the hostel and get some help. You know, I said, like, where are you? And she said, go get help. Get a gun. I said, OK. And so I started running back to the guest house where the Israelis were and I could see the light. They had a light hanging on their porch.

And I thought, you know, I'm going to run to that light. And I started running, but it was rocky. I was like exhausted. My feet hurt. And I just had this moment where I thought, oh, my God, like Katie's going to die. There's going to be a funeral. I have to call her mom. Like I just and I was instantly like really, really mad at myself for having those thoughts. And I was like, no, you have to run to the guest house.

But it was like almost impossible to run on this trail. Like I couldn't see the trail. It was loud. I knew I was coming up to that river crossing. And then I was like, you fucking asshole, like fucking run faster. Like your wife is in danger. You need to run and get help. And as I got to the door with the light, Sarah, our friend came booking past me at like a full run, screaming and crying and just like ran into the, to the guest house.

And when I got to the guest house, the Romanian was there who had been with Katie and Sarah. He was already there. So somehow he had like he had passed me and I hadn't even seen him. Like, I don't even know if we were on different trails. I don't know what it was. And he was telling everyone, you know, I sat up and I kicked and punched and screamed at the bear and the bear kind of left me alone. Sarah was there and Sarah had panicked and stood up and ran and Katie couldn't run because of her ankle injury.

And Sarah said, you know, we threw the pack. Katie said to throw the pack in the other direction. The bear is interested in the food. He's not interested in us. So he'll go after the pack. But the bear hadn't gone after the pack. So then I said, OK, well, who's going to come back with me? Let's go. And everybody said, no, are you fucking crazy? Like, you know, and I said, well, then give me the gun and I'll go back. I don't know how to fire a gun, but I said, give me the gun. I'll go back. The owner said, I can't give you my gun.

If this gun gets discharged, they're going to find me 50,000 Romanian lei. And then I will be bankrupted. I'm sorry, but I can't give you my gun. We just have to wait until the bear leaves. And I said, that's ridiculous. And so I was like, OK, I'm going to go back. And I was like, who's going to go with me? And no one would go with me. And then I was like, OK, well, I'm going to go back. So then I went back with the flashlight and I hiked back to where Katie was. When I got there, I could hear bear noises like grunts.

I couldn't see a lot. It was dark and I could hear Katie screaming and periodically crying and saying things like no and help. She said help a lot. When I fixed the flashlight, I could see how big the bear was. These are like grizzly bears. These aren't like black bears at Tahoe. These are like grizzly bears, giant, giant bears.

It had white fur on its paws. Just it was snorting and grunting. And it was like it was doing something. And I was just standing there. I was, you know, probably 10, 15 feet. I was I couldn't approach it any closer. You know, like it looked up at me and I ran back.

I just was terrified of the bear. And like, so then I thought, okay, I'll, I'll throw rocks at the bear. And so I started throwing rocks at the bear and the bear would just kind of look up. And then he was just moving his head back and forth across Katie's body was all I could see in the darkness. I couldn't see much more. And I could hear like the fabric on her clothing ripping. Okay, I'm going to throw a rock and the rock's going to make the bear move and the bear wouldn't move. So then I thought, okay, I'll get a bigger rock and the bear wouldn't move.

And I was just standing there and I was screaming and I was clapping my hands and I was trying to wave my hands. But then when the bear looked at me, I would get scared. And it was just full on cowardice on my part. And I felt like such a failure in that moment. I was like, if you loved your wife, you would charge the bear. I think I really thought that what was going to happen was I was going to intervene somehow.

This wasn't going to be awful. This was some kind of misunderstanding. It was all going to be fine. And then also thinking like, why is the bear, like, why is it doing this? What reason would it have? The bear looked purposeful. It looked like it was doing something. It was not circling and pawing. It was just like its muzzle dipping down and then lifting back up.

It was like what I felt and what I was watching never synced up. It didn't even look like it was happening. It didn't look like anything. But what it sounded like was awful. And then what it felt like was, I am absolutely here, but this is not happening to us. This is not happening at all. And yet I just kept some voice just kept saying, do something. Do something.

And then another voice just kept saying, you know, if you weren't such a fucking coward, you would intervene and you would throw your body in front of Katie. You would let the bear kill you. You would save Katie's life. You who claim to love Katie so much and claim to think life with her is so great. You aren't doing a fucking thing except throwing rocks at the bear.

And just feeling like it doesn't matter what I do. There's a thousand pound bear attacking Katie and nothing is going to change that unless the bear loses interest. Like, I want to tell you, it looked like something. It didn't look like anything. It felt like something vivid and it felt cartoonish. And it was like a fucking bear is killing Katie or maybe she'll survive it. Maybe it's not. Maybe I don't know what I'm seeing. And this whole time, you know, Katie is screaming and yelling and

It's like a deep roar for help. It was undeniable that either Katie was going to be severely, severely mangled or she was dying. I was calling to her. I was trying to say, like, I'm here. Help's on the way. Like, stupid things to tell someone who's being attacked by a fucking bear. It goes from the situation just seeming utterly helpless to just like, I have to stand here and make sure I witness this.

I have to be the person who's here. It felt like the very, very least that someone who loved Katie could do. And since I couldn't do more, since I couldn't stop it, the least I could do is not leave her alone. This was what I had to do.

And then I heard like all this noise and I looked back and there was a group of people led by the Israelis and some Romanians who were like banging on pots and pans and firing like a pop gun or something that was making a loud, like they were coming. So I went back to them and I said, yeah, it's this way. And so they came with me. And when we got back to Katie, the bear was gone and her body wasn't bloody. You know, my initial reaction was, oh, she's okay. This was scary, but she's going to be okay. She's going to survive.

And the Romanian woman was a doctor. She, you know, immediately looked at Katie and she said, you know, her pupils aren't responding. Like, this is really bad. Like, we have to get her medical help. She still had a heartbeat, but it was really faint. And the Romanians were like, we need to get away from here because there's a bear here. We need to move Katie to safety. So we lifted her and carried her body. And when we laid her down in like the dining room on the floor,

She was dead. I didn't use the word then, but the word that makes sense now is this is just so irrationally malevolent. I sat next to her, you know, we covered her with a blanket or a tarp or something. And then it was just a series of stupid medical tests to verify what was obvious to everyone in the room.

every rural Romanian official from nearby was called in to make like this series of certifications about what had happened and to record the death and the regional this and the local that and the bear patrol people showed up because there was apparently some kind of Romanian bear patrol that was to be called in these situations in like red jackets and and at some point like the bear patrol people like basically like grilled some sausages and drank vodka and everything

I was like, no, I don't want any of that. And it was really important to me that I not fall asleep. I was like, I'm going to stay up with Katie the whole night. My body felt cold. I got a chill, like the worst thing had been confirmed. But I also felt, you have to tell Katie's mom, you have to tell her family, you have things you have to do now. In fact, life is going to just continue. I called my brother and I told him what had happened.

And then I called Katie's mom and she started crying and she said, what can I do for you? Which was like, she's like, John, how can I help? I was like, oh my God, like, why would she say that to me? Like, that's like, like the most generous thing she could do.

She had died from something that was called gross thoracic trauma, which just meant basically the bear had pushed on her body to the point that many of her organs were crushed. But everybody had a reason why it had happened. The Romanians said, well, Katie's menstruating because they found tampons in her bag. Oh, she must have been menstruating. The bear smelled the blood. And then someone else said, oh, you guys must have threatened its cub. And then someone else said, oh, you were throwing rocks at it earlier, weren't you? The bear came and found you. And none of those things were true.

There was no reason for that to happen. All I could do is run through the order. If I hadn't left Katie at the lake, if I insisted she'd walk together, we would have been a bigger group. And then this wouldn't have happened. If the Romanian hadn't stood up and punched at the bear, if the Romanian and Sarah had stayed there, maybe the bear would have lost interest in all of them. And of course I know, well, maybe it would have killed all of them.

No part of me feels angry or critical of Sarah and the Romanian. I want to be really clear for leaving. I don't think they had any choice over what their bodies did, but Katie probably would have survived that if she could have run, but she couldn't run because her ankle didn't work.

I talked to people and I read about it afterwards. And I know your brain can't process that much pain and stimulus. I mean, she must have separated from her conscious self at some point during it all. But, you know, on the other hand, she absolutely went through it. My role was to save Katie. And I hadn't done that. That when, you know, a moment came to save Katie, I hadn't done it. And yet there had been no one at the center of my life like Katie was. And I didn't love her enough to save her.

It felt like cowardice. And now I was just going to live with that for the rest of my life. Inside the room where Katie was, the hunters set up, I mean, I said they set up a barbecue, they made sausages, they drank beer, they got drunk, they started singing. It was like a whole other thing was happening, you know, and I was just there next to Katie's body sitting there. They were like very, just this embodiment of life continuing. And I was like, no, I'm going to sit next to Katie's body. I'm not going to move. I'm going to stay here and I'm not going to fall asleep.

And the wind was just like blowing. It was blowing so, so cold. It was blowing so hard. And I had this thought like, oh, there's like there's a bear out there. And I thought, oh, I should go out and kill a bear. And then it was like, what do you like? You're like a kid playing army. It's the stupidest fantasy. I thought when I walked outside, I thought there's a whole bunch of bears out there. There are bears all over this land, this countryside. And I would just have that thought like they're out there. And then I would go back inside and it would be like the human world.

When sunrise happened, the people from the other hostel hiked over with Sarah. So Sarah had been given like three Xanaxes by somebody there and just like she had just passed out. So she came back. She was like, is Katie OK? And I was like, no, Katie's dead. And then like Sarah collapsed in my arms. And then we just sat next to the body. Men in really nice SUVs wearing like leather jackets showed up at like seven in the morning. They'd been sent by the embassy to move Katie's body.

So they drove Sarah and I down to like the next city over. Sarah immediately got examined. I went into another room and then they came in and pronounced Katie dead again. And then drove us from that town to the United States Embassy nurse's house. The nurse said, you know, you guys should shower. And then I was like alone for the first time in a bathroom. And now all the feelings started coming up.

I thought I was going to throw up and then I thought I was going to panic. And I just like, I started having all of these feelings and then I just started sobbing hysterically. It just felt like things were now happening in real life. Like Katie's death was over and it was all catching up. And it was just this overwhelming feeling of panic and terror and confusion and shame. And then like they fed us and it felt stupid to eat. You know, the nurse said something like the regional psychiatrist is going to fly in and talk to you.

He said, I haven't been through what you've been through, but I had a tragedy in nature. And I'll just tell you, your relationship to nature will never be the same. And it was like the first time where I thought, oh, shit. Like, if he's telling me the truth, like, this isn't going to go away. I have to get some help. My brother flew out and he was amazing. And he took over the logistics. And I was just like Xanax and sleeping pills, Xanax and sleeping pills.

It was about six days before I left Romania with Katie's body and my brother and my sister who had flown out. And we went back to Chicago, you know, funeral, body, Katie's mom, see everybody, hyper responsibility with disruptions of utter terror and panic was like my life for a few months before I kind of started to separate things out a little bit better and deal with them.

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What I had to do to feel anything was I had to play like one of these songs that reminded me of Katie and look at photos of her. And then the feelings would come on like really strong. And then I had to let them out and then I had to turn it off. And I think what I figured out later, you know, made a lot of sense was I was like training myself how to grieve. But the feeling was not grief. I mean, grief was profound and senseless. What made sense was guilt.

And I just felt like what I could live in was guilt. I couldn't live in grief. Grief was abstract and awful and overwhelming. Guilt was, this was my fault and I have to make amends. To this day, I think what I can live in is guilt. The guilt was nourishing and sustaining. It gave me stuff to do. I wouldn't have said this at the time. At the time, I would have just said, oh, there's things I have to do. And then I would go to the therapist's office and ball three times a week.

And then I would take an anxiety pill and then I'd take a sleeping pill. I knew early on I couldn't just lie in bed and sob and refuse to get out of bed. It made me feel absolutely helpless and insane. I was crawling up the walls. But guilt was very communal. I had a reason to be around people. If I could write letters, if I could call and check in on Katie's mom, if I could hang out with my nieces and nephew. There were an infinite number of ways to make amends for the fact that I hadn't stopped Katie from dying.

that I hadn't saved her life. People always say, "Oh, you know, the bear might have killed you. Oh, it could have..." I can play that forward several years. Any number of things that I could have done and Katie would still be here. Why did I insist Katie marry me? Why did I insist she go to Romania? Why did I insist we go to FIU? We could have gone to Oregon. I got into the Oregon writing program. We could have gone to Oregon and been happy MFA public health students in Oregon. I had insisted we do all these things. Now, is that fair? No.

But those feelings are instantly accessible to me. I mean, what you realize is life just moves in one direction and it's completely fragile and often senseless. And to expect it to have some neat narrative order is a writer's fantasy, but that's not how life goes. I think I knew pretty early on that I would get married again. I liked being married. I felt ashamed about that. I felt guilty about it, but it also just seemed undeniable to me.

I also thought, I really want to be a dad if I get married again. I just had this feeling, I really want to have a family. So my first wife was Katie. My second wife was Kate. Kate started sending me care packages from San Francisco. Sourdough bread, she sent me a Hang In There kiddie book, which is really funny. I got this fellowship in spring of 2008 at Stanford. I had been talking to Kate a lot. In May, I came out and I decided to burst in and confess my love for Kate.

Kate said, you know, this might be too fast. I feel the same way, but I don't want to act on it yet. And so we had this long-distance letter-writing courtship thing. But, you know, we loved each other.

how I felt at the time was I was being given this incredible gift of an old friend who knew me, who knew about Katie, who knew what this year had been. And time was of the essence because nothing was going to last for very long. And I think we both just felt really aligned and what we wanted.

We were engaged that Christmas. We got married the following July. Kate was pregnant the following November. And we had three kids in like four years. I had a family. I love my boys. They wouldn't be here if the sequence of events had gone differently. To acknowledge that is heartbreaking. Because of course, I only had the family and the kids after Katie died. I can hold this contradiction in my head and in my heart. But for a long time, I felt like

If I appreciate this life now, I'm being disrespectful to Katie. But if I think about Katie, I'm not appreciating the very, very good things that happened after she died. It's not guilt at being a survivor. It's like thriver's guilt. It's enjoying the life that happens after the horrible thing. And yet there was not a better person in the world than Katie.

We always say we're not going to sanitize her memory and say she was this saint puritanical person. Katie wasn't. She wouldn't have said she was. But if you make a list of the people bad things should happen to, you'd have to get really far down the list before you even start to think about where to put Katie. That was the beginning of thinking, you know, I have to make something that contains the grief. And the poems just weren't doing it. So I tried it in prose. It was hard because what I was writing about was Katie. And what I was living in was Kate.

A year, two years, okay, that's reasonable. Three years you're still writing about the wife who died when you have a kid and you're probably going to have another kid and you're married and you're happy and you're, you know, what are you doing? A separate second life had begun that was beautiful and separate of the first life. Diving back too deep into that life is taking time and energy away from the things, the duties and things I need to do in this life.

Writing Young Widower was awful. It drudged up a lot of feelings that I thought were settled, though I don't know why I thought they were settled only four or five years out. It was a lot of panic attacks, exhaustion. But I had a friend read Young Widower after it came out, and she wrote me a letter, a really nice letter. And she said nice things about the book. But then she said, you know, they got the back copy all wrong. She said, this is not a book about grief. This is a book about guilt.

You read the poems I wrote about Katie, there are genuine gestures of elegy there. There are things where I'm trying to acknowledge the loss, honor Katie's memory, have something to say about it all. Writing about guilt, living with guilt is a whole nother thing. It's just a constant project of second guessing and regret. There's a line from a poem by Swinburne where he says, time remembered is grief forgotten.

when you start remembering stuff the grief is gone and the idea is grief is a temporary state it's the french word for burden you carry it for a while and then you let it go it's a terminal process it has an end guilt is not terminal it doesn't end you can explain it you can contextualize it you can build in a nice little house inside of you and live with it but guilt does not go away kate was so supportive of writing these books and all my writing in general

If I was a sensitive kid, I was an incredibly sensitive post-trauma adult. Even with all the love and all the alignment and being on the same page about kids, I just think Kate found it exhausting. I think it was just really hard to be a supportive partner of someone who lived with this kind of stuff and feel like you had any room to breathe and be yourself.

I am a pretty expansive dude. I have a pretty big personality and I have huge feelings. And I think I probably feel those feelings a lot faster than I did before Katie died. Katie's death was probably gasoline thrown on the fire. It probably wasn't a fire starting.

I don't think anyone would doubt my commitment, love, devotion. But, you know, the fact that we couldn't, I couldn't spend a lot of time in the mountains with her, her family at a house in Tahoe. My inability to spend time in nature without having really strong emotional reactions, memories, intrusive thoughts, you know, what we now call PTSD. I mean, she called them my demons. Yeah.

But I think it was kind of a broad term for living with things that I think I thought I was done with, but I just could never be done with. I think that that was exhausting to be around. Probably if I'd taken more time, I could have worked out a better way of reengaging with the world at a much slower pace. But I didn't want to do that. She didn't either. And I don't think that was bad. I just, again, I just don't know if it was sustainable.

I think, you know, getting divorced forced me to really figure out what it means to really be a little more independent and comfortable in my own skin. And those were things I never did after Katie died. I mean, I was always surrounded by people and being taken care of, you know, and those were good. Those were great. But how I spend time alone now is like so different than how I did in either marriage.

When I was divorced, I undertook a lot of reflection and a lot of shame and guilt. But I had to figure out how to be alone. It forced me to really figure out who I am outside of a marriage. And not being loved by someone, being rejected by someone. When someone dies, they're not in this world. When someone divorces you, they're still in the world. They've just chosen not to love you.

My ex-wife is alive and well in the world. We have to talk every day about the kids. We have to, you know, it's just that she just didn't want to be with me. And that is a really profound distinction to me. A death is terminal. Divorce means, you know, someone just doesn't want to love or be loved by you anymore. I think I kind of had this idea, the bad stuff had happened and only good things were going to happen.

But it was shocking to me how hard it was to kind of have the life that followed Katie's death upended. And I didn't see it coming. And when it happened, I was powerless to do anything about it. And that life ended. I think the question of who I am now had to come down to, you know what? I had to like myself. I don't think I knew who I was after Katie died. Sitting down and saying, what am I hiding? What am I hiding from myself?

That's the thing I had to figure out. I couldn't just offload that onto someone else. I had to know myself. I couldn't just say, well, if I'm loved by someone else, that's enough. Seeing that I had worth and value outside of a marriage, outside of a relationship, sounds really childish and elemental, but I don't think I thought I had much value outside of the relationships I was in. And I don't think I had much of an identity outside of those relationships. Now I do.

It's not a romantic vision of what's going to happen when we're 80, sitting on the rockers, which is what I think I always wanted from when I was a kid. One of those marriages you read about and see on television. But I think I can tell myself the truth about who I am and still like that person. I wrote a whole book about how the life that came next was the magical life full of wonder and happiness and joy, and it was going to last forever. And, you know, that book is completely wrong. But thank God I wrote it because it's good to have a record when you get it wrong.

I don't feel like I'm trying to convince anybody that I'm somebody I'm not anymore. And maybe after Katie died, I was really comfortable being the widower. And then I was really comfortable being the guy who lived after grief. But I don't feel like now I'm trying to trick anyone into thinking I'm anything I'm not. It doesn't matter to me as much to explain to other people how all these pieces fit together.

And I feel much more comfortable in my own skin not trying to do that all the time. The project now is just making peace with it, all of it, and just living with the contradictions. You know, there's a moment where Job questions God and God says, you know, who are you to even think you could understand how I think? And I think that I still can't understand a universe that lets that happen to Katie.

Not just to die at the early part of the prime of her life, probably still before the prime of her life. Not just someone so healthy, not just someone so good and so loved, but to die in that way, in such a senseless way. I couldn't understand a universe that let that happen. And I can't make peace with that. All I can say is just to throw my hands up and beg for mercy from whatever it is I'm trying to talk to.

My expectation that there's reason means I must believe that there's reason to it all. And I just can't understand it. I guess I also think, you know, whatever the hell death is, Katie did it. She did the whole thing. Kind of means I can do it too. And a lot of other people can kind of do it too. That's, I think, kind of dark and wicked, but it makes a fundamental mystery of life, which is death. It gives it some shape. Yeah.

I'm at heart pretty optimistic, but my optimism isn't contingent on some fantasy of getting rid of all the bad stuff. We don't ever heal 100%, and that's fine. You don't have to have a tangible outcome to some horrible experience for it to have value. You don't have to heal to be strong. It's fine to not heal. There's still a great life out there for you.

And I think that I've found a lot of peace just in trying to accept rather than always rush to make sense of things. I want people to feel like it's a real accomplishment to just live with something hard and have a meaningful life. Just living with the hard stuff is the achievement.

Today's episode featured John W. Evans. You can find out more about John at his author website, johnwevans.com. For deeper details about his story, you can find his memoir, Young Widower, at your local bookstore or amazon.com. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

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I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was co-produced by me and Jason Blaylock, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the community on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook, or follow us on Instagram at actuallyhappening. On

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Welcome to the offensive line. You guys, on this podcast, we're going to make some picks, talk some s**t, and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Agar.

So here's how this show's going to work, okay? We're going to run through the weekly slate of NFL and college football matchups, breaking them down into very serious categories like No offense. No offense, Travis Kelsey, but you've got to step up your game if Pat Mahomes is saying the Chiefs need to have more fun this year. We're also handing out a series of awards and making picks for the top storylines surrounding the world of football. Awards like the He May Have a Point Award for the wide receiver that's most justifiably bitter.

Is it Brandon Ayuk, Tee Higgins, or Devontae Adams? Plus, on Thursdays, we're doing an exclusive bonus episode on Wondery Plus, where I share my fantasy football picks ahead of Thursday night football and the weekend's matchups. Your fantasy league is as good as locked in. Follow the offensive line on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can access bonus episodes and listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.