All the Lonely People

If there’s a heaven out there somewhere, a place where pain is cleansed with clouds and dreams lined with stars, I’m sure John Bodnar is there.

He was the kind of guy God ought to like, because he took the hardest hits fate could offer and still managed not to hate each heartbeat of his 40 years on Earth.

John struggled across the landscape of his life like a wounded bird, each progression a painful crawl toward uncertainty, until the uncertainty at last enveloped him.

I’m talking about a guy I never met.

He wrote me more than a year ago and said he’d been born with multiple physical handicaps and felt he had something to say about being that way. He wanted to say it through me.

I’m not the kind of person who ignores letters, even when they’re mindless and threatening, and I wasn’t about to dismiss this one.

But I get a lot of mail and things pile up, so it sometimes takes me months to respond. I kept thinking about John and telling myself I ought to get in touch with him, but you know how that goes.

Finally, months later, I did call the number he left. As luck would have it, there was no answer. I sent him a note instead, giving him a private number he could call. He never did.

More months passed, and I got a second letter from John. Again, I made a mental note to answer it soon, but time passes like wind in the trees, and by the time I got around to calling again it was eight months later.

His father answered the phone. He said John was dead.

*

I can’t tell you the kind of impact that had. The phone call I’d never gotten around to making until it was too late had come back to haunt my conscience like a whisper in the night.

The father, John Bodnar Sr., said his son had been born with a lot of handicaps, including a deformed arm, partial deafness and some other things.

As if that weren’t enough, they discovered a tumor on his hearing nerve and, following subsequent surgery, he ended up not being able to hear at all.

In each of the two letters he wrote he included a number for me to call so that we could communicate over the phone through the California Relay Service. An operator would transmit our conversation with the use of a device that would type my comments for him to read.

John was getting used to deafness when new surgery was required for his face. That didn’t go well, his father said. Somehow there was damage to his son’s lungs and he fell into a coma.

The coma lasted three months, followed by a year in intensive care. When he finally came home, John was on continuous oxygen, but he wasn’t the kind of guy to let that stop him.

“He never let anything get him down,” Bodnar said. “He had gone to college and gotten his bachelor’s degree and had all kinds of plans. He was a wonderful person. You’d have liked him.”

Such was John’s determination that he decided to ween himself off oxygen. One day last November, he drove to a bank and never returned. They found him slumped over in his car.

*

I don’t have that first letter John wrote, but I do have the second one. It was written after the surgery, when he was on oxygen. In it, he said he once felt lousy about himself “but now things are going well and I feel that my future is unlimited.”

He wanted me to write about him, he said, “because I want people to talk about me and to know their future can be just as good. I want you to understand my desire to help others feel as I do about life in general.”

“That’s just the way he was,” Bodnar said. He was never mad at life. He never blamed anyone or anything for the way he was. Even at the end, he was still trying.”

Trying is about as much as anyone can do. There are about a million people in L.A. County who are physically handicapped, and they’re struggling the way John did across the same landscape of high mountains and terrible deserts.

The message John was trying to convey was powerful. It said don’t give up; crawl if you have to, but get there, even if everyone else is running, and you’re left alone to make your way across a surface of hard challenges.

I don’t know what bogged me down those months when I didn’t get back to John right away, but I’m sure they weren’t as important as what he had to say. I’m sorry, John. I was one of those people running blindly toward the horizon. I should have stopped. I should have listened.

But at least now your message has been conveyed. Rest easily in your dreams.