Excerpt
Guided
1Unexpected SparksEvery now and then the Other Side guides me to a specific place at a specific time for a specific purpose. That’s what happened in 2022, when I was guided to central Florida on a scorching summer day.
Of course, I wasn’t the only one being guided that day. There was another person who, because she was open to the forces that seek to steer us on our journeys, became a part of my story, just as I became part of hers.
Put another way—we were both characters in the same story, only we didn’t know it.
And that story begins with a boy named Zach.
Zach Johnson-McDonnell and his younger sister, Makayla, were raised in Minnesota largely by their mother, Karleen Johnson, after she and her husband divorced when the children were young. Zach was one of those endlessly curious boys, a question machine, forever in search of his next adventure. “Oh, he was a ball of energy, all right,” says Karleen, who lovingly called her son Scooter. “He was so full of life. He was the kind of person who could walk into a place and not know anyone and walk out with ten new friends and a plan to do something fun with them.”
Zach burst with so much energy he could hardly be contained indoors, and his childhood was full of camping and four-wheeling and snowmobiling with his mother and family and friends. As a teenager, he took up hunting and became quite good at it. Zach’s familiarity with hunting weapons led him to enlist in the U.S. Army at the age of eighteen, after they offered him a $25,000 signing bonus to become an infantryman—the soldiers who fight ground combat on foot. Zach wound up on the front lines of the grueling and bloody war in Iraq, often face-to-face with the enemy. What saved him were his courage and his fierce will to live.
“Not me,” Zach would tell himself before rushing into battle. “Not me, not today.”
What he did not know was that the worst danger for him lay ahead, away from the battlefield, waiting for him when he came back home from two tours of duty.
The things he had to do in Iraq, the horrors he saw, the unimaginable atrocities and brutality of war—all of these “took a horrible toll on him,” Karleen states. “He never actually told me what happened over there; he just said, ‘Mom, I will always protect you because I love you so much, and there are things in life you just don’t need to know.’ ”
Zach was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The disorder is characterized by intensely disturbing and recurring thoughts and feelings, sometimes through flashbacks, sometimes through nightmares, the trauma of war resurfacing in ordinary life. PTSD can be devastating; it often makes the people who suffer from it feel detached, estranged, cut off from the world, unable to sleep or concentrate or even have relationships. It can lock someone inside a prison of emotional numbness from which escape seems all but impossible. The grim, horrifying reality is that PTSD is particularly paralyzing for U.S. military veterans, and an average of twenty-two vets in the United States take their own lives every day.
Zach was determined not to be one of the twenty-two.
“He really tried to reintegrate into civilian life, but he just struggled with it so much,” Karleen says. “Eventually he turned to drugs.”
Zach battled a gripping addiction to different narcotics for fifteen years, never quite able to free himself from a dark, despairing loop.
“The drugs,” says Karleen, “were his only way out of the pain.”
Zach’s mother and sister rallied around him at every chance, doing everything they could to pull him back into the light. Zach voluntarily entered a few drug rehab programs, with varying success, and Karleen and Makayla were always there to support and encourage him. “I kept thinking, The kid is a warrior, front lines, infantry, he’s got this new struggle and he will beat it,” Karleen says. And yet, she adds, “there was always this imminent fear of the worst happening.”
In November 2019, Zach booked himself for treatment at a Veterans Affairs medical center in St. Cloud, Minnesota. It was an encouraging sign. The night before his admission, he called Karleen and sounded agitated. “He was elevated and stressed,” she recalls. “It was a tough call.” Zach said he was hitting the road at 5:00 a.m. the next morning for the drive to St. Cloud, and right at 5:00 a.m. Karleen texted him.
Hey, Scooter, she typed, are you on your way?
Karleen checked her phone every few minutes for a reply, but she saw that her text remained unread.
In 2019, I began planning a big trip for my family to mark my husband Garrett’s fiftieth birthday. Destination: Disney World. We’d traveled there before as a family, and we all loved going (particularly me; the energy there is truly remarkable), and one thing I’d learned is that to take full advantage of Disney, you have to do a lot of planning. Not planning down to the day or even the hour—you have to plan your trip down to the minute.
So that’s what I did, buying plane tickets to Florida for July 2020, lining up which parks and attractions we’d be visiting each day, signing up for the right passes, getting reservations for the most popular restaurants, and generally plotting out our every move. Months before Garrett’s big birthday, our trip was thoroughly booked.
Then the pandemic hit in early 2020. We had no choice but to cancel our trip. Of course, I got right to work booking the same trip for July 2021, and eventually I nailed it all down again, but when 2021 rolled around, the pandemic was still a big problem, and once again we had to postpone the trip.
Undaunted, we tried once more. After much rearranging of plans, clearing of schedules, putting in for time off, and securing flight and hotel reservations, we were all set—nine days in Disney World in August 2022, each day packed with thrills and action. Did it matter that by then Garrett was already fifty-two? Not in the least. As a family, we have a lot to celebrate, and that’s what we set out to do, two and a half years late.
My point is, I had no intention of being in Florida, at Disney World, in the summer of 2022—and yet there I was, rigid schedule in hand, bouncing from one attraction to the next with my husband and three children. Even more unlikely was what happened during our stay, when I got a sudden download from the Universe that led me to change my plans one morning, even though changing plans on the fly at Disney World—especially reservations at highly popular restaurants—is all but impossible. As carefully as I had prepared our itinerary, I remained open to the Other Side and followed the little voice in me that told me to make the change.
Sometimes the Universe has its own rigid schedule for us.
Early on the morning of November 6, 2019, Karleen Johnson sent her son, Zach, a second text to see if he was still driving to the VA rehab center in St. Cloud as planned.
Hey bud, just checking in on you, she wrote. You on the way to St. Cloud?
Like her first text message to him at 5:00 a.m., her second text went unread. At noon that day, Karleen sent a more urgent message: Zach, I’m losing my mind. Where are you? Zach failed to respond to this text, too.
Perhaps Zach had decided not to check himself into rehab, Karleen thought, and was now somewhere confronting his issues and out of reach. Karleen did not hear from her son at all on November 6, and she didn’t hear from him the following day, either. Three days after Zach was set to check into rehab in St. Cloud, his mother got a phone call.
Her worst fear had been realized. Zach had taken his own life.
His body was found in a basement laundry room of his then-girlfriend’s home. The possibility had always been there, the terrible worst-case scenario, lurking in the back of Karleen’s mind, yet when the actual news came Karleen wasn’t prepared for the utter devastation she felt.
“I was always his rock, his go-to person,” she says. “He knew he could call me at three in the morning to talk. Sometimes he just needed to know I was there, and I would stay on the phone and listen to him breathe.”
Zach Johnson-McDonnell was just thirty-three years old.
After he was gone, Karleen found herself in a very dark place—a pitch-black tunnel without an entrance or exit. She constantly asked herself what she might have done differently to save Zach, agonizing over any chance she might have missed to give him the lifeline he needed. “I didn’t just second-guess myself,” she says, “I fifty times guessed myself.” Things got so dark that Karleen turned to alcohol to ease her pain, and some days she simply couldn’t get out of bed.
Finally, it was a phone call from Zach’s former girlfriend, Lisa, whom Karleen considered her “bonus daughter,” that provided Karleen with the lifeline she needed.
“Lisa said, ‘Kar, I was listening to this podcast, and someone mentioned this book I think you should read,’ ” Karleen recalls.
