Mark Godfrey

What grade am I in?

Do you know where you are now?

They weren't answering questions that I was asking them, like, where's my mom and dad?

Where's my brother and sister?

So then I slowly started realizing, you know, that what Andy and I

Maybe thought was the hallucination was actually something in real life.

God had thrown me two, you know, very, very big curveballs.

One was the loss of my family.

And then secondly, you know, the more time I spent in the hospital, the more I realized how much my life was going to be completely different than what my prior life had been.

So not only had I lost my parents, but now I was going to be leaving the hospital as a severely disabled 11-year-old boy in a wheelchair.

I went from being the quiet middle child who's just navigating the family dynamic now to being the oldest in my family and having my grandparents kind of whisper in my ear things like, you need to be the head of your family now, Mark.

You need to be in charge now, Mark.

You need to be the carrier of the family history and the family culture.

I felt very alone at that time.

I felt like my structure had been, you know, exploded around me, if you will.

I still had both my maternal and paternal grandparents, and I was going to be living with my aunt and uncle who I knew, but, you know, quite frankly, didn't know all that well.

And so I kind of pulled inside of myself at that time quite a bit.

I started, I think, building walls of protection around me.

I think John started thinking, well, I have a story that I think is pretty incredible.

I wonder if that could be a potential subject for a documentary.