The Cathedral

Summary

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Radiolab: The Cathedral

Date: December 28, 2015
Hosts: Jad Abumrad, Robert Krulwich | Reporter: Shruti Pinamaneni
Featured Guests: Amy Green, Ryan Green

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Episode Overview

Radiolab presents a deeply moving collaboration with Reply All, telling the story of Amy and Ryan Green and their journey through their young son Joel’s battle with terminal brain cancer. The episode follows how they coped with immense grief and uncertainty, ultimately channeling their experiences into an unconventional form: a video game called “That Dragon, Cancer.” The story explores the limitations of agency, the role of faith and hope, and the power of storytelling—both in life and through interactive media.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Meet the Greens and Joel’s Diagnosis

• [02:30] Shruti introduces Amy and Ryan Green, a young couple in Colorado with three sons, Caleb, Isaac, and Joel.
• Joel is diagnosed just before his first birthday with a rare, aggressive brain tumor (ATRT).
• Amy reflects on the dire odds (“It's a 50% chance of surviving just two years.” —Amy, [04:24]) and her initial disbelief at the treatment options.

2. Daily Life with Childhood Cancer

• [05:29] Description of the harsh realities—chemo, endless hospital stays, and the aimless hope that comes with treatment.
• Amy describes the emotional heaviness and her pivotal decision:
  “I think I need to be all in. Like, I think I need to love him like mad. And I think we need to live our lives like he's gonna live.”
  — Amy Green [05:59]

3. When Hope Feels Impossible: The Inspiration for the Game

• [07:14] A particularly hopeless hospital night prompts Ryan to compare the experience to a video game—where every action feels pointless and out of control.
• “You know, usually people come into a game trying to solve it. And I wonder if I could make this game where they couldn't, they would understand me and how I feel right now.”
  — Shruti Pinamaneni paraphrasing Ryan Green [09:32]

4. A ‘Terrible’ Game Becomes a Calling

• Amy’s initial reaction is disbelief: “That’s terrible. That’s not a game. And no one will want to play that.” —Amy Green [09:53]
• Despite skepticism, Ryan is driven to create a game simulating the helplessness of that hospital night.

5. Reception and Validation

• [10:27] Ryan presents his early work at the Game Developers Conference.
• His authentic approach garners unexpected support from the “empathy game” community.
• “There’s two or three different people who want to fund my game.” —Reported by Shruti Pinamaneni [11:21]

6. Amy Experiences the Game

• Amy finally plays the “dehydration scene”; she is overwhelmed:
  “I just lost it. And I was just crying and crying...it brought me back to that space in a much more real way than I thought that a video game could.”
  —Amy Green [13:54]
• The couple commits to finishing and releasing the game, naming it That Dragon, Cancer.

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[18:56] Building the Game: Surreal Vignettes of Joy and Suffering

• The game alternates between simple daily joys and surreal depictions of illness—feeding ducks, floating with balloon-gloves, hospital waiting rooms slowly filling with water as bad news arrives.
• Cancer’s ever-present threat is creatively visualized, always encroaching.

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[22:02] Living Beyond Expectation

• Joel's tumors repeatedly disappear and return, defying medical odds.
• Milestones once thought impossible—a first word, a step—are met with hope and spiritual conviction.

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[23:59] The Last Night and Community Prayer

• [24:08] Community gathers for a night of prayer as Joel's health rapidly declines.
• “All we have is death here on this earth...the only hope we have is your resurrection, God.”
  —Ryan Green [24:17]
• “It’s the blind who see and the deaf who hear...God, I believe you could do all those things.”
  —Amy Green [24:40]
• Joel dies that night, March 13, 2014.
• Amy reflects on how hope changed their grieving process:
  “Because we still believed that he could live, I feel like we didn’t go through all the processes of getting ready for him to die the way maybe you would if you were certain.”
  —Amy Green [25:37]

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[26:06] The Hardest Design Challenge: How to End the Game

• The Greens wrestle with translating death—life’s unfinished, unspeakable cathedral—into a game.
• Shruti describes the evolving “cathedral” scene:
  • At first a hospital room, then a breathtaking cathedral incorporating elements of Joel’s anatomy, then morphing between light and darkness as Ryan struggles to find meaning.
• The balance between agency and inevitability becomes a metaphor for grief:
  • “If they do it wrong, then they’ll feel as if Joel died because of them, and that’s terrible... So then he says, you know what? Scrap this whole thing.” —Shruti Pinamaneni [29:00]
  • Lighting prayer candles triggers real prayers from Joel’s final night ([30:25]).

Memorable Visuals & Insights:

• “The cathedral to Ryan will always be unfinished.” —Shruti Pinamaneni [31:35]
• “This game is not him. It’s just an echo of him... It’s not even the best echo of him.”
  —Ryan Green [31:06]

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[31:55] Goodbye Scene: “Bubbles and Pancakes”

• A final, gentle scene lets the player spend an endless, sun-drenched moment with Joel on a picnic blanket surrounded by pancakes, a dog, and bubbles.
• The only choice: to stay as long as you want, and to leave when you’re ready.
• “That’s the choice you get at the end... to not stop until you’re ready to walk away.”
  —Jad Abumrad [34:20]
• “It’s not much of a choice.” —Robert Krulwich [34:28]

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “It’s a 50% chance of surviving just two years.” —Amy Green [04:24]
• “I think I need to be all in. Like, I think I need to love him like mad.” —Amy Green [05:59]
• “The only hope we have is your resurrection, God... that you redeem it.” —Ryan Green [24:17]
• “This game is not him. It’s just an echo of him.” —Ryan Green [31:06]
• “The cathedral to Ryan will always be unfinished.” —Shruti Pinamaneni [31:35]
• “That’s the choice you get at the end... to not stop until you’re ready to walk away.” —Jad Abumrad [34:20]

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Structure & Flow of the Episode

1. Introduction:
   • Hosts set up the story, partnering with Reply All. [01:36–02:30]
2. The Greens’ Story:
   • Early meeting, family background, Joel’s diagnosis. [02:30–04:24]
3. Treatment and Despair:
   • Experience of chemo, heavy emotional toll, pivotal night. [04:24–08:26]
4. Inspiration for a Game:
   • Ryan’s gamified experience of helplessness, initial disbelief. [08:26–12:42]
5. Creation and Reception:
   • Game Developers Conference, empathy games scene, Amy’s changing perspective. [10:27–14:16]
6. Building the Game:
   • Surreal scenes blending reality and imagination, ever-present cancer. [18:56–22:02]
7. Messy Miracles and Decline:
   • Joel’s unexpected longevity, return and progression of disease, church prayer, his death. [22:02–25:37]
8. Designing the End:
   • Artistic struggle, the unfinished “cathedral,” accepting limits, integrating prayer. [26:06–31:35]
9. Goodbye and Release:
   • The moving “pancake and bubbles” scene. [31:55–34:20]
10. Reflection and Credits:
    • Hosts react, thank contributors, and end with credits. [34:20–36:14]

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Tone and Style

• Reflective: Balances clinical and creative perspectives, giving space for both struggle and hope.
• Candid and Vulnerable: First-person testimonies, especially from Amy and Ryan, infuse the episode with honesty and emotional weight.
• Intimate: Inclusion of home video, actual game audio, prayers, and unguarded moments.
• Innovative: The meta-narrative of translating grief and faith into the unconventional vessel of a video game is both unusual and insightful.

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Summary for New Listeners

The episode “The Cathedral” is a masterful exploration of love, loss, and creativity in the face of tragedy. It charts Amy and Ryan Green’s attempts to make sense of their son’s terminal cancer through a raw, unflinching personal lens, while also following their decision to memorialize Joel—and the very process of grieving—in a playable game that invites the participant to sit with the limits of agency.

Listeners are taken through the couple’s lived experience, from diagnosis and crisis to a community’s outpouring of prayer on Joel’s final night. As the game’s design evolves, it mirrors real-life ambiguity: sometimes bright and whimsical, sometimes overwhelmed by darkness and impossibility. The cathedral that Ryan builds in-game becomes a metaphor for not just Joel’s life, but for any human effort to contain the uncontainable.

The episode closes on a poignant interactive moment: the realization that sometimes the only choice is being present with love and stepping away when you’re ready. This extraordinary story lingers as both testimony and touchstone—an invitation to reflect on how we process and remember love, loss, and hope.

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Transcript

[Commercial Announcer]

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[Radiolab Producer/Host]

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[Amy Green]

Yep.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

Camp in floating tree houses hundreds of feet off the ground?

[Amy Green]

Check.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

Jump in a big tub of mud on purpose. Call it rejuvenation. We don't care. Just pack your fun pants and let childhood rule your family vacation. Discover why California is the ultimate [e-mail].

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[Jad Abumrad]

Lowes.

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We help you save. Valid through 123 while supplies last. Selection varies by location.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Oh wait, you're listening. Okay.

[Amy Green]

All right.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right. You're listening to Radiolab Radio Lab from wny.

[Amy Green]

See?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yep. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab and today we're gonna feature a story from our friends over.

[Robert Krulwich]

At Reply all, which is a podcast.

[Jad Abumrad]

Produced by Gimlet Media, hosted by pj, Vog, Alex Goldman.

[Robert Krulwich]

We're let you hear a taste of Reply all.

[Jad Abumrad]

You know, because it's an amazing show. The entire staff's like secret favorite show. Not even secret actually. And this story, it just kind of grabbed us.

[Robert Krulwich]

Now we're not going to play you the whole story that they did. We're going to play you most of it. And we may intervene from time to time just to sort of. Because we bubble over with questions sometimes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Exactly. And this story actually doesn't come from PJ and Alex. It comes from one of their producers, Shruti Pinamaneni.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

And the story sort of centers around a couple and their son.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

So let me start by introducing you to the couple. Amy Green. Hi, how are you? And Ryan Green.

[Amy Green]

Ooh, we have our buffalo chicken. Oh wait, you Got. Do you want hot wings from yesterday?

[Ryan Green]

No, I already ate those. I think that's why I'm suffering this morning.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

They live in a small house in Loveland, Colorado. They fell in love, chatting online, got married. As soon as they turned 21, they moved into this house. They the very next day.

[Ryan Green]

Let me respond to some emails and then we'll head down.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

They had their first son, Caleb, Their second son, Isaac. Ryan was a computer programmer, and Amy took care of the kids. They were just living in a mess of diapers and toys, going to church every Sunday. And then in 2009, they had Joel. When Joel was born, how old were you?

[Amy Green]

Gosh, I was thinking about this the other day. If I was 25 when Caleb was born, and then when Isaac was born, I would have been like 27. Yeah, I think I was 28. I was 28 when Joel was born.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Figured it out, everything was normal, fine. And then just a little before his first birthday, Amy noticed that his head was a little tilted, just kind of cocked to one side. A couple days later, he starts throwing up. Can't keep any food down. And so they do a bunch of tests, and the doctor says, listen, your son has a lesion. It's a cancer. So they biopsy the tumor, and then they come back with this news that it's something called an atrt. It's very, very difficult to treat.

[Amy Green]

So when you have an atrt, you go through all the most intense chemotherapy and all the most intense radiation, they throw the kitchen sink at it. And doing that, you have about a 50% chance of surviving for five years.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

I double checked this, and it turns out the odds of survival are even grimmer.

[Amy Green]

It's.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

It's a 50% chance of surviving just two years. When you hear this kind of news, is there any part of you that's like, what if you don't do the treatment?

[Amy Green]

I remember before his first surgery asking them a lot about, like, will he have to have chemotherapy? And thinking to myself, cause I can't. We can't do this. This is crazy. We can't do this. But then as time wore on and by the time we actually even heard about the tumor, then you're just thinking like, oh, well, 50%. Like, that's half. Like, we've got a good shot that he gets through this.

[Ryan Green]

What do you think, Isaac? He's in the hospital, so they're taking care of him.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

This is from a home video of Joel's brothers meeting him in the hospital. Isaac is two and a half, looking kind of Scared. Joel is a little over a year old. He's lying in a small red wagon hooked up to an iv. He's skinny and his head is perfectly round.

[Ryan Green]

His food goes through that too.

[Amy Green]

Yeah.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

So they start going through this treatment. It starts off with intense radiation and then just, you know, months of chemotherapy, which I didn't know what that meant. It means that you just hold the baby for six, seven, eight hours a day, and you just lie in a bed with them while they get these infusions.

[Ryan Green]

And so it'd be like this eight hour pump and you'd hook it up at night and it would be this, like this white, milky substance that would provide all of his nutrition because he couldn't swallow very well.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

One day, it was Amy's shift. She was holding Joel.

[Amy Green]

I was sitting in his room with him. I was singing him a song and clapping and he was clapping his hands. And then he was sort of like babble, singing along. And so, like, for me, it was just one of those moments that you felt like, oh, I'm always going to remember this. Like, sometimes you just have a moment and you go, I'm going to remember this the rest of my life. And then that made me sad because I thought, oh, like. But the reason I think I'll remember this the rest of my life is because he could die. Until eventually I did just kind of decide, like, I think I need to be all in. Like, I think I need to love him like mad. And I think we need to live our lives like he's gonna live.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

And that's what they did for a year. And then in November 2010, just before Joel's second birthday, the doctors call them in and they say, we're really sorry, Joel has another tumor. All these chemicals we've been pumping into him, they didn't do anything. And so it's time for us to stop. He will eventually die, we're not sure, but we think in about four months, you know, this is it.

[Jad Abumrad]

But as Shruti goes on to explain in the story, that definitely wasn't it, because there's this one night when the situation was pretty much at its worst when something happened.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Joel had a stomach bug. He was throwing up, got dehydrated. So Ryan spent the night with him in the hospital.

[Ryan Green]

I just remember him really wanting apple juice because that was one of his favorite things at the hospital. But then I'd give it to him and he'd just throw it up again.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

And he's crying and crying and his cries just get more frantic. And animal, and there's nothing that Ryan can do.

[Ryan Green]

By the end of the night, he had just such sunken eyes. But I just remember, like, I wanted to hold him and I couldn't put him down because he would get so upset.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

And when Ryan finally did put him down, Joel would start hitting his head against the wall of his crib. Eventually, Ryan himself started to lose it. He was crying, too. And then in the early hours of the morning, he lay down and prayed.

[Ryan Green]

And I remember that's when he stopped crying and he fell asleep. And it was just one of those. It's one of those few moments in life where, like, it felt like an answer from God. And it wasn't like I heard a voice or saw, you know, a burning bush or anything like that, but it was just. It felt so much like mercy and.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Beyond, just sheer relief. Ryan had this other thought, frankly, a weird thought. This whole ordeal reminded him of a video game. Like, you have to get the baby to stop crying. So you keep trying things, give him juice, bounce him, talk to him. But the weird thing is, in this awful game, none of those things actually work. They're all, like, fake choices. Ryan thought, what if I could make a game like this where you, the player, you don't really have control. And so he started to think, like, I wonder if I could make that. If I could make that scene.

[Robert Krulwich]

If he could make the scene of Joel in desperation and then give him an option, Is that the thing? Is there an act of saving, being?

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

No.

[Jad Abumrad]

So wait, he's going to make the video game where everything you do doesn't work? The baby still cries?

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Yeah. I think he was just intrigued by that because it seemed bizarre.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, I'll make a video game where you can't do anything except pray.

[Ryan Green]

I don't know.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

But to show you has a very.

[Robert Krulwich]

High likelihood of being a popular game.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

I think the popularity of it was so not essential. He wasn't even thinking that because he wasn't thinking, oh, this is a game that I will release. It was almost like a thought experiment right in his brain where he's thinking. You know, usually people come into a game trying to solve it. And I wonder how if I could make this game where they couldn't, they would understand me and how I feel right now.

[Amy Green]

Oh, I remember he really was like, I want to make a game about that day that Joel was dehydrated in the hospital. And I said, that's terrible. That's not a game. And no one will want to play that. Like, I think that that word game meant like something you do in your leisure time, you know? And so who wants to spend their leisure time reliving the worst moment of a man's life? So I said, do not make that. That is horrible.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

But he clung to the idea. So finally Amy said, okay, I'll give you three months.

[Commercial Announcer]

Thank you.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

So a few months later, it's the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco Alongside Assassin's Creed 3, Battlefield 4, the new Oculus Rift VR headset.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay.

[Ryan Green]

Hi, everybody. My name is Ryan.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

There was Ryan.

[Ryan Green]

I'm going to talk to you about a personal game that I'm making. My son Joel had just turned one year old the day that we found the monster in his brain.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Ryan is standing in front of a bunch of young tech dudes. They're listening kind of half heartedly.

[Ryan Green]

Joel is alive and fighting his eighth tumor. Our doctors fight for him, our family fights for him. And we serve a God that's the God of the living, not the dead. In the middle of all this pain and suffering and mud and morass that cancer has wrought in our family, we have a drink of water that's made of hope and love and light, and we hope to share it with you.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Amy stayed home fretting because they were almost out of money and she was worried that Ryan would come home feeling crushed. But that's not what happened. Ryan got back and said it was amazing. This person introduced me to that person. That person. There's two or three different people who want to fund my game.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait, so you're saying there's actually a market for a game like this, like different people?

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

So I want to be clear that the world of these kinds of emotional games, it's a small one, right? But there are people, there are investors in there who are looking for games that are doing something different, looking for games that are meaningful in some way. And so I think a few of them played through the scene, this dehydration scene, and they thought, okay, let's, let's like, see what a full fledged version of this would be. And we're just, you know, there's. It's like the video game generation has grown up, right? Like if you were born in the 80s or the 70s, like you played games for certain reasons when you were a kid. And now we're grown up and we're having these different experiences, like a child going through cancer or, you know, the death of my father, or these things which suddenly you're like, why can't I tell these stories with video games?

[Jad Abumrad]

And what was Amy's reaction when she heard people wanted to fund the game.

[Amy Green]

It really blew my mind because I'm still just like. Because of your dehydration game that I told you to never make. And he realizes, like, you've never played it. Like you've never played the scene. So I put on the headphones, and.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

She finds herself back in the hospital room. You don't see Joel. You see an empty crib, and you can hear him crying. You're playing as Ryan. You can move your mouse around the screen and options appear. You can give him juice. You can try to bounce him. You can walk into the bathroom, look at the window. But no matter what you do, his crying just gets worse and worse.

[Ryan Green]

Okay, buddy. Okay, I'll hold you.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Please.

[Lowe's Advertiser]

Stop.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

After five or six minutes of this, Brian sits in a chair, drops his head into his lap and prays. And you've brought us this far.

[Ryan Green]

He's still here. Not dead, not there.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

And then with you, the crying stops.

[Ryan Green]

Peace. He sleeps.

[Amy Green]

So I put on the headphones and I just lost it. And I was just crying and crying, and I knew Joel was okay. And he was, like, right there. Like, Joel was right there with us. And yet it brought me back to that space in a much more real way than I thought that a video game could.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Amy didn't need any more convincing. She said, okay, let's do this. Let's pull the rest of our savings and make this game. They named it that Dragon Cancer.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm just going to use the same tease that reply all used in their podcast. Coming up, Ryan and Amy encounter what might be the world's biggest design problem.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

This is Riley Lawrence from Woodland Hills, California. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about [e-mail].

[Amy Green]

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[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, I'm Jan Abumran. I'm Robert Krulwitz this is Radiolab and.

[Robert Krulwich]

We are back with again, reply all story. It's about a couple who have a kid who's fighting cancer. And the mom and dad have decided to express the experiences that they're going through in, of all things, a video game.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. So Amy and Ryan and their six person team, they begin to build these scenes of the game, these surreal vignettes where you, the player, you take on different characters and in every scene, your job, your role basically is to kind of take care of baby Joel.

[Robert Krulwich]

So let's now go back to the piece and to Sruti.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

The first scene is at the pond. You start off as a duck, you paddle towards a little boy. It's Joel or this origami version of him. He doesn't have eyes or a mouth, but he has a voice. And that is actually Joel's laugh as you hand him pieces of bread and he throws them into the water.

[Ryan Green]

Here you go, Joel. Here's a piece. Okay. No, you throw it.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

Joel's almost five, right?

[Amy Green]

Yeah.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

The kid speaking here is Isaac, Joel's brother.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

But he. But he can't talk.

[Ryan Green]

It's true.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

Yeah, we don't talk.

[Ryan Green]

Yeah, I know.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

Why can't Joel?

[Ryan Green]

Well, Joel got sick right after he.

[Robert Krulwich]

Turned one.

[Amy Green]

Kind of slowed him down a bit little.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

And there's other vignettes. Like there was this one time in a hospital when to keep Joel entertained, Ryan blew up surgical gloves like balloons. It's this gorgeous scene where you see Joel floating into the nighttime sky, towards the moon, holding onto these surgical balloons. And then you see these black burrs appear from the corner. That's the cancer. And they pop the balloons one by one. And throughout these scenes, you play mini games, you discover rooms, listen to voicemails from Amy. There's even little levels you can beat. But the cancer is always around the edges of this world, thorny and black and creeping in. And at one point, you'll arrive here, the waiting room, where doctors tell Amy and Ryan that Joel's cancer is terminal. As they break the news, rain starts pouring into the room and Ryan slowly starts to slip under the water. We've given you a lot to think about already today, but we're going to.

[Ryan Green]

Have you come back Monday and we can talk about palliative treatment.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

We're very good at end of life care. We're very good at managing pain and masking symptoms at the end of life.

[Jad Abumrad]

Just to jump in for one second, we asked Shruti. So as Ryan and Amy and the team were crafting these scenes, what was happening with Joel. And she says, what happened surprised everybody.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Thing that happened was that tumor where, you know, the doctor said, listen, he's terminal. It's gonna be over soon. They radiate the tumor, and it goes away. And then a few months later, he gets another tumor. They radiate and it goes away. And then this happens again and again and again. And so he's 2 years old, he's 3 years old, he's 4 years old. He's doing things that the doctors never thought he would do. Like he. He turned two and a half and said his first word. Uh, oh. He starts to swallow again.

[Ryan Green]

Joel don't drive the food, Starts to walk.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

When he's three, He just became this miracle baby. Somebody in their church said they had a vision. A woman in the church told her that she had a vision that Joel would do great things. Another reason they wanted to make this about Joel is because they felt as if, you know, as Christians, they were living a miracle, and they wanted to share this with people and show them. And then a doctor calls them in, and he says, listen, Joel has a new tumor, but this tumor is different. It's in a place that we've already radiated.

[Amy Green]

He explained to us that cannot continue to radiate an area too much, or it can cause brain death. And it was right on the brain stem.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

The doctors say, we're not going to radiate this time.

[Jad Abumrad]

And what happened to Joel?

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

His condition, like, very rapidly deteriorated. He's having more trouble breathing. He can't swallow again. A lot of the things that he was able to do, like walk and eat, he stops. And so they invite their entire church community to come to their house and pray.

[Amy Green]

We had a prayer night, just praying for him to be healed. And we just had everyone over, and we spent, you know, hours just worshiping and praying.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

There's video footage of this night. It's in their small living room. There's family members, friends, people from their church community. Ryan is holding Joel, and they're playing.

[Ryan Green]

All we have is death here on this earth. That's all we have. The only hope we have is your resurrection, God. So why would hope hurt us? All I have is my disappointment. That's what I start with. But I have hope that you fulfill my disappointment. That you make it right, that you redeem it.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

Thank you, God.

[Amy Green]

It's the blind who see any, the deaf who hear, and it's the dumb who speak. God, I believe you do all of those things. I believe that you could do all of those things. My Child.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

What's your strongest memory from that night?

[Ryan Green]

I think it's just real that he was going to die that night. It's that space of being with a bunch of people that desperately want the same thing that you will and are crying out for that grace and that mercy to kind of invade a situation.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Joel died later that night. It was March 13, 2014.

[Amy Green]

I feel like, in a way, because we were believing that he would be healed and because we were believing that even if he died, maybe he'd be raised from the dead. Like, which is wild. And you so don't have to put that in your story because it's weird. And I so get that it's weird. But because we still believed that he could live, I feel like we didn't go through all the processes of getting ready for him to die the way that maybe you would if you were certain that this was it.

[Robert Krulwich]

So at this point in the tale, Struti tells us, well, they had to finish the game. I mean, they'd invested an enormous amount of time and heart and talent in building this game. But now the facts have changed.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, it started as a game that was supposed to be about the experience of fighting cancer, but also the experience of triumphing over cancer, but can't be that game anymore. So, like, what do you do as game designers, as parents, how do you finish a game where you don't have many choices and you can't win? For this part, as we were talking with Shruti, I mean, it's so visual, she just sat down and walked us through as descriptively as she could how Ryan and Amy, particularly Ryan, tried to solve this design problem.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

The end of the game, they weren't sure, but it was basically going to be a two part scene where there's the moment of his death, you know, and they weren't sure how to do that. But there's a moment of his death and right after that, a moment where he goes to heaven. Essentially, there's this little island and so Ryan sets about making the scene of his death. It starts off pretty simple. It's in a hospital. There's little Joel sitting on a green chair and there's some tubes of this neon fluid feeding into him. And there's these pipes that rise up above him, which are like pipe organ pipes. And there was a little bit of gameplay where you can play the pipe organ anyway. And then, and then after that he said, well, this isn't, this isn't enough. This is the scene where my son dies. And so it must Be just, like, epic. And so he creates this almost European style, like, oversized cathedral where, you know, the walls are soaring up and the ceilings are intricate and contain all these different, like, body. Like, it's almost as if he's coating Joel's body into the architecture. So he has, you know, pieces that look like ribs, and there's this part that looks like his heart. I can show you guys these pictures. It's so. I'm trying to think how I do that.

[Jad Abumrad]

Maybe just hold up your laptop to the glass.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Yeah, this is tow in the. Just quickly, I want to show you. This is.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Yeah. So.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, that's amazing.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Right?

[Jad Abumrad]

That's amazing. He's so pretty.

[Robert Krulwich]

I was not prepared for the beauty of this very intricate interlacing arches, light cascading down.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

That's the catacombs, stained glass, these very ornate ceilings. And so he starts building that, and it's beautiful, and it just gets bigger and bigger. And then suddenly he feels like, you know, this is too light. And so then cathedral becomes a place of darkness, and all the lights are neon.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh. So now it's very dark. There's trees growing into the cathedral now.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

That's the cancer, huh? And then he's in this space, and he's like, so what should people be able to do in this space? We have all this, you know, these tubes and things for chemo. I want to put in the machines that were keeping Joel alive. So we were feeding him with these nutrition IV things. We had these oxygen tanks. And so he starts building actual equipment that the user would have to, like, fiddle with the levers and, you know, make things just right so that Joel's getting what he needs to stay alive. But then he thinks, oh, well, if they do it wrong, then they'll feel as if Joel died because of them, and that's terrible. And so then he says, you know what? Scrap this whole thing.

[Jad Abumrad]

Shruti showed us maybe 60 different sketches, different iterations of the cathedral that were all super detailed in a kind of Terry Gilliam on steroids sort of way. Like, for instance, there was one sketch where Ryan had built an entire amusement park in the cathedral, and that was supposed to represent all of Joel's favorite things.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

And then he's like, wait. But now it's all. There's just, like, too much stuff. It's distracting. So then he takes out the whole amusement park, and then he puts in these prayer candles because he's like, you know, really, what I want people to take away is this feeling I had on the last night of Joel's life, where all you can do now is pray. And so you light one of these candles and you hear a prayer from that night.

[Lowe's Advertiser]

Lord, my God, let this boy's life return to him.

[Amy Green]

I will not let you go unless you bless him. And it's been hard, I think, for both of us to get to a place where we say it can't say all the things the cathedral can't say all the things we want it to say.

[Ryan Green]

I just had to cut something else in the game because we couldn't finish it.

[Amy Green]

And it's hard because you just want to never finish it and make it as beautiful as possible. And, I don't know, like, there's a part of me that feels like we betray the project by finishing it and by saying it can only be so much.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

But of course they have to finish it. There's investors, there's a release date.

[Ryan Green]

What's disappointing to me is how quickly it fades.

[Jad Abumrad]

Joel.

[Ryan Green]

How the memories and the person of Joel fades because he's not here. He becomes more and more an idea. This game is not him. It's just an echo of him. It's not even the best echo of him. I think that's the thing that I'm struggling with as we're approaching the end of this. Like, what did we do all this for? Why is it that? Why did we do this?

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

The game is coming out mid January. The cathedral to Ryan will always be unfinished. Can you show me the last scene with the pancakes?

[Ryan Green]

Sure.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

Ryan was able to finish the place that comes right after the cathedral. It's the scene where you say goodbye to Joel. You find yourself in a boat next to Joel. There's no oars. You're headed towards an island. You get there, you walk along a small path, and you end up in a clearing in the woods. There's a picnic blanket, and Joel's sitting on it.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

I remember you. You made it, too. I'm glad you're here. I love it here. I bet you like it, too.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

And around him are all the things he loved most.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

Look at all these pancakes.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

A huge stack of pancakes. Way, way bigger than him. A little dog.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

I always wanted a dog, and now I got one.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

And bubbles. You can blow him bubbles.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

I love bubbles. Throw bubbles. Look, I can catch one.

[Ryan Green]

You can blow them for as long as you want. Okay? Okay. Joel.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

I love my bubbles. Come here, Andrew. Have another pin cake. Man, you love syrup.

[Amy Green]

Me too.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

Syrup is my favorite party.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

And you just keep blowing bubbles.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

I love bubbles. Blow bubbles.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

And at some point.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

Look, I can touch one.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

You just walk away.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

I want my babbles. You have to buy them. I love the bubbles.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's like, wow. That's the choice you get at the end of this game is to not stop until you're ready to walk away.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's not much of a choice.

[Jad Abumrad]

No. Very big thanks to Shruti Pinanameni and the whole team at Reply All. PJ Vote, Alex Goldman and our former producer, Tim Howard.

[Ryan Green]

Love you, Tim.

[Amy Green]

Hi, Tim.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thea Bennen, Kahlilah Holt, Peter Clownley, my first editor and Rick Kwan.

[Robert Krulwich]

And definitely go check out Reply All. You can find them at gimletmedia.com, gimlet G I M L E T. They're so.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's so fun. It's such a fun show.

[Robert Krulwich]

It is. We were on stage with them in a thing and we thought we were, you know, good.

[Jad Abumrad]

We thought we were good. And they were so much better than us. They were so much better than us. They had this such a good story. I think it actually might be coming up in their stream next week maybe.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, you want to check it out? It's about a woman who shoots everybody every night for years and years, over and over and over. And she's like, well, I want to.

[Jad Abumrad]

Don't say the rest.

[Robert Krulwich]

Also thanks to David Assit and to Malika Zuhali Worl, who made a documentary also about Ryan and Amy. They called theirs thank youk For Playing. I Saw it. It's pretty good.

[Jad Abumrad]

And thank you for listening. I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

We'll see you next time.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

You have two new messages.

[Shruti Pinamaneni]

To play the message, press two. Hey. Hey, Radiolab. Shruti here. Just reading the credits. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. The staff includes Brenna Farrell, David Gable, Dylan Keith Mack Hilty, Robert Krulwitz, Andy Mills, Lateef Nasser, Kelsey Padgett, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster, Soren Wheeler and Jamie York. With help from Simon Adler, Alexandra Lee Young, Abigail Keel, Stephanie Tam and Micah Lowinger. Our fact checkers are Ava Dasher and Michelle Harris. Bye, guys.

[Radiolab Producer/Host]

End of message.