There are moments in life that seem insignificant when they happen.

A walk across a street. A question from an uncle. A few words spoken to a kid who thinks he already knows what he wants to be when he grows up.

For Judge Gregory Gonzalez, one of those moments came sometime around 1965 or 1966 in Los Angeles.

His parents were taking his uncle, Johnny Mejia, out to dinner. Mejia was a Marine home on leave from Vietnam. As they crossed the street, he turned to his young nephew and asked a question children hear all the time.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Gonzalez had an answer ready.

A baseball player.

His uncle had another idea.

“No, you want to become a lawyer.”

Years later, Gonzalez learned there was some humor behind the advice. His uncle had gotten into enough trouble during his time in the Marine Corps that he figured having a lawyer in the family might not be a bad idea.

But the comment stuck.
In fact, it did more than stick.

“From that moment,” Gonzalez recalled, “I wanted to pursue that path.”

Nearly six decades later, that kid from Southern California would be sitting inside a courthouse in Clark County, Washington, reflecting on a legal career that had taken him from private practice to municipal court and eventually to the Superior Court bench.

But before the robes, courtrooms and decisions that sometimes kept him awake at night, there was baseball.

Baseball, Law and a Move North

Gonzalez grew up in La Puente, a community southeast of Los Angeles, and attended Workman High School.

When it came time for college, he headed to the University of California, Riverside, where he played second base on the baseball team. He had also been recruited to play football.

That possibility didn't last long.

Once he arrived and saw the size of the football players, Gonzalez reconsidered.

“I decided, no, I think I’ll just play baseball.”

It was probably a wise business decision.

He spent four years playing baseball at UC Riverside while studying political science, but the career idea planted years earlier by his uncle never disappeared. Eventually, baseball gave way to the path he had been thinking about since childhood.

Law.

That path brought Gonzalez north to Lewis & Clark Law School in Oregon.

And then life changed.
Gonzalez fell in love with the Pacific Northwest and ultimately stayed. He also formed friendships in law school that would become far more important than he could have known at the time.

During his first year, his mother was killed in a car accident.

“She was my rock,” Gonzalez said.

It was the first truly devastating event he had experienced. He was young, far from the place where he had grown up and attempting to survive what is already an extraordinarily demanding first year of law school.

Suddenly, school was no longer the hardest thing he was facing.

He wondered what he was going to do.

The answer, at least in part, came from the people around him.

His law school friends refused to let him quit.

“You can do it,” they told him. “You can finish.”

His faith helped, but Gonzalez remembers that group of friends as an especially important source of strength. They helped carry him through one of the darkest periods of his young life.

And they never really left.

Decades later, those same friends still get together regularly to play poker.

Careers changed. Years passed. Gonzalez believes he may now be the only one of the group still actively practicing.

The friendship endured.

It is one of several recurring themes in Gonzalez's story: people arriving at consequential moments, sometimes offering encouragement, sometimes opening a door and sometimes, quite literally, keeping him alive.

A Temporary Job That Lasted 29 Years

After law school, Gonzalez found an opportunity in Hazel Dell.

The law firm Weber Baumgartner needed temporary summer help with trial preparation, investigation and legal research. Gonzalez started there in the late spring of 1983.

The temporary job lasted 29 years.

He was 27 years old when he joined the firm.

At first, he was the young attorney learning from the lawyers around him. Over time, the firm's name changed, eventually becoming Weber and Gunn, and Gonzalez's place within it changed too. The young lawyer being mentored eventually became one of the experienced attorneys.

“I learned so much from all those attorneys that mentored me as a young attorney,” he said.

It is difficult to separate Gonzalez's career from mentorship.

His uncle first planted the idea of becoming a lawyer. Friends carried him through law school after his mother's death.

Experienced attorneys taught him the profession. Years later, some of Washington's highest-ranking judges would become mentors and colleagues.

Each stage seemed to prepare him for another.
But for much of his career, becoming a full-time judge was not necessarily the plan.

Gonzalez loved practicing law.

He loved his clients.

Then, sometime in the mid-1990s, he began serving as a pro tem judge in Clark County District Court, “pinch hitting,” as he describes it.

Something clicked.
The more time he spent behind the bench, the more interested he became in the work.

“This is pretty good,” he remembers thinking.

In 2005, another opportunity arrived.

A friend serving as the Battle Ground Municipal Court judge decided it was time to step away and suggested Gonzalez apply for the position.

He did.

For the next seven years, Gonzalez lived in two professional worlds. One day a week, he served as a municipal court judge. The rest of the time, he continued practicing law.

He wasn't ready to give that part of himself up.

But the municipal courtroom began teaching him lessons that would follow him throughout the rest of his judicial career.

People came before him facing DUIs, assaults, traffic infractions and other matters. Many did not have attorneys. They represented themselves.

To the court, a traffic ticket might be routine.

To the person standing in front of the judge, it could feel like the worst thing that had ever happened to them.

Gonzalez learned to recognize that difference.

He began seeing not merely a charge or case number, but a person who might be having a terrible day or who might be carrying something painful from long before they entered his courtroom.

“You understand that folks in front of me had good days, bad days, [and were] traumatized sometime in the past, maybe not,” he said.

The lesson was simple but consequential:

Everyone arriving in a courtroom arrives with a life outside it.

Eventually, people around Gonzalez began encouraging him to take the next step.

A position was opening on the Clark County Superior Court.

Apply, they told him.
So he did.

Gonzalez received the gubernatorial appointment and took the Superior Court bench full time in 2012.

From the outside, becoming a Superior Court judge might seem like the obvious culmination of everything that came before it.

For Gonzalez, it wasn't that simple.

In fact, when asked about the hardest decision he has ever had to make as a judge, he didn't mention sentencing someone, ruling in a painful family dispute or deciding a complicated question of law.

He went back to the decision that made him a full-time judge in the first place.

Leaving his clients.

“I didn't really want to leave my private practice,” Gonzalez said. “I loved my clients.”

After 29 years, he had to walk away from the practice and people that had defined most of his adult professional life.

His clients, however, understood.

Many had known him for years.

And most, he remembers, were proud that their lawyer was becoming a judge.

What Gonzalez could not have known then was just how much the bench would teach him about people or how, a decade later, an event hundreds of miles away from his Clark County courtroom would fundamentally alter the way he thought about life, empathy and the preciousness of another day.

Behind the Bench

Taking the Superior Court bench in 2012 did not mean Gregory Gonzalez had finished becoming a judge.
In many ways, he was just beginning.

More than a decade later, Gonzalez can see the difference between the judge who first entered the courtroom and the one who sits there today.

“I’ve changed quite a bit,” he said.

Some of that change comes simply from experience. After years of listening to arguments, weighing evidence and making decisions, Gonzalez can often identify the heart of an issue faster than he could earlier in his career.

Some of it has also made him less tolerant of lawyers who arrive unprepared.
Gonzalez jokes that he may have developed a bit of a “get off my lawn” attitude, particularly when it comes to Washington’s civil and evidentiary rules.

The joke comes with a serious point.

Those rules matter.

As one of the more experienced judges on the Clark County bench, Gonzalez expects attorneys appearing before him to understand them and follow them. With age and experience, he has become increasingly convinced that respect for the rule of law begins with knowing the rules governing the profession.

“I expect all lawyers to know those rules and follow them to a T,” he said.

That expectation extends to himself.

Preparation, Gonzalez said, is one of the most important parts of his job.

Before entering the courtroom, he reads the materials submitted to him. He reviews statutes. He researches legal questions himself. If a case raises an unfamiliar or evolving issue, he studies it.

“Most of the time, 99% of the time, before I go into the courtroom, I’ve looked at the law on that particular issue for every single case,” Gonzalez said.

For a judge, however, knowing the law is only part of the responsibility.

The other part is considerably more human.

The Person Behind the Case

A courthouse has a strange relationship with difficult days.

For the attorneys, clerks and judges who work there, it is a workplace.

For many of the people walking through its doors, it is anything but ordinary.

Someone may be fighting for time with their children.

Someone may be facing criminal charges.

Someone may be watching a marriage come apart.

Someone may be waiting for a decision that will affect where they live, what they can do or what happens to their family.
A judge encounters people at moments they may remember for the rest of their lives.

Gonzalez knows that.

He learned it during his years handling municipal and district court matters, and the lesson became even more pronounced on the Superior Court bench.

“Everybody in front of me has had a good day, bad day,” he said. “Everybody in front of me had some traumatic event in their life.”

The challenge is recognizing that humanity without allowing emotion to replace the law.

Gonzalez described the distinction carefully.

He can empathize with the person standing before him. He can understand that person’s circumstances. He can listen.

But ultimately, his responsibility is to take the facts and apply them to the law.

That can create an uncomfortable reality.

The humane decision and the legally required decision are not always the same thing.

“I can apply the facts to the law and make a decision,” Gonzalez said.

Sometimes, he acknowledged, that decision hurts.

There are cases he thinks about after leaving the courthouse. Some have followed him home and into the middle of the night.

“A lot of them keep me up at night,” Gonzalez said.

Sometimes he wakes with a new thought about a case and makes notes to himself. It might be something he wants to research, another angle he wants to consider or a clearer way of approaching a decision.

Yet when the decision is ultimately made, he has learned that he must move forward.

Judging requires a certain degree of compartmentalization.

There is another case waiting.

Another set of facts.

Another person.

Another decision.

When Children Are Caught in the Middle

Some cases make that separation particularly difficult.

For Gonzalez, disputes involving families and children are among them.

Divorce and parenting cases can place children in the middle of conflicts they did not create. Parents arrive with competing perspectives, histories and emotions, while a judge is asked to make decisions that can shape a family’s life long after everyone leaves the courthouse.

“Those are probably the most difficult cases,” Gonzalez said, particularly when children become “entangled in the web” of a divorce.

He feels for the children.

He feels for the parents.

But sympathy cannot determine the outcome.

Again, he returns to the same foundation: What does the law require? What do the facts establish? What decision is supported by both?

That balance between humanity and judicial obligation runs throughout Gonzalez’s philosophy.

There was, however, one assignment where the distance between judge and participant looked very different.

Drug court.

A Different Kind of Courtroom

From approximately 2014 to 2016, Gonzalez served as a drug court judge.

Unlike a traditional courtroom, where the judge primarily evaluates a case and issues a ruling, drug court allowed Gonzalez to participate in a process explicitly designed to help people move toward sobriety.

There, the court could be more hands-on.

The goal was not simply to decide what had happened.

It was to help someone change what happened next.

For a judge who had spent years seeing the consequences of alcohol and drug use, dating back to his municipal court days, the experience reinforced something Gonzalez now tells young adults whenever he has the opportunity.

Stay away from drugs.

Be careful with alcohol.

Stay out of trouble.

And, in the language of a man who has spent decades seeing what can happen when one bad decision collides with the wrong hour of the night:

“Nothing good happens after 11 o’clock.”

Gonzalez knows how that can sound coming from a veteran judge.

He laughs about occasionally sounding like the grumpy older man telling younger people how to live.

But he also knows what he has seen.

“I was a young adult,” he said. “I made silly mistakes. I did stupid things too.”

The difference is that he has now spent decades watching seemingly small choices become cases.

He has seen how alcohol, drugs, anger, impulsiveness and a moment of bad judgment can change someone’s trajectory.

His advice is not delivered from the perspective of someone who believes he has lived perfectly.

It comes from someone who has watched consequences arrive.

Learning From the State’s Judicial Leaders

Gonzalez’s education as a judge did not occur only inside his own courtroom.

His work eventually took him into statewide judicial leadership through Washington’s Board for Judicial Administration.

He served on the board and later as a co-chair, working alongside three chief justices of the Washington Supreme Court: Mary Fairhurst, Debra Stephens and Steven González.

For Gonzalez, it became another chapter in a career shaped by mentors.

He describes the justices with unmistakable admiration, not simply for their knowledge of the law, but for their ability to understand the judicial system as a whole.

“They were fantastic mentors to me,” he said. “They were incredible leaders.”

The experience gave him a broader view of what it means to administer justice.

A trial judge sees the system case by case.
Statewide judicial leadership requires looking at how the entire system functions. It means considering how courts operate, how judges are supported and how the judiciary responds when circumstances change dramatically.

Few circumstances changed the courts more dramatically than COVID-19.

Gonzalez watched judicial leaders navigate a period when the ordinary mechanics of the justice system could no longer be taken for granted. Courts still had obligations. Cases still existed. People’s rights still mattered.

But the system had to figure out how to function in extraordinary conditions.

For Gonzalez, working alongside Washington’s judicial leaders during that period reinforced something he had experienced throughout his life: there is always more to learn from the people around you.

“I’ve been so lucky to work with those type of folks,” he said.

He has used another phrase to describe the effect of being surrounded by capable people:

Iron sharpens iron.

Fairness Doesn’t Always Feel Good

After years on the bench, Gonzalez does not pretend that fairness means everyone walks away happy.

Quite often, someone leaves his courtroom disappointed.

Sometimes deeply so.
The judge’s responsibility is not to produce an outcome everyone likes. It is to give people a fair process, listen to what they have to say, understand their position and then make the decision the law requires.

That is also why Gonzalez can be stern.

“Light and polite” would eventually become an important phrase in his life, but it does not mean passive.

There are rules.

There are moments when a courtroom requires order.

There are lawyers who need to be held to professional standards.

There are decisions from higher courts that a Superior Court judge is obligated to follow.

Gonzalez estimates that in roughly 14 years on the Superior Court bench, he has needed to use his gavel to restore order only about twice.

His authority generally doesn’t need the sound effect.

Still, beneath the rules, procedure and stern moments is a question Gonzalez has spent years trying to answer:

How do you truly listen to a person when you know you may ultimately have to tell them no?

His answer has evolved.

He wants people to feel that they received what he calls a “fair shake.”

He wants them to have the opportunity to tell their side.

“I listen,” Gonzalez said. “Then I make that decision.”

For most of his judicial career, that philosophy was shaped by decades of experience with clients, defendants, attorneys, families and fellow judges.

Then, in November 2022, Gonzalez experienced something that altered the equation.

For years, he had sat behind a bench looking at people experiencing some of the hardest moments of their lives.

Suddenly, there was no bench.

There was no robe.

There was no case to research, statute to consult or decision for him to make.

There was only a runner on a road in Monterey, California.

At mile 2.5 of a half marathon, Gregory Gonzalez’s heart stopped.

And for the first time in the story, what happened next was entirely in someone else’s hands.

The Day His Heart Stopped

On Nov. 13, 2022, Judge Gregory Gonzalez was doing something he had done for much of his life.

He was running.

Gonzalez had been a runner since college. By this point, he had completed marathons and half marathons, and at 67 years old, he arrived at the Monterey Bay Half Marathon believing he was in good enough shape to chase a personal goal.

He wanted to finish in under two hours.

There was reason to believe he could do it.

Gonzalez had trained hard. He felt strong. Despite a family history of heart disease, he had made it through his 50s without a major cardiac event, and recent medical checkups had given him no indication that what was about to happen was coming.

The race began.

Gonzalez settled into his pace.

Around mile 2, he stopped briefly for the restroom.

Soon he was running downhill toward the Pacific Ocean.

Then, at approximately mile 2.5, everything disappeared.

Gonzalez collapsed.

His heart had stopped.

He was not breathing.

He remembers none of it.

“I flat out dropped to the ground,” Gonzalez said. “My heart stopped. I wasn’t breathing.”

What happened in the next several minutes is something Gonzalez had to learn from the people who witnessed it.

And the circumstances are so improbable that even now, he speaks about them through the language of gratitude and blessing.

Roughly 30 feet behind him were two doctors.

One was a neurosurgeon.

The other was a cardiologist.

They did not know each other.

They were simply running the same race.

Thirty Feet

One of the details Gonzalez learned afterward has stayed with him.

That morning, before and during the race, he had made a series of seemingly meaningless decisions.

His socks did not feel right, so he returned to his car and changed them. He moved around the starting area several times. He drank enough that morning that he eventually needed the restroom stop early in the race.

None of those choices seemed important when he made them.

Together, they helped place Gonzalez only about 30 feet in front of cardiologist Dr. Steven Lome when his heart stopped.

Gonzalez still gets emotional thinking about the timing.

The neurosurgeon reached him and checked his condition. Lome then became involved, and CPR began.

According to reporting later published by the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation through American Heart Association News, Lome was one of three bystanders who performed CPR on Gonzalez for several minutes before an automated external defibrillator arrived. One shock restored a sustainable heart rhythm.

Gonzalez had suffered cardiac arrest triggered by a heart attack.

He would later receive a stent.

But on the road that morning, Gonzalez knew none of this.

There was no judge making a decision.

There was no amount of preparation that could help him.

He could not research his way out of it.

He could not argue his position.

His survival depended upon other people recognizing what was happening and acting.

For a man who had spent decades making consequential decisions for others, his own life was now completely in the hands of strangers.

Gonzalez remembers waking in the ambulance.

His chest hurt.

He was told he may have experienced some type of cardiac event.

Then came the hospital.

Eventually, he began learning the story of what had happened to him.

But his story was only half of what made that day extraordinary.

The Doctor Kept Running

Dr. Steven Lome had been running the half marathon with his children.

When Gonzalez collapsed, Lome stopped to help. His children continued the race.

After working on Gonzalez until emergency personnel arrived, Lome resumed running.

The cardiologist was also communicating with a colleague in the medical practice who was caring for Gonzalez at the hospital, according to Gonzalez.

Then, roughly two hours after Gonzalez collapsed, another runner approached the finish line.

His name was Michael Heilemann.

He crossed the finish, became dizzy, grabbed a railing and collapsed.

His heart had stopped too.
And once again, Dr. Steven Lome was there.

The same cardiologist who had stopped during his own race to help save Gonzalez was now performing CPR on a second runner suffering cardiac arrest at the same half marathon.

Heilemann was also revived.

The coincidence became national news.

TODAY later covered the extraordinary story of the cardiologist who helped save two runners during a single race. Readers can find that reporting here:

TODAY: Doctor Runs Half Marathon, Saves 2 Men Who Went Into Cardiac Arrest

https://www.today.com/health/news/doctor-runs-half-marathon-saves-2-men-went-cardiac-arrest-rcna63447

TODAY also aired a television segment about Lome and the two runners:
TODAY Video: California Cardiologist Saves Lives of 2 Runners During Half Marathon

https://www.today.com/video/california-cardiologist-saves-lives-of-2-runners-during-half-marathon-158908485873

The Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation also published an extensive account of Gonzalez and Heilemann's experiences, their recoveries and the lessons they took from surviving:

Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation: Take It From 2 Runners Whose Hearts Stopped During the Same Race

https://www.sca-aware.org/sca-news/take-it-from-2-runners-whose-hearts-stopped-during-the-same-race-a-heart-healthy-lifestyle

For Gonzalez, though, Lome did not remain simply the doctor who happened to be running behind him.

They became friends.
So did Gonzalez and Heilemann.

Three people whose lives intersected under almost impossible circumstances became connected long after the ambulances left Monterey.

And eventually, they decided to return to the place where it happened.

Going Back

For some people, surviving cardiac arrest during a half marathon might be a convincing reason to never stand at another starting line.

Gonzalez chose differently.

After returning home from Monterey, he entered cardiac rehabilitation with a team at Legacy.

He remembers the people who worked with him there with the same gratitude he uses when talking about so many others who have entered his life.

“They were phenomenal,” Gonzalez said. “They took great care of me.”

He worked his way back.

Eventually, his medical team gave him the green light to run.

In 2023, Gonzalez returned to Monterey.

There was, naturally, something in the back of his mind.

How could there not be?

But he had trained.

And this time, finishing meant something very different.

The stopwatch was no longer the point.

He ran again with Lome and Heilemann.

In the years that followed, their connection continued.

Gonzalez returned to the Monterey event again. His sons became part of the experience as well.

The race where his life nearly ended became a place he deliberately chose to revisit.

Not to erase what happened there.

To continue from it.

When Gonzalez spoke about the experience years later, one word surfaced repeatedly.

Blessed.

He was blessed that physicians happened to be near him.

Blessed that people knew CPR.

Blessed that an AED was available.

Blessed by the medical professionals who cared for him afterward.

Blessed that he got another morning.

And another.

And another.

“Talk about second chances,” Gonzalez said.

A Second Life

Before his cardiac arrest, Gonzalez already understood that people carried stories into his courtroom.

He had spent years seeing them.

He had watched people struggle with addiction.

He had watched families fracture.

He had listened to people explain mistakes.

He had seen attorneys, defendants, parents and children on difficult days.

He understood, intellectually and professionally, that life could change quickly.

Then his own heart stopped.

That changed the perspective.

“As that comes into play, I needed to finish something, of course,” Gonzalez said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here. So somebody had a plan for me.”

He now refers to the years since Monterey as his “second life.”

And with that second life came a renewed approach to ordinary days.

“Every day is a marvelous day,” Gonzalez said. “I wake up thinking this is the best day of my life.”

That philosophy followed him back into the courthouse.

It did not change the law.

It did not eliminate difficult decisions.

It did not mean everyone standing before him would receive the outcome they wanted.

What changed was the intensity with which Gonzalez tried to recognize the person standing there.

If his own life could change without warning on an ordinary Sunday morning, then he knew even more deeply that the person before him could be carrying something he could not see.

Everybody has been through something.

Everybody has made mistakes.

Everybody has experienced loss, fear or trauma in some form.

Everybody has a story.

Gonzalez still has to make the decision.

But first, he wants to listen.

Light and Polite

Another Clark County judge eventually gave Gonzalez language for the approach he was trying to practice.

Judge Suzan Clark taught him a simple phrase:

“Light and polite.”

Gonzalez adopted it.

“So I try to be light and polite with everything I do on the bench,” he said.

He is also the first to admit he does not always succeed.

There are times when a judge must be stern. There are rules that must be followed. Attorneys must be prepared. Courtroom behavior has boundaries. Sympathy cannot override the law.

Light and polite does not mean ignoring those responsibilities.

It means remembering the person while carrying them out.

Gonzalez knows the decisions he makes can hurt people.

He knows someone may walk into his courtroom hoping for one result and leave with another.

He cannot change that simply because he feels for them.

What he can change is how closely he listens.
Since receiving what he considers his second chance, Gonzalez said he has tried to listen even more intently.

Not because he did not listen before.

Because now he understands the value of the opportunity differently.

“I really try to understand everybody a little more intently,” Gonzalez said. “Really try to listen hard.”

That may ultimately be one of the clearest connections between the runner who collapsed on a road in Monterey and the judge who returned to a courtroom in Vancouver.

Gonzalez could not control what happened to him at mile 2.5.

He survived because people stopped.

They noticed.

They listened to what his body was telling them when he could not speak for himself.

And they acted.

Years later, sitting behind the bench with a second life he never expected to receive, Judge Gregory Gonzalez is still required to make difficult decisions.

But before he makes them, he tries to do something deceptively simple.

He listens.

Because the case in front of him belongs to a person.
And that person has a story.

What Comes After a Second Chance

Gregory Gonzalez does not talk about surviving cardiac arrest as though he simply got lucky.

He talks about being blessed.

That word surfaced again and again as he reflected on his life. He used it when discussing the people who mentored him, the opportunities that shaped his career and, most powerfully, the strangers who happened to be close enough to save his life when his heart stopped during the Monterey Bay Half Marathon.

There is faith behind that gratitude.

Gonzalez is a parishioner at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in Vancouver, and faith has been part of his story through both loss and renewal. His significant other is also going through the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults, commonly known as OCIA, at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Vancouver.

For Gonzalez, some of life's biggest moments have forced him to confront how little any person truly controls.

He experienced that as a young law student when his mother was killed in a car accident during his first year at Lewis & Clark Law School.

Decades later, he experienced it again on a road in Monterey.

One moment he was running a half marathon.

The next, his heart had stopped.

He could not save himself.

Yet the right people were there.

A cardiologist was running only feet behind him. A neurosurgeon was nearby. People knew CPR. An AED became available. Emergency responders arrived.

Gonzalez survived.

When he thinks about why he is still here, his conclusion reaches beyond medicine.

“I needed to finish something, of course,” he said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here. So somebody had a plan for me.”

What that unfinished business is may not be something Gonzalez can fully define.

Maybe it is not one thing.

Maybe it is another case.

Another conversation.

Another morning with his family.

Another opportunity to help someone.

Another round of golf.

Another starting line.

Or simply another chance to treat the person in front of him with a little more patience than he might have the day before.

Whatever the reason, Gonzalez has decided what to do with the time.

Wake up.

Be grateful.

And try to make the day count.

Three Sons and Another Starting Line

There is another part of Gonzalez's life that becomes clearer when he talks about running.

He is a father.

His three sons are now adults, and after their father's cardiac arrest, running became one of the ways the family could participate in his return.
Gonzalez laughed while telling the story of running with his sons. The younger two took off.

The oldest stayed with Dad.

Gonzalez called him “the smarter one.”

It is a small story, but perhaps that is the point.

Surviving does not always reveal itself through dramatic declarations about the meaning of life.

Sometimes it looks like running alongside your son.

Sometimes it is playing poker with the same law school friends who helped you survive your mother's death decades earlier.

Sometimes it is golf with fellow judges.

Sometimes it is returning to the courthouse and doing the work you have done for years, except now you understand the privilege of being there differently.

Gonzalez plans to keep running.

He told me he intends to return to the Monterey Bay Half Marathon again.

Think about what that means.

The place where his heart stopped has not become a place he runs from.

It has become a place he returns to.

One More Chapter

Gonzalez also knows his time on the Superior Court bench is approaching its final stretch.

His goal, he said, is to retire around Halloween 2027.

Retirement, however, may not be the right word for what comes next.

He wants to play golf.

He wants to run.

But he also wants to practice law part time.

After decades in the legal profession, Gonzalez does not sound like someone eager to completely separate himself from it.

Law has been part of his identity since he was a boy crossing a street in Los Angeles with his uncle Johnny Mejia.

Remember, Gonzalez wanted to become a baseball player.

His uncle told him to become a lawyer.

The boy listened.

That suggestion eventually led him to UC Riverside, Lewis & Clark Law School, a temporary job at a Hazel Dell law firm that lasted 29 years, a municipal court judgeship in Battle Ground and, finally, the Clark County Superior Court.

It led him into courtrooms where he encountered thousands of people whose lives were more complicated than anything written on the paperwork in front of him.

It led him to decisions that followed him home.

It led him to nights when he woke up thinking about a case.

And it taught him that listening is not a courtesy added to justice.

Listening is part of doing justice well.

A Fair Shake

When Gonzalez finally leaves the bench, he has a remarkably simple hope for how people remember him.

He does not talk about landmark decisions.

He does not talk about titles.

He does not talk about being the smartest person in the courtroom.

He hopes people believe he gave them a fair shake.

“I hope that they would say I gave them a fair shake, and that I understood their position,” Gonzalez said.

He wants people who appeared before him to know they had an opportunity to speak.

“I try to portray that, or at least give everybody a chance to tell me their side of the story,” he said. “I listen, then I make that decision.”

That last part matters.
Listening does not guarantee agreement.

Empathy does not guarantee leniency.

Being light and polite does not mean Gonzalez cannot be stern.

He remains a judge.

He still has to follow statutes, court rules, evidentiary rules and decisions from higher courts.

Sometimes the person standing before him is going to dislike his ruling.
Sometimes the decision may change that person's life.

Gonzalez knows that.
What he can offer is the assurance that before he decides, he has tried to see the person.

His cardiac arrest intensified that commitment.

“Since the second life that I have, I really try to understand everybody a little more intently,” Gonzalez said. “Really try to listen hard.”

There may be no better summary of the judge he has become.

The young attorney learned the rules.

The municipal court judge learned to see the person behind the infraction.

The Superior Court judge learned the weight of making decisions for families, defendants and litigants.

The drug court judge saw what could happen when people were given help and another opportunity.

Then the runner lying unconscious on a Monterey road learned what it meant to need a second chance himself.

Everyone Has a Story

At the end of our conversation, I asked Gonzalez the same question I ask at the heart of this blog.

What does the phrase “Everyone Has a Story” mean to you?

His response brought us back to where much of our conversation had eventually gone.

Second chances.

“Oh, I have a story,” Gonzalez said. “Everybody has a story, just like my story.”

The details will be different.
Not everyone becomes a judge.

Not everyone loses a mother during law school.
Not everyone spends nearly three decades practicing law before taking the bench.

And certainly not everyone collapses during a half marathon only to discover that a cardiologist and a neurosurgeon happened to be running just behind them.

But Gonzalez believes there is something universal underneath those differences.

People get things wrong.

People wish they could go back.

People mature.

People change.

People get opportunities to choose differently the next time.

“We all had a chance to look back at our life and not do certain things,” Gonzalez said. “We can correct it as we mature and age.”

He includes himself in that.

“There are things that I wish I never had done in my life,” he said.

He did not pretend otherwise.

The past exists.

What interests Gonzalez more now is what he does with today.

“My rule of thumb is I’m going to wake up, be happy every day, and make sure I do the best job I can every day for what I’ve been retained and hired to do.”

It is a fitting philosophy for someone whose life has been shaped by people appearing at precisely the moments he needed them.

An uncle who told a boy to become a lawyer.

Friends who refused to let a grieving law student give up.

Attorneys who mentored a 27-year-old lawyer.
A fellow judge who encouraged him toward the municipal court.

People who encouraged him to apply for the Superior Court.

Chief justices who taught him about leadership.

A fellow judge who gave him the words “light and polite.”

Doctors who happened to be running behind him when his heart stopped.

Medical professionals who helped him recover.

A family that ran beside him when he returned.

And a faith that helps him understand those moments as something more than coincidence.

For decades, Judge Gregory Gonzalez has occupied a seat that requires him to make decisions about other people's stories.

Soon, he expects to step away from that seat.

He will leave with his own story still unfinished.

There are more miles to run.
More golf to play.

More time with family.

Perhaps more legal work.

More mornings to wake up and recognize that being here at all is a gift.

Gonzalez knows better than most that none of us is promised the next mile.

He also knows what can happen when we are fortunate enough to get one.

A second chance does not erase the miles behind us.
It gives us another opportunity to decide how we will run the ones ahead.

And Gregory Gonzalez plans to keep running.

---
Personal Note: 
 

Judge Gonzalez, thank you again for sharing your story with me. I really appreciate your time.

Let’s get out for a round of golf sometime!
 

God bless you, Judge!

Related Coverage

The extraordinary events surrounding Gonzalez's cardiac arrest at the 2022 Monterey Bay Half Marathon received national attention. Readers who would like to learn more can find additional reporting and video coverage below.

TODAY: Doctor Runs Half Marathon, Saves 2 Men Who Went Into Cardiac Arrest

https://www.today.com/health/news/doctor-runs-half-marathon-saves-2-men-went-cardiac-arrest-rcna63447

TODAY Video: California Cardiologist Saves Lives of 2 Runners During Half Marathon

https://www.today.com/video/california-cardiologist-saves-lives-of-2-runners-during-half-marathon-158908485873

Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation: Take It From 2 Runners Whose Hearts Stopped During the Same Race

https://www.sca-aware.org/sca-news/take-it-from-2-runners-whose-hearts-stopped-during-the-same-race-a-heart-healthy-lifestyle