What do you think the significance is between Henrik's mother drowning herself in a lake, and John eventually doing the same?
Okay, it's taken me 2 days, but I'm finally answering this.
I think John had been fixated on the idea of dying by drowning for years, and I think that was because of Henrik. He'd been suicidal before, no doubt, but it was after pulling Henrik from the lake and finding out about Elisabet that he decided he wanted to die by drowning specifically.
John is someone obsessed with his own self-image. Fandom tends to boil this down to an idea of him thinking highly of himself, but I think it's a lot deeper and more complex than that. First of all, John does not hold anywhere near as strong a belief in his own superiority as many would think. He has essentially the same unstable self-perception as Henrik: he'll think himself a genius who's better and smarter than everyone one moment, and view himself as completely worthless the next. For some reason, a lot of people simplify both their characterisation into "John is arrogant and thinks he's a god, Henrik is self-hating and thinks he's unloveable", but that's just... not accurate at all. (Mr. Clarke the psychiatrist didn't call Henrik a narcissist for nothing!) I think this isn't helped by the fact that John is suffering increasingly from grandiose delusions throughout his storyline, something which I suppose it's easy for people, especially those without much experience with mental illness, to misread as him just being egotistical.
I've had a lot of conversations with Lucia (@prydon) about this, because it's an aspect of John's character we both find fascinating. John sees himself as less worthy because of his background. Sees himself as broken (in the same way Henrik sees himself). He feels he has to meet a ridiculously high standard of 'greatness' in order to deserve basic human respect like other people. In fact, I'd argue the path he went down makes much more sense if you read it as, at least in part, John going to more and more desperate lengths in an attempt to 'prove' himself and feel like he was worthy.
This does circle back to John's chosen suicide method, I promise. Part of that whole spiel was just me trying to introduce the fact that Lucia is responsible for, like, half my views on this subject!
So, John has a lot of terrible coping mechanisms for his poor self-image, and one of them is him developing a viewpoint of seeing certain things as "tragically beautiful". (I think things like his canon love of poetry can easily fit into this.) He can't romanticise his own past - much as he wishes he could (I've read fic that has him being jealous of Henrik's trauma because he thinks it's "prettier", which, as awful as it is, is utterly in character) - but he can try to romanticise his present. (See: what I said to you a few days ago about John trying to romanticise himself for being "insane".)
But that only goes so far.
It's basically canon that John romanticises just about anything to do with Henrik. His dialogue in Report To The Mirror part 2 as good as confirms it, sounding, basically, like John wondering how Henrik is able to carry his trauma with him in a "prettier" way (in John's mind) than John himself does:
"I know how you suffer. Every day, like the rest of us, you report to the mirror. But when you come into work, you come into a place where so much tragedy has befallen you. And yet you’re still able to carry on. For this vision. So that we can do this together. If we don’t have this, then… how do you do it, Henrik?"
So because John sees anything to do with Henrik as "beautiful", even the ugliest, most painful parts - like his mother drowning herself and him going on to try to do the same (see, we're getting there.....), it's no wonder he ends up romanticising the idea of dying by drowning. In particular, the idea of drowning with Henrik. Let's face it: you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn't, on some level, find the idea of dying alongside the love of their life to be romantic (or at least I assume you'd be hard-pressed? Maybe I'm just fucked up).
I don't think this desire was at all one-sided. I think John just felt it more intensely (story of his life right there, poor lad). But - look. There is no way those two didn't have a 30+ year long suicide pact.
You know how normal friends sometimes promise each other: "Hey, if we haven't found our soulmates by 50/60/70, we'll get married to each other"?
John and Henrik's equivalent was definitely "if things don't work out in our lives, we'll drown ourselves together". I don't know if they ever said it to each other and I don't know how seriously they said it, but on some level, even if just through their weird borderline-telepathic Understanding, they knew it was a possibility.
But they just kept putting it off. The years went by, they went their separate ways, floated in and out of contact. Henrik probably hardly ever thought of the idea by the time John turned up at Holby, although I think John was still obsessed with it and fully believed that drowning with Henrik was how he would die eventually.
I also think John and Henrik having made an agreement to drown themselves together if it came to that, in the past, would go some way to explaining why Henrik knew exactly where to find John when he disappeared in Report To The Mirror, and why John had equally been expecting Henrik to come. Still doesn't explain why Henrik knew it would be that specific lake, unless it's the only one in Holby lol, but it does add another layer to those scenes.
Lucia once said that John's mindset regarding the idea of drowning himself and especially of drowning with Henrik was him thinking "my entire life has been so ugly, I want at least my death to be something beautiful". And I mean... yeah. Yeah, that's the whole thing summed up. :(
(...I've just spent over an hour typing up this answer. I do apologise if it's not coherent.)
