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Port Orchard Chamber of Commerce
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So we're thankful to have our speaker today, David George Brook, that gratitude guy
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He's been a speaker, teacher, life coach, and best-selling author for over 25 years
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former Nordstrom manager and also managed in a corporate role for over 30 years
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He's an author of a couple of books, the Brooks Daily Gratitude Journal
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Happiness Starts with Gratitude, and Gratitude Nuggets to Chew On. Recently featured on New Day with Margaret Morrison on King TV and Chat With Women on KIXI Radio
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Over 400 gratitude videos are posted on YouTube. Thousands have seen his message
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He's now considered a leading authority on gratitude. I'll leave the light of gratitude to enhance and improve your life
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Please help me welcome David George Brook. Thank you. Thank you, Barry, and there's Christine
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Christine, thank you so much for inviting me. I feel very blessed
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I'm fortunate enough to do a couple of presentations a week, and I did leave the corporate world some time ago
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So let me start off with a question here. How many people here by a show of hands have suffered a significant personal loss in your life
1:16
Thank you. I, as I said, am fortunate enough to talk to groups as small as 10 or 20 and up to 1,000 and maybe 1,500
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It's always about 75, 80, 90%. Somewhere in that range, people raise their hands
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So I'd like to tell you about my significant personal loss. It was September 29th, 1998
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It was a Tuesday. I woke up and I looked to my right, and my wife wasn't in bed
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She normally would have been there about 6 in the morning. So I thought, that's strange. I wonder where Dana is
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And so just then, my 4-year-old Connor, he's about this high, comes in. Where's mom
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I don't know. Let's go find her. So we get out and we walk down the hallway, and Kyle, my 14-year-old, comes in
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Same question. Same answer. I don't know. So we look in a couple of bedrooms, and we look downstairs
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and here's Dana down in front of the washer and dryer, face down. She's kind of curled over, and it doesn't look good
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So we go running down there. I turn her over, and there's stuff coming out of her mouth, and it was just not a good situation
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Connor starts crying. I told Kyle, go call the police. Call fire. Call everybody
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And within a matter of a few minutes, there must have been 25 people in our house
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They were doing all this. They had her out on the floor, and they had tubes and wires and those paddles
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The only time I'd ever seen this before in my life was when I watched TV
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Most surrealistic thing I'd ever seen. So they're working on her, working on her in that electric shock and all that kind of thing
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And your body turns numb, because you don't know. Everything shuts down. You don't know if this is a real thing or it's a nightmare or whatever
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But I will tell you one thing. For those of you that have been through something like this, time loses all measure
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And this little short fire person comes over to me, and she says, Mr. Brooke, we've been working on your wife for 45 minutes
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We still don't have a heartbeat. Would you like us to continue
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And even in the numb state that I was in, your brain still works to a certain degree
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And I thought, 45 minutes without her heartbeat. I said, as I thought slowly, I'd never before in my life had to make a life and death decision for somebody
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And I said, no, you can stop. And she was dead. She was 38 years old
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And I remember over those next few days, having gone through something like this
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again, the numbness wears off at some point. And you start to realize, this is not a nightmare. This is actually happening
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And people and friends and family came over, and they brought food and all these neat things
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And it was just so neat to have that kind of support. But after two or three days after that had worn off, I walked up to this old deck we had by myself
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And I kind of looked out to the sky, and I just kind of pinched my skin
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And realized, I'm just a guy. Bone, skin, cartilage. Just a person. How am I going to get through this
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I wasn't sure I could. And I looked up, and I just sort of stared up at the stars, or sky, I should say, rather
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For the first time in my life, I realized why people kill themselves
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And I thought about it for a minute or two, and I thought about, wow. We live by Green Lake in Seattle, and the Aurora Bridge wasn't very far away
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But within about five minutes, I made a decision, I'm not going to do that
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I'm just not going to do it. Connor was four, Kyle was 14, they need a dad, their mom's already gone
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So I'm going to have to go forward on this. What had made it really challenging for me, it wasn't just Dana
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I asked about the significant losses in your life. My father had committed suicide when I was younger
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He's a very prominent, very good attorney. I saw him in court many times
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My mom had died of cancer. Two of my best friends, the night we graduated from Queen Anne High School
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no longer a school, died in a car accident. And it was just on, and on, and on
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So by the time I got to the time where Dana died, I just kept thinking, I don't know what I'm going to do
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And I realized, it really does come down to how you look at something
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And having gone through this, to make it worse, Dana had been addicted to prescription pills
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She got hooked on Vicodin, and Oxycontin, and all this junk that you read about
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Barry mentioned I'd worked at Nordstrom, I'd met Dana at Nordstrom. I'd never seen somebody in handcuffs before
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I went in one day, and here she was, she'd been handcuffed for prescription fraud
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She went in to detox. She says, David, I've got a real problem. I didn't even know
#Family
#Other
#Self-Help & Motivational

