Port Orchard Chamber of Commerce: 11-14-13

So we're thankful to have our speaker today, David George Brook, that gratitude guy

He's been a speaker, teacher, life coach, and best-selling author for over 25 years

former Nordstrom manager and also managed in a corporate role for over 30 years

He's an author of a couple of books, the Brooks Daily Gratitude Journal

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

Over 400 gratitude videos are posted on YouTube. Thousands have seen his message

He's now considered a leading authority on gratitude. I'll leave the light of gratitude to enhance and improve your life

Please help me welcome David George Brook. Thank you. Thank you, Barry, and there's Christine

Christine, thank you so much for inviting me. I feel very blessed

I'm fortunate enough to do a couple of presentations a week, and I did leave the corporate world some time ago

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

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

It's always about 75, 80, 90%. Somewhere in that range, people raise their hands

So I'd like to tell you about my significant personal loss. It was September 29th, 1998

It was a Tuesday. I woke up and I looked to my right, and my wife wasn't in bed

She normally would have been there about 6 in the morning. So I thought, that's strange. I wonder where Dana is

And so just then, my 4-year-old Connor, he's about this high, comes in. Where's mom

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

Same question. Same answer. I don't know. So we look in a couple of bedrooms, and we look downstairs

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

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

Connor starts crying. I told Kyle, go call the police. Call fire. Call everybody

And within a matter of a few minutes, there must have been 25 people in our house

They were doing all this. They had her out on the floor, and they had tubes and wires and those paddles

The only time I'd ever seen this before in my life was when I watched TV

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

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

But I will tell you one thing. For those of you that have been through something like this, time loses all measure

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

We still don't have a heartbeat. Would you like us to continue

And even in the numb state that I was in, your brain still works to a certain degree

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

And I said, no, you can stop. And she was dead. She was 38 years old

And I remember over those next few days, having gone through something like this

again, the numbness wears off at some point. And you start to realize, this is not a nightmare. This is actually happening

And people and friends and family came over, and they brought food and all these neat things

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

And I kind of looked out to the sky, and I just kind of pinched my skin

And realized, I'm just a guy. Bone, skin, cartilage. Just a person. How am I going to get through this

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

For the first time in my life, I realized why people kill themselves

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

But within about five minutes, I made a decision, I'm not going to do that

I'm just not going to do it. Connor was four, Kyle was 14, they need a dad, their mom's already gone

So I'm going to have to go forward on this. What had made it really challenging for me, it wasn't just Dana

I asked about the significant losses in your life. My father had committed suicide when I was younger

He's a very prominent, very good attorney. I saw him in court many times

My mom had died of cancer. Two of my best friends, the night we graduated from Queen Anne High School

no longer a school, died in a car accident. And it was just on, and on, and on

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

And I realized, it really does come down to how you look at something

And having gone through this, to make it worse, Dana had been addicted to prescription pills

She got hooked on Vicodin, and Oxycontin, and all this junk that you read about

Barry mentioned I'd worked at Nordstrom, I'd met Dana at Nordstrom. I'd never seen somebody in handcuffs before

I went in one day, and here she was, she'd been handcuffed for prescription fraud

She went in to detox. She says, David, I've got a real problem. I didn't even know