Transcriber: Beata M Reviewer: Lexi Ding
I want you to do me a favor. I want you to try on something for me.
And that thing is a possibility and for the time that we’re here today,
the short time, I want you to keep it on.
I want you to wear it, I want you to see how it feels.
And the possibility is that you can save a life
just by sitting down.
Now I’m gonna remind you that this, in fact, is what you can do
because the reality is it’s not a possibility,
It’s a truth, it’s a fact.
And I’m not talking figuratively, I’m talking literally.
And I got, I’m gonna remind you of your ability to do this,
of the fact that you can save a life by sitting down because you’ve done it.
You’ve done it not just once but on a multitude of occasions
but you just didn’t realize that’s what you were doing.
And I’m gonna remind you by three stories,
three stories at the outside that you may think
that they don’t get along but by the end
you will indeed agree that they are like the three legs of a three legged stool.
And they create this firm foundation
so that when we sit, we can do so with confidence.
Because when seated,
we can do some extraordinary things.
We can even save a life.
When I was eight years old, my best friend in all the world was Billy.
Billy and I were inseparable and Billy’s family became my family.
And in part that was because his father Jim, Big Jim,
because he was indeed a big man, he became like a father to me.
A year earlier, at the tender age of seven, I lost my father,
James Hamilton Bartley, known to everybody as Ham,
until Big Jim, knowing there was a void,
he stepped in to be a father like figure for me.
One day he comes to Billy and I and says, ‘Boys, on Saturday, we’re going fishing.’
In that moment I had lost
my eight year old mind because Billy had been fishing,
he told me all about these fishing trips.
But I had never cast a line into the water
and now I was gonna have my opportunity.
Big day comes, we jump in that big 1970s station wagon,
we make our way to the lake.
And as soon as Big Jim parked that whale of a size of a car,
we ran around to the back and he opened it and it was like a treasure chest,
like all this gear.
And he reaches in, he takes one of the fishing poles
and puts it in my right hand and I hold it.
And then he grabs one of those buckets,
the bucket that I konw was gonna be filled with fish.
I was gonna catch more fish than anybody and hold it in my left hand.
Then he gives Billy his equipment,
he grabs his and we make our way to the pier.
Jim’s in front, Billy’s in the middle
and I'm bringing up the end and it is a perfect day.
We are the first ones at the lake and the lake is like glass
and there is no clouds in the sky and it’s crisp
I am just overwhelmed with the experience.
I’m trying to take it all in so I don’t miss anything.
I’m not really 100 percent focused on kind of
the basic functions like walking,
and so I don’t see that plank,
that piece of wood that’s raised up a little bit.
As I walk over it, I catch my right foot on it.
I tumble forward, I’m trying to catch myself,
but I fall into the water and hit the water.
And I’m still holding that fishing pole in my right hand,
and I'm holding the bucket firmly in my left hand.
The bucket that was empty but is now rapidly filling up with water.
I’m drowning.
And 50 years later
I can still remember looking up and seeing these images
of Billy and his dad and they were fading away.
Then in that one dramatic herculean moment,
Big Jim thrusts his right arm down into the water and somehow picks me up
and out of the water and lays me down on the pier.
He turns me slightly and then begins to thump me on my back
and water went out of my lungs and air returned and I was alive.
He saved my life.
Now, the truth is,
not many of us will have an opportunity to save a life in such a dramatic fashion,
not many of us will rush into a burning building,
will revive somebody with CPR,
but we are indeed life savers.
We’ve all saved the life just in different ways,
As much as I remember the act on that day of being pulled from the water,
what stays with me, a memory so profound, that when I bring it to mind,
I literally still have goose bumps,
is what Big Jim did after he pulled me out of the water.
There I was laid down on the pier and he bent down
and scooped me up with his two mighty arms,
and he pulled me into his body a little bit,
and he walked me to the edge of the pier, and he sat me down.
And then he sat down next to me and he stretched out his left arm
and he pulled me in close to his body
and he took his right hand and he covered the entirety of my heart.
And he leaned in close and in a voice just above a whisper, he said,
’David, you’re gonna be OK.
There’s nothing to fear.
Son, I got you.’
He saved me from a life that would have been characterised
by a fear of water, by a fear of adventure,
by a fear of taking opportunities of stepping forward.
And little did I know that that experience 50 years ago
would be a foreshadowing of a time, many years later,
in which I would have an opportunity to save a life just by sitting down.
But in this case, it wasn’t a human life, it was an animal life.
Murphy was one of the many animals that came to the sanctuary
that my former wife, Deanna and I ran for a great many years.
And the sanctuary was home to as many as 100 animals at any one time.
as many as 15 different species: dogs, cats, sheep, goats, horses,
fish, bunnies and birds.
And we were very specific, a little bit different
than other sanctuaries in that we wanted the unadoptables.
We wanted those companion animals that either due to age
or some sort of malady, no fault of their own, nobody wanted them.
They were oftentimes tossed aside.
And so we were that forever home, doing no adoptions,
allowing animals to stay until, as we liked to say,
they made their transition.
Murphy was a dog. Specifically, Murphy was a Boston terrier.
Now you may not remember, but you’ve seen Boston terriers.
They’re like that more slender version of an English bulldog
and they’re dressed in the traditional black and white of a formal tuxedo.
Their eyes are big, their ears are upright.
They have like a permanent smile
and they walk around being filled up with equal parts of enthusiasm and gas.
The only thing that we knew about Murphy was he had this special need.
And in fact, it was a life threatening special need
that if it wasn’t solved, this problem
he would die.
But when Murphy came, I was confused.
He was a stunningly beautiful dog.
His black had like the sheen to it
and it mixed perfectly with his white and his fur felt like velvet.
And he got along instantly with the other 22 dogs that we had
the time that he bonded with Deanna and I,
I don’t know what’s wrong.
But Murphy underscored the reality that sometimes what hurts the most
can’t be seen.
And Murphy indeed had a life threatening condition.
And the problem was that Murphy was starving to death.
When Murphy would begin to eat,
he would take the food in his mouth and it would go part way down his throat,
but then it would stop.
And what can’t go down comes back up
and he would lose all his food.
He would regurgitate.
And the reason that this was happening was
his esophagus forgot what was supposed to do.
It was enlarged until an esophagus is meant to contract.
It brings the food from the mouth, through the throat, down into the stomach.
But Murphy’s wasn’t working.
And when we found out that, I thought, there’s nothing we can do.
It wouldn’t been the first time
somebody had brought an animal at the end of life
and we were there to just help them with dignity and grace and move on.
But my former wife, Deanna,
when you think about a mama bear, that was D.
Like every animal, 200 of all them,
as soon as they crossed over the boundary line,
they became one of her babies, one of her cubs.
There was no way mama bear was gonna let one of her new cubs suffer.
She was gonna do everything she could to solve the problem.
And true to form, D did.
And the solution was so available like within an arm’s length of where we were
that I dismissed it.
like there’s no way it can work, it’s too easy.
But me of little faith, it did.
Not just the first time,
but every single time thereafter.
And it worked like this:
Murphy would start eating and D would position herself
and she knew exactly when Murphy had eaten just enough, but not too much.
And then she bent down and she just scooped him up,
keeping him in an upright position and she’d pull him in close to her chest.
And then when I saw that, I knew it was time for me to do my job,
sit down
and I had this big, overstuffed sized man chair,
the type when you lean back you feel like someone is hugging you.
And I’d sit there initially right on the edge and D would come over
and we did this exchange.
I would take Murphy, keeping him propped up,
lay him down on my outstretched legs,
turn him slightly to the left because I wanted his heart
to lay right on top of mine.
And there we sat, two of us, sitting down.
What D realized
is that we could leverage Newton’s famous discovery of gravity
to take the place of malfunctioning anatomy.
Murphy’s life could be saved by sitting down.
And there Murphy and I would be twice a day sitting down
and we got into this wonderful routine.
As soon as I took him in, he almost immediately started to get,
like really tired and his eyes would be heavy
and right before he’d fall asleep, he’d put his head right here.
Now I’ve come to realize that this spot
was specifically created for one of three things:
a teddy bear, our beloved or a puppy dog.
And Murphy would fall asleep,
and I’d move my face in closer
’cause I wanted to feel his whiskers tickle my cheek,
and I bury my nose into his coat and I can smell sunshine.
And then while Beethoven's fifth is good,
it has no comparison to a Boston terrier snoring.
It's just this melody.
After about 30 minutes, we’d get up, I put him down and he’d go do his thing.
And these twice a day sit downs had an enormous impact on me.
What I came to realize is that life is not broken.
Yes, people in countries and in things, they get hurt, they get wounded,
they get injured, but they're not broken.
Life is greater than that.
And being absolved of the responsibility
to go and fix something I realize that what I need to do is partner with life.
Be willing to participate.
In this case, it was being willing to align with the brilliance
of an extraordinary woman to sit down.
I was heroic for the mere fact that I showed up
and I got this front row seat to see twice a day
how a life can be saved by sitting down.
But it wasn't just Murphy's life who was saved by sitting down.
It was my life, too.
On August 31st, 2011,
the monster known as clinical depression took me forcibly by the hand
and dragged me to the midpoint of the 730-foot tall Foresthill Bridge.
And once there, he slammed my body up against
the four and a half foot suicide barrier, bent me over
so I could see where he was about to toss me over.
And then, by way of swirling thoughts of self-hatred,
and worthlessness, and uselessness,
the monster with everything he had endeavored to toss me up and over
that rail with no more thought than any of us give to tossing away
a piece of worthless, useless garbage.
But life had another idea,
my story was not to end that day.
My life was saved on that day and is saved now on the days
that the monster still has me by the throat,
by a series of people who have sat down with me.
It was the first responder who sat down next to me as I stood on a dark spot
on a tall, tall bridge
and leverage curiosity to take us both to the safe place of understanding.
He asking me, ‘David, what does it feel like to be depressed?’
And then through a series of other extraordinary questions,
ultimately I got off that bridge into a psychiatric ward
and on the second day it was sitting down,
knee to knee with a psychiatrist who created the safe place
for me to tell my story.
To learn that I had a history of mental illness in my family,
my grandfather having killed himself,
my father suffering terribly.
And that genetic predisposition,
combined with the trauma of losing my father at seven
and the unspeakable horror
of being brutally sodomized and raped
at the hands of a Boy Scout leader.
This man in that place sitting down with me
then took his hands, reached to mine,
took my hands in his just like a father would to a son and looked at me
and he said, ‘David, it’s not your fault.’
And then it was my neighbors, Ron and Maryann,
who finding out where I had been and why, and once they learned I was home,
they were there knocking on my door.
And they showed up and Maryann was holding one of her wonderful homemade creations
and they came in and sat down with me and we shared a meal.
And we laughed and we cried and they embraced me.
And then it was my friend Larry
who said, ‘I’m taking you to your therapy appointments.’
On that first appointment, there he was and I got in,
I sat down with him and we went and he dropped me off.
And at the end I figured, I have to text him when I’m done,
but there he was, sitting in the waiting room.
And then on the way home, he said,
‘Hey, I got to make a quick stop’ and I’m like, okay.
And we pulled up to one of those liquor grocery stores,
those store that we see in every neighborhood.
He said, ‘I’ll be right back.’
and sure enough he came back holding two pints.
No, not beer. Ben & Jerry’s.
And then we sat down in his car
we talked and we laughed.
I’ve come to realized
there are a few injuries in life that can’t be healed
by way of brotherhood and ice cream.
And it’s the people now who somehow know that sometimes
what hurts me the most can’t be seen
but they also know sometimes what helps the most is easy to do.
And they sit down,
and they pick up the phone and they make a phone call.
And even if I don’t answer, they leave a message,
’I love you,
you’re important to me.
You have survived 100 percent of your worst days.
You got this because I got you.′
And then it’s my big brother, John.
Who somehow, somehow knows when his little brother is hurting.
And he always does the same thing,
he sits down and he puts pen to paper
and he writes me one of those amazing handwritten notes.
And he seals it with brotherly love and sends it on its way
and I go to the mailbox at the right in the perfect time when it’s needed.
And then I just hold it
and then when I open it, I’m overwhelmed with the aroma of hope.
It’s simple things done by everyday people that have a lifesaving effect.
And each and every time one of these heroes steps forward
in response to my suffering, they sit down and they sit back
and they activate the downward pull of life.
And then just like Murphy,
I too am fed.
My life is saved by sitting down.
And I wanna offer one more piece of evidence, one more piece of proof,
one more reminder, so that you will take
the possibility that you have tried on to go out into the world
knowing that truth looks good on you.
Dr. Drew Ramsey, an esteemed psychiatrist,
says this: ’Someone you see today is thinking about killing themselves.
Your smile, your question, your love could save them.
Trust me, they told me it did.′
And it’s no coincidence to me that each of these three things
that Dr. Ramsey’s patients told him that saved their life:
a smile, a question and an expression of love,
each of those things can be done,
sitting down.
Right now, people all around us are suffering,
They’re at risk of being pulled under for the third and final time.
But we need not to stand helpless on the shore because we know what to do.
We know how to do it and what works because we’ve done it before.
The time is now for us to reimagine what it takes to save a life.
The time is now for us to reimagine what saving a life looks like.
And most importantly, the time is now for us to remember
that we can all save a life,
just by sitting down.
Thank you.