My Next Step

by Dave Liniger

  By the time we got back to Craig Hospital, I’d told everyone at RE/MAX that Gail was my top priority. I needed to stay by her side so nothing like this would ever happen again. We were a much smaller company at the time—just twenty-five of us in the office—but every single person stepped up to help in any way they could. Secretaries stopped at my house in the mornings to feed and walk our dog. They’d sometimes bring him into the office so he wasn’t alone all of the time. Everyone played with him, threw the ball around and let him run at lunchtime. At night another group would feed and walk him or take him back to the house. Sometimes I’d take a couple of hours away from Gail so I could go home, see the dog, take a shower, open mail and nap before heading right back to the hospital. But when I did leave, I made damn sure there was always someone with Gail.

  After several weeks of this routine, one of Gail’s nurses took me aside and suggested that I—make that strongly encouraged me to—sit in on a group therapy session. I’d become friendly with this particular nurse because she was a no-nonsense woman—my favorite kind. She was direct and sincere, which I always appreciate.

  “Dave, I want you to do this for me. We are treating Gail fine here, but you are still being a total pain in the ass to the staff, so I need you to go talk about your anger and frustration, ok?”

  I hated to admit it, but she was right. I had gotten so caught up in taking care of Gail, keeping her safe and never turning my back on her, that I’d become very tightly wound. I was on verge of cracking, which wouldn’t do anyone a bit of good, so I reluctantly and begrudgingly agreed to go.

  Now, I’m not sure the rest of this story puts me in the best light, but it’s honest and it’s what happened.

  When I got to the group therapy session, they went around the room and asked each person to tell us why they were there. The first person spoke and said, “My husband fell out of a cherry picker, and because he wasn’t wearing his safety harness, he broke his neck and is paralyzed from the shoulders down.”

  The next person said, “I don’t know what we are going to do for money. We don’t have insurance and our savings have run out.”

  The third person spoke next: “Our son got drunk at his homecoming party and rolled his car four times. He killed his girlfriend and has a broken back. He’s ruined his future and ours, because we can’t afford to pay the medical bills either.”

  Finally, they get to me.

  I sat there, clearly angry and frustrated to be in the room.

  “Dave, would you like to tell us why you’re here today?” The group therapist was speaking to me in a gentle tone, but all I heard was blah, blah, blah.

  “I’ve got nothing to say. My fiancée’s nurse asked me to sit through a session, so that’s what I’m doing here today.” I’ve been known to be a bit stubborn over the years. I wasn’t budging and I certainly had no intention of sharing my feelings in a group full of strangers.

  “Why don’t you tell us how you feel, Dave?”

  “My feelings are my feelings!” I was beginning to raise my voice, so they moved on to the next person before going around the room yet again, and then once more.

  As they say, the third time’s a charm. When they came back to me for the third time that day, I was ready to talk—and boy, did I.

  “You want to know how I feel? Ok. I’ll tell you how I feel. My fiancée has a traumatic head injury and we don’t know how much she’s going to come back from it. Right now she’s also paralyzed on the left side of her body. Her life has changed forever. And I feel very sad for that loss. I’m angry about it. This is a wonderful woman who got hurt by no fault of her own. I’m not here to cry or bellyache and tell you all how bad I feel about our situation. I know what my next step is going to be. I’m going to get her out of this damned hospital and she is going to learn to walk. We are going to make the best life we can make with what we have left. I know it will never be the same, and I can live with that. I’m not going to talk about it anymore. It’s happened, and I’ve put that story in a box and hid it in the back of my brain, which is where it will stay. This won’t define who we are or who we’ll be. I have a beautiful woman in my life. And as she heals, we’re going to make a brand new life together. Can I leave this fucking meeting now?”

  When Gail’s nurse heard about my outburst, she smiled and said, “I’m very proud of you.”

  Mission accomplished.

  Looking back, I realize I shouldn’t have handled the group that way, but I was extremely uptight and although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, was about to explode. The fact that I could look forward was a gift—not a detriment. I sat in that group therapy session and listened as each person spoke. They had no idea what their next step was going to be. They were lost and couldn’t figure it out. The therapist was trying to show us that if we talked about the fear, anger, resentment or loss we were experiencing and allowed ourselves to feel our emotions, over time we’d come to grips with the situation. Then, once we did that, we could start moving forward one step at a time. I was already ten steps ahead of the others when I sat there that day, and I don’t regret a word of what I said.

  Life brings us unexpected happenings every day. We have the choice and the power to choose how we react to those situations and circumstances. At some point, each of us will likely face something terrible—the loss of a parent, best friend or child, a bitter divorce, or even the bankruptcy of a business. We’re left to pick up the pieces. Our response to the occurrence dictates the outcome.

  “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

  -M. Kathleen Casey

  Several years after Gail’s accident, I was struck by something I read in Jack Canfield’s book, Success Principles: How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. It was called the E+R=O theory. Event+Response=Outcome. Canfield’s book is one of the best success and motivational works that I’ve ever read. In the book, Canfield tells a story about a big earthquake in Southern California. Freeway overpasses buckled, city streets were torn up and commuting around LA had suddenly become a science. A reporter was in the field covering people’s reactions, doing man-on-the-street interviews. The first man he stopped to talk to was sitting in his car. Traffic was at a complete stop, so the reporter knocked on the window and asked, “What do you think about this mess?”

  The man in the car was a heavyset older gentleman who was clearly unhappy. “First it was the floods and then it was the gangs and now it’s the damned earthquake! I HATE California. It sucks!” Veins were popping out of the sides of his neck, as his face grew red from rage.

  The reporter knocked on the next car’s window.

  “What do you think of this mess?”

  The demeanor of the man inside was drastically different. “Well, we’ve had an awful earthquake. The streets have fallen down and they are blocked, so it’s much harder to get around the city. I get up an hour and a half earlier than I used to and it takes me almost two hours to get to work, but it’s ok. I have a Thermos full of coffee, a couple of sandwiches and cookies, and am listening to tapes to help me learn to speak English a little better. It’s slow going, but it is what it is. This too shall pass.”

  The same event happened to both men. The earthquake and traffic jams affected everyone, but one man’s answer was filled with anger and hatred while the other man’s answer was relaxed and accepting.

  The Event–E—was the earthquake.

  The Response–R—was anger versus acceptance.

  The Outcome–O—was a man who was tightly wound and most likely headed for a heart attack versus another who who took the event in stride and actually used the time to improve his English.

  E+R=O became a lesson I would include in many speeches going forward, especially when the housing market began to collapse.

  In 2007, Margaret Kelly, Vinnie Tracey and I set out on a thirty-city speaking tour around the country to give a three-hour course on the changes in real estate that were just beginning to unravel the industry. We wante
d to prepare our brokers and agents for what was coming, explore what it meant and suggest ways to respond to it. We called this our Be Great in 2008 tour. The basic message was that everyone needed to understand the local market and respond accordingly. For many, this would require a major change to meet the new conditions. There would be no overnight fix—if your market changed, you had to change with it. We urged each and every person to stop daydreaming about things going back to the way they used to be, and to do the work necessary to adapt.

  By this time, many who couldn’t make it in the new economy had fallen out of the business, so the bulk of the people we were addressing were those who already had the survival mentality it took to succeed. We drew upon Jack Canfield’s E+R=O theory as a way to illustrate to those agents and brokers that their response to the housing and economic crisis—and not the downturn itself—would dictate their outcome.

  Were they willing to be retrained or were they determined to hang onto the memories of how easy things used to be? Would they work hard, learning how to navigate through foreclosures on distressed properties and deal with panicked sellers whose homes were upside down in value? Could they face the reality that they themselves would need to tighten their belts because fewer sales overall meant lower incomes for most? If they weren’t willing to make that kind of commitment and sacrifice, it was time to get out of the business because they would never survive.

  To succeed, they’d have to figure out a plan and then decide what their response would be.

  Even though I didn’t have the benefit of knowing about E+R=O when I was dealing with Gail’s recovery, it perfectly matched my attitude at that time. She had had a terrible event, but our response to it, together, would determine the outcome of our lives going forward. And our lives were going to be great.

  I would use the same formula later in my own recovery, when I lay virtually motionless in my hospital bed, thinking about the choices I faced.

  Because of all we’d been through together twenty-nine years earlier, it was incredibly important to Gail that she had the chance to support me through this crisis as I had supported her. We committed ourselves to each other many years ago—in good times and bad, in sickness and in health. A bend in the road is not the end of the road. We’ve had a wonderful life together, and that wasn’t going to change because of my illness.

  In my case, E+R=O, at least for the things I controlled, was a pretty simple formula:

  E—Getting sick

  R—Giving up or fighting

  O—Living or dying

  How I would proceed was my choice to make.

  CHAPTER 3

  Controlled Chaos

  JUNIOR

  Once we were told that Dad could die, John, Mary and I quickly rallied as a group. Mary and I live the closest to the hospital and are the most available so we each took a twelve-hour shift ensuring that Dad would never be alone. Mary came around six o’clock in the morning and I usually arrived around six at night. Everything was happening so fast that our brother Chuck, who lives in Florida, wasn’t yet aware of just how bad things had gotten. Once we filled him in, he made arrangements to be by Dad’s side that same day.

  The first thing we did was set up a barrier at the hospital to protect my father’s privacy. The hospital placed him under VIP status with no name on record. If someone called looking for Dave Liniger, no one could unintentionally give out any personal information about his condition because he wouldn’t appear as a registered patient. The answer to such callers’ questions would be, “He is not a patient here” or “Contact his family.”

  A friend of mine, who works as a reporter for a local news station, just happened to be in the hospital that day and wanted to know why I was there. By this time, Dad was comatose. He wasn’t able to speak for himself and we wanted to do everything we could to preserve his dignity. I didn’t get into details with the reporter that day, but I knew she could tell something was very wrong.

  Next, we sat down as a group and set some ground rules amongst ourselves. By this time my brother Chuck had arrived from Florida, so he was in on the decision making too. John, Mary, Chuck, Gail a small group of Dad’s closest friends and I determined that every decision had to be unanimous. No one was empowered to make a single decision without sending a text or email to everyone else to be sure we were all on the same page.

  We unanimously agreed that we wouldn’t turn Dad’s condition into a high-pressure situation where everyone is fighting, arguing and competing to be the person who did the most. When the stakes are this high, even the littlest things can turn a close family against one another.

  Someone told us the reason they keep security in the ICU waiting room is because families explode from the pressure. It has nothing to do with stealing drugs from the pharmacy or any other crime. It’s because families have a tendency to collapse on each other. We each vowed that wouldn’t happen to us.

  Finally, we gathered Dad’s cell phone, iPad and other personal items and put them all in a safe. If, for whatever reason, Dad passed away, his privacy couldn’t be intruded upon. We all agreed that if something were to happen, that’s where it would stay, unopened and never to be viewed. It’s not that we thought Dad had anything to hide—it’s just that we all agreed that he deserved his privacy in life and if needed, in death.

  JOHN

  My girlfriend who was in the car accident was able to recover from her injuries, but what we were never able to recover from was the negative stuff that occurred between her family, friends and me in the waiting room. I would say, “Guys, I know what is going on here and we have to do this because it is the next logical step.” It was an unfortunate experience in that the venom and the bad blood in that waiting room when she was ill had the worst impact on our relationship. I wasn’t willing to go through that again with my own family, so I made sure we all stuck together as much as we could. We found a comfortable place for everyone to be and it happened to work out. It was funny because the doctors and nurses would all say the same thing—that we were an exception to the rule. Even the chaplain thought we should collaborate on creating a pamphlet for people in the ICU, sharing our advice on how to cope with the stress of the waiting room.

  CHUCK

  When I arrived at Sky Ridge, I was shocked to see how sick Dad was. My dad is tough—like John Wayne tough—so it was weird to see someone like him in that condition. We have a tight family, especially the kids. We are all really close with our mom and dad and our stepmom and step-dad. We talk or text each other every day. This was the first time we had a close family member in that much trouble. It was shocking.

  JUNIOR

  We didn’t want to scare anyone outside our immediate family about Dad’s condition until we knew more about it. We were all aware that there are a lot of people who rely on him, including the more than three hundred employees of RE/MAX at the corporate headquarters in Denver, The Wildlife Experience Museum, the staff at Sanctuary and so many others who worked by his side every day.

  I spent half of my nights by Dad’s bedside keeping a close eye on him and the other half typing out texts and email replies to everyone who couldn’t get a hold of him. It wasn’t unusual for me to field messages for Dad if someone was trying to reach him and couldn’t. But this time was different because as hard as we tried to keep a lid on things, bad news always has a way of getting out. My usual response was to share just enough information without giving up his privacy. I’d write back, “Dad is in the hospital now and doesn’t have his cell phone.”

  I promised that when the time was right, I’d get back to each and every person to keep them updated and if and when he got better, we’d let anyone who wanted to spend time with him have that time. In our own subtle way, it was clear to everyone we spoke to that things were serious. We were preparing for the worst and hoping for a miracle. There wasn’t much else we could do except be with Dad, support him, stay positive and offer our unconditional love and support.

  MARY

&n
bsp; As a way to keep morale up, on the morning of February 5th, my brother John came up with the idea to host a Super Bowl party for all of the family and friends who had loved ones in the ICU. Sky Ridge had never allowed anything like this to happen in the ICU. We knew how hard it was for all of the families going through the same kind of traumatic experience we were—we thought it would give everyone a much needed release of tensions to watch the New England Patriots and the New York Giants battle it out to see who would win the Lombardi trophy.

  We brought in a big screen TV and turned it into an ICU potluck dinner, with each of us bringing in a dish to enjoy while watching the game together as if we were in someone’s home. There’s nothing comfortable about the ICU waiting room and worse, you know everyone there is in crisis. There was no better way to create a much-needed camaraderie among us than to watch a good ol’ football game. Even though tensions were high among the families that were there that day, every single person could breathe a little easier or simply let out a sigh of relief for those few hours. Hospital security actually showed up and asked us to keep down the noise. It’s true that we were loud, but it was a day for everyone to relax.

  JOHN

  We weren’t going to have the Super Bowl party at first because some people thought that it was disrespectful for the other people in the waiting room. But then, I happened to go into the waiting room earlier that day and people from other families asked, “Are you going to bring in the big screen TV?”

  I knew every family in the ICU was struggling. We didn’t want to intrude, but I genuinely thought the Super Bowl would provide a great four-hour break in the tension. “We already ordered pizzas and were planning on this,” some of the other families said. “We need to escape from our reality.” It was obvious they agreed with our decision, so we carried on with the plan. The staff had to tell us to keep the noise down a couple of times, but they wandered through to get the score every now and then, too.