The Man Who Saved His Own Life with Kindness

A true story about the value of human presence

It happened at a hockey rink

I was a hockey dad for a while when we lived in Canada. After moving to the southwestern United States, my son joined a recreational hockey league in Arizona hoping to keep up with his passion.

Unless you’re sitting at a bar there’s a lot less ice in Arizona than in Canada. So a lot of the recreational hockey that took place happened outdoors on concrete rinks using inline skates—bypassing the need for Zambonis to maintain the rink and parkas to warm the spectators.

There was a new outdoor facility in the small town where we lived at the time, which became the destination for both practices and games. Parents would routinely bring their kids to the complex, drop them off for a few hours of recreation, then return later to pick them up.

Let’s face it, hockey is not the most benign of sports, so I always felt a little hesitant to do the dump and run thing with my kid. As a compromise I’d often bring work to do while he practiced.

Hockey is not the most benign of sports.

I’m not the first parent to have to manage the stress of getting his kid to sports practices and get work done on the side, but I was finding it particularly challenging to stay focused on the book I was writing at the time while also keeping an eye on the kids and the rink.

Then there was Doyle

There was one other parental figure who regularly remained for these practice sessions among the kids. He was the grandfather of a good friend of my son. His name was Doyle.

Doyle was a physical tower of Southern charm, warm and sweet to the kids. If you combined Colonel Sanders and Gomer Pyle into one person, you’d get Doyle. He’d spent most of his life in Oklahoma and spoke with an accent that was thicker than cough syrup. You might think that, as a comedian, entertainer and speaker, I’d be an outgoing person by nature, but it’s pretty much the opposite. I’m a good measure of introvert, often preferring quiet solitude, internal reflection, and individual creative work and focus.

If you combined Colonel Sanders and Gomer Pyle into one person, you’d get Doyle.

On this day, as usual, I turned off my social switch and buried myself in my own writing work. The book I was working on was 7 Rules You Were Born to Break, which is all about breaking one’s own unconscious rules. As was regularly the case, the grandfather and I were sitting in our separate vehicles while the boys scrimmaged. I was getting lots of work done, and Doyle, the grandpa, was watching his grandson as usual.

I remember watching this kind elder with admiration, appreciating the uncomplicated affection he exuded by just sitting and paying attention to someone other than himself. I was often moved by his devotion to his grandson but, quite frankly, did not go out of my way to get into lengthy conversations with him, despite his being the accepting gentleman that he was.

The fact is, I find social interactions stressful. It really doesn’t matter who my social interactions are with. On this day, however, I found my own attention being drawn toward Doyle — and I tried to ignore it. Ironically, the book I was writing is all about hidden rules that we follow. And the very rule I was working on there at the rink is one that I’d named Pretend You Don’t Matter. This is the phrasing I choose to describe our tendency to discount the value of our presence in the lives of others. My book argues that we need to break this rule if we wish to reach our full potential.

Pretending we don’t matter is a behavior that is built on the belief that we can’t make a difference — perhaps a holdover from childhoods where we were raised to be “seen, but not heard.” It’s not true, of course. Every last one of us matters. Yet, believing that we don’t, it’s tempting to hide out and hold back, because hiding out allows us to temporarily avoid the stress of showing up in human relationships.

Saving a life

The irony of my position — writing to encourage others to do the very thing I was ignoring — did not escape me. I looked over at Doyle again. The demonstration of his heartfelt attention on the kids was a shining example of “mattering” to his grandson. As I looked over at him sitting in his pickup truck, staring at the rink, a deeper instinct was calling out to me to engage with him, yet the stress involved with connecting left me wanting to stay holed up and just get things done.

The irony of my position — writing to encourage others to do the very thing I was ignoring — did not escape me.

I tried to go back to my work, but I couldn’t shake the thought that I should stop writing about this topic and actually engage it through the situation in front of me. I wrestled for a while with my lack of confidence and the obvious need for it.

Finally I got out of my vehicle the way a four-year-old finally responds to his mother when she won’t stop nagging him to get out of the house and go play. “Okaaay . . . I’m going!” my inner child whined, as I put away my laptop, got out of the car, and walked around the back of Doyle’s pickup to approach him from the driver’s side and say hello.

Strolling up alongside his window, I stood just next to the left rearview mirror and waited for him to notice I was there. But he didn’t. He just continued to stare straight ahead at the rink. Finally, I tapped lightly on the glass. He then slowly turned to look at me, seeming a little confused. I had to prompt him to roll down the window, which he did, cracking it open enough that we could converse.

We started to talk as I asked him the usual “how are you” kind of questions. Doyle responded with a run of phrases that were typically hard for me to decipher due to the drawl of his Southern delivery. I managed to keep the conversation going as I caught a few of his words, but as our dialogue continued I realized that his accent was not the only barrier. The actual content of his speech involved some odd concepts and indicated that he was feeling stressed and disoriented. Indeed, after a few minutes he managed to articulate that he was feeling funny.

Getting a little concerned, I asked him for more details and to roll down the window the rest of the way so I could properly hear him. As he attempted to do as I asked, it became apparent that his left arm wasn’t functioning. He had to bring his right arm across his chest to complete the task. It then dawned on me what was happening. I called 911 immediately and explained that the older gentleman I was standing with might be having a stroke.

As luck would have it, an ambulance which had stationed itself on call at a high school soccer game on the other side of the same park responded immediately. Arriving less than two minutes later, the paramedics confirmed that a stroke had occurred and worked very quickly to get Doyle out of the vehicle and into the ambulance.

He was in the emergency room within ten minutes of his stroke.

Doyle outlived that fateful day by many years, enjoying his loving family as a functional person with minimal damage to his brain and nervous system. Even a minute more of a delay between his stroke and his reaching the hospital would have left him far worse off, and potentially he wouldn’t have survived.

Every time I see Doyle’s daughter, the mother of my friend’s son, she credits me with saving her father’s life. I didn’t have a commitment to save a life, however, I only had a small commitment to breaking the rule of pretending I don’t matter. A rule that Doyle never for a moment succumbed to in relationship to his grandson. In fact, it was Doyle’s demonstration of caring and attentiveness that had inspired a small measure of the same in me and motivated me to reach out to him.

More often than we might think, a small commitment of our simple presence can have enormous benefit to others. In some cases, we might even be helping ourselves.