Hollywood Tales, Heartache + Resiliency with Carl Yorke (part 1)

Encounter the stirring odyssey of Carl Yorke2, a man whose story is etched with both the shine of Hollywood glamour and the shadows of profound loss. As your hosts Natalie Davis and Pam, we share the airwaves with Carl, inviting you to hear his compelling narrative. From the vibrant lights of Broadway to the buzz of the movie industry, he carved a niche as a story analyst and script doctor, only to face the heartbreak of losing a son and the collapse of his marriage. Our conversation with Carl not only reveals the inner workings of Hollywood but underscores the raw power of the human spirit to rise amidst adversity.

The terrain of grief is a solitary one, as I know all too well from the emotional tempest of my child's cancer battle. The episode is an intimate reflection on the tumultuous journey from hopeful beginnings to facing the grimmest of outcomes. Staying grounded in the present and leaning into Buddhist principles became my compass through the storm. We open up about the isolating effects of sorrow, the rippling impact on our careers, and the irreplaceable value of a network of support during the darkest times. It's a testament to the resilience nestled within all of us, often unearthed through the most painful experiences.

As we traverse the landscape of loss together, Carl illuminates the path from paralyzing pain to a newfound warriorhood, borne from the ashes of his deepest suffering. Discover how the wisdom of thinkers like Ram Dass and Alan Watts can guide us through our darkest hours and how shared grief fosters connection and compassion. This episode doesn't shy away from the hard truths about mourning, the intricacies of friendships under strain, and the profound shift in perspective that comes from enduring the unimaginable. Join us for an episode that is not just a story of survival but a celebration of the indomitable resilience that resides in the human heart.

Transcript

Pamela Cass: 0:06

In the Grand Theater of Life. We all seek a comeback, a resurgence, a rekindling of our inner fire. But how do we spark that flame? Welcome to Reignite Resilience. This is not just another podcast. This is a journey, a venture into the heart of human spirit, the power of resilience and the art of reigniting our passions.

Natalie Davis: 0:29

Welcome back to another episode of Reignite Resilience. I am your co-host, natalie Davis, and I am so excited to be back with you guys. Pam, how's it going? It is fabulous.

Pamela Cass: 0:39

It's a gloomy day, which we were just talking about. I don't love it. It's not our normal Colorado sunny day, but it's still in the 60s, so we're going to be okay with it.

Natalie Davis: 0:49

Yeah, you know. For those that don't know, pam and I are in Colorado and we get about 300 days of sunshine, I think, on average. I've heard some statistics that say that's going down. Let me tell you the other 65 days there's a lack of sunshine. We all know it and we bring it up. It is hard to get through those days.

Natalie Davis: 1:08

Yes, we do, but we are still here in paradise, in fabulous Colorado. So, without further ado though, pam, we have a fabulous guest joining us today, and I am so excited to dive right in, so why don't you get us started by sharing with our listeners who's joining us today?

Pamela Cass: 1:24

Absolutely. I am super excited about this guest today. So today joining us is Carl York. He started out as an actor, story analyst and script doctor in Hollywood Between November 1991 and April 1994, his marriage ended, his son, willem, was diagnosed with cancer and died after 18 months of treatment, and his Hollywood career came to an end. He transitioned to technical writing 25 years ago and now lives in Hudson River Valley in New York. Welcome, carl, so excited for you to be here. Talk about resilience. I mean, just the bio alone shares with our listeners all of these things that you went through in a very short amount of time, and so we're honored to have you here to share your story. So I guess, I don't know, let's kind of start at the beginning, not maybe when you were born, but let's start at the beginning, like getting into Hollywood. And I mean, I'm just curious, you know what was that like, what were the years you were in Hollywood? Kind of just start at the beginning.

Carl York: 2:28

Okay, so first I want to say thank you for having me. I'm honored to be here. I think resilience is a really good topic. It's not one that we hear much of. We hear a lot of different things that approach resilience, I think, but don't really dive in. I'm interested to find out how this conversation unfolds. I started out. I was born. That's where it all started.

Natalie Davis: 2:54

That's the beginning.

Carl York: 2:56

So if we're doing a linear timeline.

Natalie Davis: 2:58

That's the first dot.

Carl York: 2:59

That was it. I was born and I come from a family of people who were in show business. My great grandfather was an actor, my grandfather was head of publicity at 20th Century Fox for decades and my father wasn't in the business. But I went to New York right out of college on tour with one flew over the Cuckoo's Nest to play. I did three national tours of that and then I landed in New York and that's where I met my wife.

Carl York: 3:30

I spent seven years there and then I went to Hollywood because I belonged on screen, not on stage. There's different kinds of actors. There's real actors who create entire characters those are stage actors to me and then there's other people who pretty much play themselves the whole time. That's me. So I went to Hollywood in 1982, and I'd been working as a story analyst and a reader in New York. I read books and novels for all the studios there and some publishers, and so by the time I got to Hollywood people knew my name from all the reports I'd written for all those years and then I ended up as a reader. There there's a Readers Union and I couldn't get in because you have to have a union job before you can get in the union and you can't get a union job unless you're in the union. So that's right.

Natalie Davis: 4:28

Sounds easy. That's exactly right, perfect.

Pamela Cass: 4:31

That's fine.

Carl York: 4:32

So that was okay. I worked freelance. I started at a place called Creative Artists Agency, which has since become the most powerful talent agency in the world. Boy was I lucky to have that. I met an agent there who went on to become a producer and took me with her. I ran her office for six years, six and a half years. In the span of all this time, I calculated I read about 20,000 novels and about 30,000 screenplays. So most of those I wrote some kind of a description of. You know, we call it coverage. I covered most of those, and the coverage is one or one and a half pages of a synopsis and then another page or so of where it fits in the marketplace and isn't any good, and it puts the tone and blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so sorry, I shouldn't do that.

Natalie Davis: 5:27

No, that's okay. Those are probably the things that we look for and how we filter out our whatever we're reading or at least what makes it.

Carl York: 5:35

Everybody does. Everybody does, you know, have to exercise some sort of discrimination in a way that, well, in what you choose to watch or read, like that. So I was at the other end of that and then, as the head of development for this producer, I was involved in producing movies. I didn't produce them, I mostly was the story department, where I helped fix the scripts to make them shootable. That's probably not the right way to say it. I'm more of a story structure guy and I'm and I knew story structure better than the only people I knew who knew it as well as I did were the directors. Directors really have have to have that, and that led to years later I taught screenwriting at Stanford for five years. So that's, that's kind of that Part of the world, of my world.

Natalie Davis: 6:31

Carl, out of curiosity, what brought you to the other coast was your desire to be on film, right to act, and so you had so many other opportunities that came out of that. Did you miss that piece of it? Was there a Actually?

Carl York: 6:46

exercise that piece of it I. That's actually kind of part of this, this story. Let me get there. I got there. I did a couple of years on a TV show called the paper chase as a recurring character, and then I did a lot of little stuff here and there and I was reading you know, reading instead of waiting tables, which I also did at times. And then I got married. We had a baby, the first one. There was something wrong with him, we couldn't quite figure that out. He's he's autistic. And then I got sober and Then my marriage started to fall apart. So I don't know if that makes any sense at all. It seems to be sort of backwards, like you would get sober and then you could show up and everything would be better.

Carl York: 7:35

Yeah, but there's, I can bring you many, many people who they get sober, and then they're not the same person that got married, you know, on either end, and then so it shakes up the structure of the of the relationship. I don't think that happened actually, although that was a good kind of line of demarcation where things have changed now and and I got sober 30 days after Willem was born, our second child, and so he was one and a half when my wife moved out. So now I'm sober 18 months, which might as well be 25 minutes, you know, in terms of handling life without the helpers that I used to use. And what was underneath all of that was, you know, I don't know how you grew up. I mean, I think we all grew up we in some sort of dysfunction. I might be wrong. I've never met anybody who didn't grow up in a dysfunctional situation, but there's a lot of anger under there, and as my divorce started to unfold, a lot of that came out. And then I had met not really performed up to what I needed to in my job, so my producer fired me, and, and that was six weeks after she moved out, and then six weeks later she took the kids and moved. And so then I was in this you know, half furnished apartment by myself and Luckily I had other sober people in my life to talk to and I started leaning on them because I didn't have anybody else. I, the kind of family I came from, we love each other. It's all good, except that we don't quite know how to support each other. So in these two and a half years from the time my wife moved out to the time well and died, nobody came. Nobody came at all. That's not true. My sister changed planes in Los Angeles and came and visited us in the hospital for an hour. So I was fortunate enough to have other sober people to Lean on. So I got fired and then she took the kids and then I moved.

Carl York: 9:50

One of the top stressors moving, unemployment, divorce, you know, your child sick. There's got to be something else. People kept saying what did you do? How come all of this is happening to you at once? And Naturally I didn't have an answer. But a lot of people in Los Angeles had an answer, you know, because they have all kinds of Spiritual beliefs, you know, and I had people saying things to me like you know, once he was diagnosed, he was diagnosed.

Carl York: 10:20

We were 30 days from our our final court date, our divorce date, when he was diagnosed and here's how that went. She had a partner already and we couldn't all be in the hospital together. We couldn't all be together anywhere because the partner was afraid that our sick child would bring us back together. So that person made it as difficult as possible for her. I'm pretty sure she didn't want it that way, but she had to service that relationship. So there we are in the hospital.

Carl York: 10:52

He'd been in a hospital for two weeks and then they gave us the news he had neuroblastoma and the treatment would go a year. I asked in that meeting Is this kind of like leukemia being, not being a doctor? And you know, in their best bedside manner they said, oh, you wish it was leukemia, wow. So I didn't wish it was you leukemia. But he had to get chemo for a week every month for a year. So they told us that and I'm in the room with my ex and her partner and they stood up and hugged each other and started to cry and I just kind of like I Wouldn't, I kind of Floated down the hallway. I was so disconnected from everything and I went into he williams room and you know he was Still kind of a happy little two and a half year old, and I realized I need, I couldn't be in there and I went on down the hallway to the social workers office but she and her partner were in there and they said we're talking in here, why don't you come back later? And that was, I think that was, the moment where Everything changed, and I think I said this to you, pam, when we talked. It was, like I call it, metaphysical freefall, where had nothing left to hang on to, but in that moment it felt like there was nobody left to do the hanging on. Whoever I had been up to that point I'd been, you know, a, a Hollywood executive and a father and a husband and a family member of my family of origin, and all of those things had were just evaporating in front of me. And Luckily I had these sober people. I wandered down the hall and called one of them and and he showed up at the hospital.

Carl York: 12:51

So the next year of chemo was I don't know how to describe it, I can't, there's no description for it. It was a roller coaster, probably the the hardest, the well, the God. I'm trying to figure out what. Where that? Well, they told us that he had a 50 50 chance and it turned out it didn't really. He had a 10% chance and so moving from 50, 50 down to 10 and then to the reality of it was a Want to call it like a journey across the desert. You know, I don't know if you've seen Lawrence of Arabia's movie people don't see anymore. But he goes, you know, he says we've kind of got to attack akaba and they say you can't do that, you have to go across the desert. Nobody's ever been across the desert. They call it the anvil of the Sun. And he goes, let's go. And then boom, boom, and he's on his little camel and here's the Sun. That's what it felt like, yeah.

Carl York: 13:54

And then after his year of chemo, he was, he was cancer-free for five months and then in February of 94 they called and said his cancer is back. The protocol that we were doing is Over. He can't do that anymore. The best we can offer it is a bone marrow transplant, and we did some research on that and I said so. Isn't that? That's kind of when you torture him for a while and then they die, and they didn't quite appreciate Reputting it that way. But they said, yeah, that's basically it and we decided not to do that.

Carl York: 14:28

So, yeah, so the story of resilience for me starts in here somewhere. And well, it really starts with being sober and being present and fighting to stay present and and through this whole thing. So the Buddhists like to say Things like you know, you invite anger in, but you don't invite it in alone. Sort of the foundation of the of addiction is trying to run away from how you feel, and it doesn't quite matter what feelings you're running away from. But faced with these kind of feelings of life and death and it was an extraordinary opportunity I thought to and this makes me sound much different than I think I was but I Didn't want to abandon him when he was dying. You know I had to be there for him. So I was, and there were a lot of moments that happened. I'll give you one.

Carl York: 15:37

We had him at Sloan Catering in New York. We moved, went there for a while and they didn't have an answer, but he got in a blood transfusion. This is about three weeks before he died. He had a blood transfusion, he was feeling good for the first time in a long time and then they told me they wanted to do an MRI To see if the tumors in his back were growing towards his spine, because if they were, then he would be paralyzed before he died and that would be difficult for him and they could do something about that. When I told him that you know they were gonna put him under again and do an MRI, he, he was so angry he started punching me in the stomach and Normally with you know, normally you would say to your child that's not appropriate, use your words, you know, whatever those, you know some version of that.

Carl York: 16:26

But in the moment I knew that you know this was the absolute, appropriate reaction to what I just told him and that I was the adult and it was my job to make it about him, not about me. So rather than fall into that hole and just I can't account for it, except that I'm lucky, you know, I let him hit me and then we went and did the thing and then he was an onward now, recently bring that up is because there was a bunch of feelings in that moment that I had to store. I had to store him away, right, I knew I couldn't process him right in front of him right then and I didn't have access to them for a while. But that's the rest of that story. Then he died and Just to give you an idea of family I'm from, you know. I called my mother to tell her when the memorial service was going to be. She was in Northern California, I was in Southern California and she said, well, I'll see if I can make, and I don't fault her for it, because I'm not quite sure what she meant. Yeah, you know, she was older and I know I knew the issues very independent, but I knew she wasn't gonna be able to drive down there herself, you know. And then, you know, eventually my sister went, got her and brought her down. But just the fact that that's what I kept getting from that quarter, you know, just it really made me feel.

Carl York: 17:47

Now a whole lot of people showed up and Once, well, I'm got sick and the word got out, this is where my acting career I've done. I had done some things and some people knew me and I did the movie called Jack the bear, before any of this happened. It's just, I kind of fell on me and I was on the, I was a 20th century Fox, and so I knew some people and and a whole bunch of oddball connections just showed up and and got me acting work to make sure that I had my insurance for for William. And this is why I like to say you know, your life is a mess when acting is where you have to fall back on. You know that's so I. You know I got to to do that and but the moment he died, all of that went silent.

Carl York: 18:36

All of that went silent. The phone stopped ringing. I wasn't the disease of the week anymore. People stopped returning my calls. I did get a couple more jobs in the movie business. The last person to fire me said you exude sadness. And I was busted. I exuded sadness, you know, and more than one group of people, when they saw me coming, were like oh my God, I hope he doesn't talk about his life. So I became the guy who people would say to me I thought I was having a bad day. I'm glad you showed up.

Carl York: 19:14

Because now I realize it's sort of an idiotic way to say I'm glad, I'm not you. They were glad and I was glad they weren't me.

Carl York: 19:23

So then I ended up being the guy that people call when somebody shows up in their life with a dead kid or some other kind of serious really something that's really a suicide, a disease, you know, a loved one like that. So I call it out from. I was about a year and a half out from Willems death and I a guy called and he said I met this guy, he's Greek, his name's Nick. His daughter fell off a cliff and died. Would you talk to him? I said, well, you know, you give him my number, he won't call, but he can give him my number. He called and I went to his house and on the way up there and I had this mentor who was, like you know, sort of ahead of me with the. His son had died three years before mine.

Carl York: 20:14

I met people in a group called Compassionate Friends, which is a really I don't know, I don't know how to. It had a lot to do with how I got through the next few months, next few years actually, but it's really just a bunch of people who have dead kids. So there's no structure to it and there's no real, you know, it's just really raw and mostly women. So I'm kind of a group person. I'm kind of I'm really emotional. So I went and I asked some women where are your husbands? You know how come they're not here? And the answer I got was it was always. Well, he doesn't like to come because it makes him feel weak. And I'm like, yeah, that's exactly backwards.

Carl York: 21:05

Exactly the opposite. You have to be really strong. In fact, I told a friend of mine that I was gonna talk to you guys today and about resilience, he said, oh, you're a warrior, You're a warrior. So that made me think okay, how do you do that? Do you do that on purpose? I don't know. I don't know if I did that on purpose. So I don't know if you can actually move someone into warriorhood. You know when the world blows up? I don't know, Because before I became a warrior I stayed on the couch and in the house for a year.

Carl York: 21:40

You know, I could barely move. I couldn't be out of the house when the sun was going down. It was just terrifying. I don't know why. For a long time I couldn't go too far from the house. I would go back over to creative artists to pick up some work that were feeding me freelance work. So I had some work, but you know, after Willie died I didn't care anymore. When you don't care in the movie business, they know, you know, they know, and that's part of why probably that career was over. So at least while he was sick.

Carl York: 22:16

I've been thinking about this since I talked to you, Pam, and about how to frame it all, Because there's the journey in you know, as each thing happens when you go wait, can't get any worse. Well, can't get any worse. Well, I think I'm gonna stop saying that, you know, Because it just got worser and worser, and then this is unimaginable. And then it went from unimaginable to unbearable. Yeah, there's a guy named Ram Dass who wrote a book in the 60s called Be here Now. He was a famous. He was I don't know if you know Ram Dass, but he was teaching brilliant analysis at Harvard when, 1960, when Timothy Larry moved in down the hall and then, within a year, they both got kicked out of Harvard for doing acid and giving it to their students. And then Didn't I know?

Pamela Cass: 23:14

that.

Natalie Davis: 23:15

Exactly, that's quite the college experience, yeah.

Carl York: 23:19

Well, his name was Richard Albert Ben, and then he went to India and then he got this new name, ram Dass, and then he's done hundreds and hundreds of hours of talks. That's one of the things. He's one of the people that helped me make sense of it. Another one is Alan Watts, who's also not quite as pertinent to this conversation. But Ram Dass said when you have bared the unbearable, you get to see the world the way God sees it and with compassion. And I certainly did have a lot more compassion on the way out of. Here's one of the thoughts. This is why I said at the beginning you're gonna have to tell me when to shut up, because I can just keep motoring and if you have any questions, please feel free.

Carl York: 24:11

After he died even before he died people started saying really dumb stuff to me, like remember, this woman said you should tell him to put white light around his tumors? I said you know what? He's? Two and a half, I think he's already still in the white light. You know what I'm saying. And she was like no, but if he does that, I'm like I don't think he's gonna understand. She got mad at me because she wanted her help to help, so now I appreciate her wanting to help, but now it's about her, not about the help, but not about me and not about Willem.

Carl York: 24:48

And there was that. And then, of course, once he died, people have these awful, awful things. They say, well, god needed another little angel. Yeah, why did he have to take mine? If you know what God needed, why, you must know why he needed to take mine. So I told you before I had this well of anger underneath and I wore black for two years straight, just every day. Everything was black, no matter what, because if that scared people off, that was the right thing to do.

Carl York: 25:23

So here's one of the things I learned If I was in a lot of pain, there were people who would try to fix that and what I think I figured out might be wrong is that it had to do with their relationship with their own pain, and if they're clean with their pain then they can walk into my world and walk through my pain with me. That comes a lot from my experience talking to people since Willem died, where other people don't quite know what to say, and I'm not really afraid of it, you know. So I've started two and a half stories that I haven't finished. Let me finish one of them Nick, the Greek guy whose daughter fell off the cliff, and compassionate friends. You know there's a number of different dividing lines, but one of them is sudden death versus long-term illness, you know. Another is older versus younger.

Carl York: 26:26

It was very hard to find people in my category who had long-term illness of basically an infant. So on my way over to his house I thought I'm not sure what we have in common, because he had a 16-year-old daughter who was a sudden death. So I got there and boy, this guy was so full. He just like two hours, two hours, it's pouring out of him all the grief and the pain and the confusion and all of that. And then he stopped and he said what about you? What happened to you? And I thought I don't think our stories match. But I had gained all this wisdom in that year and a half and I thought you know what I'm just going to like deliver the wisdom, the year and a half wisdom, right, and I started telling him stuff. I have no idea what it was, but I could see it flying right over his head. It went shooting right over his head. He had no idea what I was talking about, not a clue. And that's when I rolled it back and thought of my mentor and who said just share your experience. So I told him exactly what I've told you in more detail. I could see that he got about 10 minutes of absolute peace. It was the first 10 minutes of peace he'd had since he got that phone call. And at the end of it he said now I know you understand.

Carl York: 27:50

So here's one of the things also I have to say, because I live in the world of words. I'm a writer and words are really important and powerful and my wife likes to remind me of that. And then I argue with her and go yeah, but if I'm instructing somebody else, you know your words are. So somehow in America we've decided that we can't use the right words for things. We can't say tragedy, we have to say challenge. We can't say you know, despair, we have to say kind of upset. We can't say challenge opportunity. My favorite bumper sticker is oh no, not another learning opportunity. You know, it's like I don't want any more opportunities, you know, and, and these aren't opportunities, except they are. But if that's where we're starting, if we're starting with oh, this is an opportunity, then you miss all of that other stuff, all of that deep grief which we don't.

Carl York: 28:50

I think that most of the trouble in America and probably in the world is unresolved grief. It's just unresolved grief. And some places, like in the Middle East, the culture is we will never forget, we will always remember and we will always hate them until they all are dead. Yeah, so that's obvious, what's going to happen and that's what's happening For me. I'm too sensitive. I couldn't live that way.

Carl York: 29:21

I had to keep finding ways to, for instance, forgive the people who had disappeared out of my life. Yeah, so people like to say there's things like this and then you find out who your friends are, and I don't think that's right. I don't think you find out who your friends are. You find out who's scared of your feelings, who's scared of their own feelings, who have a lot of unresolved grief that you're going to trigger. And that's who they are. They're still my friends. I said this to a friend of mine here, a very close friend, who didn't come around at all, who didn't come to the memorial, who you know. I just saw him for lunch a few months ago and I said that to him and he thought I was talking about him. I wasn't, but he thought I was talking about him. He said I just didn't know what to do, I didn't know what to say, you know, I said I wasn't talking about you, but now that you mentioned it, I'm talking about you, you know because you just feel that it applies.

Natalie Davis: 30:22

Here you go, yes, yeah.

Carl York: 30:26

So I don't want to call myself an atheist. I think I'm not even an agnostic. I'm kind of too lazy to be an atheist. Do you see how much work those guys do? Holy crap, oh God. But I don't believe in God.

Carl York: 30:42

But just in case there's a God, my version of that is he's not in charge of life and death, because it's just too uneven. You know, there's no sense to be made of it and anything. Every time somebody dies, if you're religious, it's because you were a sinner. You know, if you're not religious, it's just the luck of the draw. I don't think there's also this worthiness baked into all that, right. So you get into a situation like mine. And then the people the worthy, focused people are real sure why this is happening in my life, because I'm not worthy. And the religious people you know that's a really God. It's just such a slippery slope because God is the thought police. You know. They taught me that in Sunday school. God has this big book, right, and he's marking down everything you're doing, including if you think the wrong thing. Oh boy, you're gonna have to answer for that, you know. So I think that's like in terms of resilience, being able to recover from these things. That's one of the things that you have to think about. Did this happen to me because I did something? Is this retribution of some sort? Because the old testament is full of retribution and then so is the New Testament.

Carl York: 32:13

So I said to a friend of mine once, you know he said wow, that must have been. I can't even imagine. People do say that a lot. I'm sure they say that to you guys too. I can't imagine. My snarky sort of response is no, you can't, and don't try it, because you're gonna make yourself miserable and you're just gonna get about a quarter of the way there. It's so much worse than what you could even imagine. But I said what it really did was it burned the baby fat off of me. You know. It burned away all of the fantasies about worthiness and about if I do the right thing, then the right thing will come out at the other end, and somehow there's some kind of cosmological justice. You know all of those things that I didn't know were in there, you know. But they were. And this friend, he said, well, how long does it take to burn the baby fat off? And I said, well, it depends on how big of a baby you are, you know.

Natalie Davis: 33:12

Yes.

Carl York: 33:15

So turns out, I was a pretty big baby, you know, like I had carried with me a whole bunch of ideas about what my life was supposed to be and how it was actually gonna, you know, come out, and it turned out that whoever said it I think it might be, oh boy, I don't know, I might have been Aristotle, probably not, but in the ways of knowledge you add something every day. In the ways of wisdom, you remove something every day. So the journey was more about what I left behind and it was about what I gained, because there's a certain kind of materialism that we I don't wanna call it a character flaw, but it's kind of built into our culture, you know, and our culture is not conducive to. We don't support each other.

Carl York: 34:10

The men who felt weak and didn't come to those meetings, you know they couldn't go out with their friends and go golfing and then start crying. They can, but you know what they do they die. Yeah, they die. There were people I knew who had even went to compassionate friends where eventually, kind of supposedly, you know, come face to face with your feelings, and you know these couple of single women I knew, who had single children, who died. Then they died. Yeah, I'm not saying that dying is a bad thing. In fact, what I told Willem as he was getting ready to die was I know one thing for sure this is safe. It's safe for you to die, you know. And I also said you know, if you can manage it, I'd like to be here when that moment comes. And he managed it.

Natalie Davis: 35:07

We hope that you've enjoyed our two-part interview with Carl York. In less than five years, carl started his journey to sobriety, found himself facing divorce and a terminal diagnosis of his son, ultimately leading to his passing. Join us as we continue in part two of our interview with Carl, as he talks about the coping mechanisms that he used after the passing of his son and also speaking about the community that he built around himself. We'll hope to see you soon. Thank you for joining us on today's episode of Reignite Resilience. We hope that you had amazing a-has and takeaways. Remember to subscribe on your favorite streaming platform, like it and download the upcoming episodes, and if you know anyone in your life that is looking to continue to ignite their resilience, share it with them. We look forward to seeing you on our future episodes and until then, continue to reignite that fire within your hearts.