Rico Sharp shares his brother's final words before dying after decades of addiction and injury: "Don't let life kill you." Sharp calls on leaders, educators, and health workers to see themselves as lifesavers and actively fight despair in those around them.
Chapters
Don't let life kill them.
I had a brother who was 1 year older than I, or myself. I basically helped him out and took care of him most of his life. He had a problem with drugs and alcohol as a teenager. He had a rough life too, and he was addicted to cocaine, crack cocaine, at the age of 15 through a girl that he met. which he cared a lot about, loved, fell in love with, and she introduced him to crack. And from the age of 15 on up, he struggled back and forth, up and down with crack cocaine. Then one day he married, started a family, got off the drugs, got into church, started doing real well. One day walking home from work as a chef, he got hit by a car And broke up his hip, his elbow, his pelvis bone, put him in a lot of pain. The doctor gave him pain prescriptions. Then he became addicted to the pain prescriptions, and the pain prescriptions took him back down that path of now wanting a high. Went back to crack cocaine. Lost his marriage. 6-year-old daughter died of brain cancer. And then his wife divorced him. And so one day his wife's brother comes to town and they're all— him and his brother hanging out, him and her brother hanging out in a hotel room. Then they started using crack together. The brother got paranoid, picked up a golf club, and hit my brother in the head with the golf club. And broke his skull and thrust a 6-inch piece of his skull down into his brain, threw him in the bathtub, left him for dead. The cleaner comes in the next morning to clean up the room, finds my brother in the bathtub nearly dead. Calls the police, rushed him to the hospital. Doctors didn't think he would survive. Yet, long story short, he survived, but he's paralyzed immediately on the right side. He would spend the next 12 years of his life with a tube in his brain, having major, major seizures, not really able to talk, cognitively disabled, and really having just a hard life. And I would go and talk to him and move him into my place and do everything I can to take care of him. I said to him on the last day we had a conversation, I said, hey bro, I'm gonna come and get you next week when I get back in town and we're gonna go fishing. Would you like that? He said, yes, I would. And then he said, but wait a minute. He says, you're going to go speak somewhere, right? I said, yes, I am.
He said, do something for me. He said, tell the world, don't let life kill you.
Don't let life kill you.
Don't let life kill you. Those were his words to me. He says, when you're going to these schools, tell the kids. When you do corporate training, tell the employees, tell the leaders. When you speak to government officials, tell them, don't let life kill you. I said, what do you mean by that? He said, don't allow for what you've gone through in life beat you down so bad That you don't feel like you can handle it anymore and that you're just ready to give up and leave this world. I said, okay.
I gave him a hug.
I said, I'll be sure to share that message. I got in my car and left, went on my trip.
I come back a couple days later, I'm getting ready to go pick him up. I get a phone call early that morning saying, your brother's dead. That was the last conversation I had with him.
And the last words he spoke to me was, don't let life kill me. When I say to you that as mental health wellness providers, that your mission is to save lives, that's what you do. That's who you are. You are a lifesaver. That's what you signed up for. And when you step into an office and sit before a patient or When you give them who you are, you are saving lives. When you tell them what you know, you are saving lives. Do not take lightly what you do and the impact that you have on other people's lives. And I close with this: we are World Changers. We are World Changers.
