In 2006, Eve Moffatt, a singer and motivational speaker living Maui, Hawaii, woke up one morning to find that she could not stand without walking into a wall.
She felt wobbly, almost like she was drunk, despite not having had a drink in decades. Her body wanted to vomit. She tried to get over it — she hoped it would just go away with time.
“I took three days before I went to the hospital,” Moffatt said. “I just wouldn’t go. My husband wanted me, I just wouldn’t go. I thought, ‘I can get over this!’ I didn’t go until I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t go to the bathroom by myself.”
Moffatt had had an ischemic stroke. A blood vessel leading to her brain had become clogged, depriving it of vital air and other nutrients. She spent days in a coma — long enough that she cannot even remember how many. She took medication that made her hair fall out. The recovery was long and difficult. She and her husband divorced.
“I got home and I thought I would be comfortable,” Moffatt said. “But I couldn’t make coffee, I couldn’t answer the phone. It was just bad.”
Moffatt moved to Cottonwood and it was just in the last five years that she regained enough control over her speech to return to public speaking. That happened with the help of an aide from Verde Valley Medical Center Entire Care, who she said “gave me courage.”
“I wanted desperately to sing again and I wanted desperately to speak again before people, because I was a motivational speaker in Maui,” Moffatt said.
Today, that is what Moffatt does. She was a guest speaker at the quarterly luncheon held by the Professional Women’s Group of Northern Arizona on Tuesday, April 16, at the Cottonwood Recreation Center, in an event that also raised money for scholarships. Moffatt spoke before the female business and nonprofit leaders of Cottonwood and the surrounding area and gave them a clear message inspired by her own experience: “Never give up.”
Moffatt’s speech featured a slew of famous people who she felt had exemplified her idea of never giving up — Oprah Winfrey, who grew up poor, and Jim Carrey, who did too. She spoke of Harriet Tubman bringing slaves to freedom, often pushing them past the point where their fear made them want to turn back. She referenced Jack Canfield, creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, who was rejected 144 times and said, “When the world says no, you say, ‘Next!’”
But the one person that took up the most time in Moffatt’s speech, even more than her own story, was Ruby Bridges, the African-American civil rights activist, who, at age 6, become the first black student to desegregate New Orleans’ William Frantz Elementary School in 1960. Bridges faced a hostile crowd of white students and parents who did not want to share the school with black students and had to be escorted to class by federal marshals. Bridges’ ordeal was immortalized in Norman Rockwell’s 1964 painting, “The Problem We All Live With,” which hung outside the Oval Office in the White House for several months in 2011.
Moffatt said that Bridges had been her personal hero for years and that she felt she embodied the idea of never giving up.
“To tell you the truth, when I was 6 years old, I wouldn’t have done that, I wouldn’t have done it. I wouldn’t have shown up at school,” Moffatt said. But Moffatt said that going through the experience she has, overcoming the stroke and returning to public speaking, has given her a new outlook on what she has the potential to accomplish. “Yeah, I could do it. I could do it as an adult, now.”
Though she continues to live in Cottonwood, Moffatt has taken her inspiring speech all over America and the world. She has plans to go to Mexico to speak in the near future and dreams of going to France.
“Tell someone you know what you want to do,” Moffatt said in her speech. “Tell them, and mean it, and then do it.”
