Good Grief: The Answers to One Man's Grief

By W. Dean Baxter and Bill Baxter

When Karen was first diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease), we could not accept or believe it. The cruelty, the pain, and the prospect of a future without Karen did not fit into the plans we had made.

When all of life seems as it should be, and then we are faced with the news it will all com

• Language: English
• Publisher: NMW Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Apr 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985574517

W. Dean Baxter

W. Dean Baxter (Bill) is a Class A builder in the Tidewater area of Virginia, where he has lived most of his life. His passion is in building and design, but his hobbies include anything related to classic BMWs. You might even see him in his classic 1984, "Al". He and his wife Michelle are very active in many different areas within their local community and love traveling together.

Book preview

Good Grief

January 15, 2010. It is eleven o’clock at night and I need to feed my wife. She is sleeping and has been asleep for about twenty hours. I walk into our room and get started with preparing her feeding tube.

Karen has been on a feeding tube for three or four months now. She isn’t able to lift her arms or move her hands. The strength in her legs was one of the first things she lost and she has been in a wheelchair for about a year and a half. She has been slowly losing the use of her tongue and has not been able to talk for several weeks. Three days ago, she lost the focus in her eyes and hasn’t been able to see me. ALS is so cruel.

We did laugh together two weeks ago. Karen was trying to tell me something. She was trying to talk, and I just could not understand what she was saying. The words were too garbled. She was trying to motion with her hands, but she couldn’t lift them more than about two inches off of her lap. She kept trying to say something.

What do you need, Honey? I don’t understand.

Finally, after about ten minutes, she got the words out. Scratch my nose.

I said back to her with a puzzled look, Scratch my nose? She nodded her head. I scratched her nose for her. She was so relieved. We laughed together.

Now she is sleeping peacefully, and I need to feed her. I start with cleaning her feeding tube and getting everything set up. In the process, Karen wakes up. She looks straight into my eyes and sternly says, You woke me up!

I am shocked, speechless. She spoke! I can only say, What?

Her eyes are still locked on mine, and she isn’t happy. Then she says, I was with God, and you woke me up!

I am crushed. I realize what I have done. Where I have brought her from. Where she is now. Grasping for words, all I can say is, Honey, I am so sorry. She is extremely upset with me. She is back, and I feel so bad.

I have always been a person of Faith. I believe in God and have always felt that He is watching over me and protecting me. In 2 Corinthians 5, the Apostle Paul says that absence from the body is presence with the Lord. When Karen looked at me with clear focus and spoke in clear words, I knew she had been in the presence of God. I was in such a shock to be part of that. To realize that God was so close.

Getting all these events down on paper is something I have wanted to do for a long time. When Karen and I were dating, we would tell people our story and they would always comment, You should write a book. We would laugh and think, Yeah, we should.

Life is not predictable, yet we make our plans. We plan our dreams. We set course on our journey and life changes our direction. This book is a story about those dreams and plans and how life changes everything. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you are in control. That only you are directing your steps and choosing your path.

I really wasn’t sure I would actually ever write this book. In my mind I could see myself getting it done, but it has been a huge struggle. I have been trying to write it for more than ten years now. It’s painful. I wind up in tears, but it’s a story I really feel I should share. This journey has taught me many things. Many things about life, many things about love, and many things about death.

The grieving process is a strange and difficult journey. It is so unique to each individual. And yet many parts of the journey are predictable. I have discovered some things during this journey that I want to share. My purpose for this book is to reach out to as many hurting people as I can and hopefully bring them comfort from their terrible pain. Make them realize that they aren’t alone in this. There is comfort in knowing others have gone through the place you find yourself right now. When I hear about someone losing a loved one, my heart breaks. Especially when it’s a spouse. I want to run and give them comfort. Because I was there, I know that what they need is just someone to talk to. Just someone to listen, someone to share their pain with, that understands where they are. It’s just that simple. There is great comfort in knowing that person has been through the same pain. Which means they understand what you are going through. They have been there.

Everyone will deal with grief at some point in their life. We eventually lose everyone that is in our life. There is an old saying, Every successful marriage ends with the death of one of the spouses. It is a difficult truth.

Grief is so individual. There are so many different degrees of grief with every different circumstance of death. The grief you feel is as individual as that relationship. Grief is pain, and the level of pain is different for each person in your life.

Growing Up

I was brought up in a typical baby boomer family of six. I had a mom, dad, one sister and two brothers. I was the youngest, the baby brother. Which was, in my opinion, a great position to be in. I was raised in a home where Mom and Dad were both Christians. My family heritage on both sides went back many generations with a deep faith in God. I can remember stories when I was a small boy about my great grandfather, the man that I was named after. That was my mother’s grandfather. He would ride on horseback through the mountains of North Carolina to hold revivals, preaching and teaching through a trail of small towns. When I was a boy, my parents would teach us about the Bible after dinner. We grew up going to church on Sundays and on Wednesday nights. I grew up knowing that God does exist and is ultimately in charge.

When I was a young man in my twenties and early thirties, both sets of my grandparents passed away. I drove to my grandfather’s funeral in Wichita. My father’s father. It was in January and was bitter cold. Everything was covered in snow and ice. The wind was blowing, and it cut right through you. As the line of cars left the church and headed to the cemetery, all the traffic in the streets stopped. The people got out of their cars and stood in the freezing cold as we drove by, their hands covering their hearts. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Being from Virginia, I had never seen anything like that. I was moved to tears. Don’t know why they do that in Kansas, but it was a great show of respect for the individual that had passed and for the grieving family.

My Nana passed away. This was my mother’s mother. She was special to me. She spent a lot of time with all of us kids when we were growing up. She was so full of love and knew how to make you feel special. I flew to Tucson for the funeral. It was sad, but that seemed to be the proper cycle of life. My dad died unexpectedly when I was forty-four. That was extremely difficult to deal with. He was someone that I really loved. I talked to him all the time. He was seventy-seven when he died from complications from triple bypass heart surgery. What he died from was a one percent risk, I was told. Somebody is going to be that one percent. This time, it happened to be my dad. I missed him terribly. He spent his youth growing up in the Kansas countryside. He grew up very poor. His senior year in high school, he sold candy bars from his locker to make extra money. A teacher caught him, and he was sent to the principal’s office. The principal expelled him from school and did not allow him to graduate. He got a job the rest of that year and that following summer. In the fall, he returned to school to take his senior year again. He graduated from