Lynda Karr:  

I don't imagine anyone remembers me, wallflower that I was in school, though I did participate in the Future Nurses Association, the Senior play, and the Talent Show at Lenape. If you're viewing me through Cloverleaf (wondering, "I don't remember any Lynda Sandford" and leafing through the yearbook), I only attended for 2 weeks of Sophomore year (1963-4), having gone through Jr High at LeRoy (lived next door to Nancy Crittenden), then moved to N.J. I registered on Classmates at Cloverleaf for all my LeRoy-attending friends. In 1967 I married Gary Karr, Lenape class of '64, and moved to Waukegan, IL and began our married life as an Avon lady while he attended a Navy school. I managed to survive his 20-year Naval career, following him from the Midwest to the West Coast, then back to the Midwest, then to the East Coast, and finally back to the Midwest to Columbus (OH) where he retired as the Executive Officer of the Navy-Marine Reserve Training Center. (His family settled in the Newark, OH area just before we married.) When, as a first-class petty officer, he was "stationed" at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, the Navy Enlisted Scientific Education Program paid for his college degree in Systems Analysis in exchange for 6 more years of service as an officer. During those college years, we created two little Karrs, Scott and Dawn, and I came to the realization that while I loved the kids, I "had" to get out of the house and talk to adult-type people, so I got a temporary job that turned into a career as a medical transcriptionist. I experienced regret at "abandoning" my kids for a career, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time and my kids still love me and aren't derelicts, drug addicts, or murderers, so I exited that guilt trip. Twenty years later, the stress of my medical transcriptionist job burned me out, and still not being able to just clean house, I established myself (in the early years of the commercial Internet) as a freelance proofreader, copyeditor, text editor, wordwright . . . whatever you wish to call it. Not a great writer in my opinion (though others disagree), but a great nit-picker. Oh, and did I mention my business (A Last Look) is completely Internet-based (people visit my web site, send an e-mail to get the editing process started, and I send the finished electronic file back to them via e-mail) so Gary and I could be winter Texans and summer Ohioans? "It's a tough life, but somebody has to do it", right? Well, we did it for 10 years, until Gary developed pancreatic cancer. Never sick a day in his life, he had to get one of the cancers with the lowest survival rate (4%)! He always did believe in doing whatever you do in a big way, so I guess if he had to get sick, he had to get the worst disease. From an early age Gary felt he would "die young", and he stayed in the Navy to provide an early retirement for himself so he could enjoy whatever longevity he was given. He was determined not to work till he was 65 and die before age 70 like his granddad and later his dad did. During our Navy years, which, of course, included the Vietnam War, the Lebanese crisis, and other international hot spots, I was acutely aware of the possibility that Gary may be right about his early demise, and during several incidents in his career, I prematurely mourned him in my fear for his life. Eventually we came to the belief that Gary's attitude toward life came from God, who was warning him that he would not survive to a ripe old age like my dad, who, having been born in 1921, is still going relatively strongly. Doors were opened for Gar so that he had choices to make that would have dramatically changed our lives, yet he always ignored the "dangling carrot" of riches and made decisions in favor of enriched family life and friendships. He was also very concerned with finding the real God, and through intense Bible studies found a loving and benevolent Father, for whom he developed an intense love and respect. His understanding of life and death was such that he had no fear of death, something that had once plagued him, and he proclaimed to everyone that if he lived because God wanted him to do something, he won, but if he died because it was his time to escape this deteriorating world, he still won against Satan because the cares of this world would be gone and the next thing he would see is Jesus. On December 11, 2006, after Scott, Dawn, and I had lunch together by his bedside, Gary gave up this life to, as the Bible explains, await the return of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to awaken all those who have died in Him from their graves and gather them together with His living believers and take them back to heaven with Him. When I'm lonely and sad, I know I'm just feeling sorry for myself, so I pray and revive fairly quickly. I also seek pity hugs at church, LOL. I'm functional due to the grace and strength God gave me and my "practice mourning" for him years ago as well as for the 3 months that preceded his death, when it became obvious that a cure was not going to happen. I thank God that the disease progressed rapidly from the time Gary became totally dependent on others, and he was spared a lingering death. As I said, God has blessed throughout our lives. Please take time to thank God for your blessings, too, for He surely blesses you, whether you hear and see and take the time to appreciate the blessings or not. UPDATES: To ease my pain, God has given me the Adventist Community Services Center here in Newark (Ohio) to direct. Sin...Expand for more