Re: Re: Re: Re: Update

I greatly appreciate your post to me, but it also saddens me deeply that you haven't found your level of inner peace because your postd are so informative and your humor is so great - often in a tongue in cheek style.

I've always been active traveling as part of my comptroller work in my working days. Annually, I took a two week period to perform organ classical music in all parts of Europe, traveled below Mexico City to the country's southern end annually with Lucille, Connie and Rick (without knowing pure Spanish, only Tex-Mex) in our motor home, also making two trips guiding interested parties to Mexico to assure easy border entry and departure, on seven different Board of Directors plus constant fund raising and always knowing what every employee was doing or better be doing.

Then, WHAM BAM, dx with IBM on Aug. 9, 1991 and advised to totally retire by end of 1991...then trying to find replacements to do all the work I had been doing over a quarter of century. I stumbled all that heart breaking work. empying out my main office with a packed van just before Christmas 1991 at age 59.5.

In Dallas then we owned a townhouse that I had to scoot up and down the steps. We had a story & half lake house nearby to where we live now. I didn't have any steps but knew I had to find another larger place place(that we still live in where you and Chris visited us.) I was doing all I could to forget the IBM.

Rick, my only son, assumed looking over our properties for me, but he died 1.5 years after I was dx, having a fatal heart attack as he was parking, returning to work after lunch. Another WHAM BAM that nearly killed me as well.

I had over $100,000 spent to make this home like we wanted it....but I was about to lose it mentally because my son and I always spent every weekend just he and I roaming the countryside. Lucille was still at work at AT&T. He always flew with me in our plane when I needed to go away, me letting his fly and I was the navagator.

Dear friends we knew in Cincinnati wintered in Florida on the island in the Gulf of Mexico. We flew down there and leased a condo on the ground floor acroos the courtyar from our friends and a few feet from the seawall overlooking only the Gulf.

I would make six round trips between Florida and Texas annually, staying two or three months each time at each location. Lucille would fly down for a long weekend then we would drive back to Texas. I think being alone helped me to get rid of my stinking-thinking. It took over 2 years to get my will rewritten after my son's death.

We could only take Florida like this for two or three years, then stayed in beautiful piney woods of East Texas. I wrote "Coping with a Myositis Disease" book that was published in NYC, started this website with my son's life insurance and opened the Amazon.com connection which keeps me busy every day since then, making wonderful friends like you, Martin and 100's of others.

Right now, I have total inner peace in knowing I've helped others when I felt my life was over when dx with IBM. I think my son's death, the funeral of my sister and Mom's funeral (all at my expense) helped me greatly to acccept that I could find inner peace inspite of everything.

I have already planned my Order of Celebration folder for my funeral, only the date of my death has to be inserted before the final printing. I have all my music that was mostly professional recorded while giving concerts in Europe. Kern, my friend in town who does concert work around the world, and Kelly Miller, our webmaster, will be in charge of my funeral service. All my stastics, plans and instructions for my funeral home friends that I knew in Dallas will follow them so Lucille doessn't have to do anything when I die (she was a total basket case when Rick died so I wanted to prevent that when I die.)

Yes, I have complete inner peace. As Dan the Man puts me into bed every night, I ask the Lord to allow me to die each night, waking up in Heaven.

Sorry, Greg, for being so long in this editorial, but when I started writing, I just couldn't find a stopping place.