My next guest on the blog tour is Doug Simpson. What inspires him? Take a peek!

Dacque LaRose, Just an Average Nice Guy

I was born and raised in Canton, Ohio, and after receiving my teacher qualifications, I returned to my home town to begin my career as a high school teacher. A teacher friend was nice enough to introduce me to his lovely sister Beverly, and a year later we were married. We were blessed with three adorable and bright children who now all have flourishing careers all around the world. It was a wonderful life.

I retired from teaching at sixty and Bev and I were thoroughly enjoying retirement and the empty nest. Unfortunately, bliss was short-lived. Within a few months, Bev was diagnosed with colon cancer and after a valiant struggle, her soul returned home six months later.

Lost. Alone in a big old empty house. There is no training for that! Fortunately, I was by nature, philosophical. I would miss Bev until my dying breath, but I was determined to make the best of things as they were.

The next big hurdle I needed to leap over quickly drew down upon me. Bev’s birthday was a little more than a month after her passing. I had made a habit of always surprising her with something special on her birthdays, but what was I supposed to do this year on our special day?

I purchased a dozen red roses, her favorite, and placed them on the kitchen counter in Beverly’s favorite vase. While I was accumulating favorites, I retrieved my favorite photo of Beverly from my nightstand in our bedroom, and placed it beside the vase filled with red roses. Nice memorial arrangement, I thought to myself.

Before I retired that evening, I said a loving prayer to Beverly as I stood before this private memorial, and turned to the refrigerator to retrieve a drink. Staring at me, from the top right corner of the refrigerator freezer door, was ‘our’ magnet, the one that I had purchased for her decades earlier, and which had morphed into ‘our’ saying: You Light Up My Life.

I hesitated a long moment, then removed the magnet from the door and placed it on the counter in front of the roses and photo of Beverly. Might as well gather all of the favorites, I reasoned.

In the morning, I noticed that the magnet was not on the counter where I was pretty sure I had left it the night before. Immediately checking the door of the freezer I realized it was still in its usual home in the top right-hand corner. I was almost certain that I had moved the magnet before retiring the night before, but managed to half convince myself that I must have simply considered doing it without actually moving it to the counter.

That evening, before retiring, I specifically moved ‘our’ magnet from the freezer door to the counter. In the morning it was once again back in its home on the freezer door.  For a solid week, I shifted the magnet to the counter before retiring, and found it back on the refrigerator in the morning. The roses, by then, had outlived their due date, and I dismantled my private memorial to Beverly, convinced that she definitely did not want me messing around with her magnet.

A few nights later, I woke up in the dark to the sound of snoring, apparently from Beverly’s side of the bed. No one else was in the house. Beverly snored occasionally, specifically when she lay in one particular position on her pillow. I cautiously reached my arm over to touch her. No one was there, but the snoring stopped. Snoring incidents occurred three or four times within a week or so. I knew I heard the snoring from Beverly’s side of the bed, but no one could ever be detected and the snoring ceased as soon as I reached over to touch her.

One evening, not too long after the last snoring incident, I was reading a book in the living room. For whatever reason, I looked up from the book and saw the spirit of Beverly sitting across the room in her favorite chair, smiling at me. She looked as she had when she was thirty, very beautiful and healthy. In my state of shock, I could not speak a word, but Beverly’s spirit spoke softly to me. “You must stop grieving and get on with your life. I am fine. There is no more pain.” Beverly’s spirit then faded away.

A couple of years earlier, while accompanying Beverly on one of her Saturday morning yard-sale excursions, I had picked up a book about Edgar Cayce, the legendary American mystic from Virginia Beach, so I had some knowledge concerning the theory of survival of the soul and spirit after the death of the body, and reincarnation of souls. I quickly retrieved the book, titled There Is A River, written by Thomas Sugrue.

A further, careful re-reading of the book, along with additional research, convinced me that I had not been hallucinating at all when the magnet persistently moved from the counter to the fridge, nor when I heard Beverly’s snoring in bed beside me, nor when her spirit visited with and spoke to me in our living room.

Jumping ahead, I sold our home in Canton and joined the snowbird migration south, settling in the small city of Anywhere. I later discovered a local group called the Reincarnation Enlightenment Group and eventually uncovered a dozen of my past lifetimes. As my knowledge of souls and life on the other side increased, another phenomenon began to occur. It took a while to accept it, but I realized that I was receiving communications from the other side, sometimes through voices and other times during dreams. It turned out that I was apparently receiving messages from God to do good deeds, sent through one of His messengers.

My new career suddenly commenced. I was enlisted as one of God’s Good Samaritans. Some how, I’m still not sure how, Canadian writer, Doug Simpson, heard about my good deeds and started writing books about me. Me? Can you believe it? His first novel, titled Soul Awakening, released in October of 2011, recounts how I was lead by the Powers-That-Be to two total strangers, in separate incidents, and we eventually discovered that we had shared previous lifetimes together. His second novel, Soul Rescue, is the story of how a dream communication I received led me to a children’s hospital in Anywhere where I was to rescue some earth-bound souls of children who had died there years earlier but had not managed to make the normal cross-over to the other side. Soul Rescue should be out in the fall of 2012. A third novel, a murder mystery titled Soul Mind, has been completed as a first draft and is scheduled for release in the fall of 2013. It describes a totally different adventure, where the spirit and soul of a murdered acquaintance enlists my assistance in solving his murder.

I never knew retirement could be so much fun!

Dacque LaRose

© Doug Simpson 2012

Doug Simpson is a retired high school teacher who has turned his talents to writing. His first novel, a spiritual mystery titled Soul Awakening, was published in the United States in October of 2011, by Book Locker. Check it out at http://booklocker.com/books/5754.html. It is available in print and eBook format through most book stores around the world. His magazine and website articles have been published in 2010 to 2012 in Australia, Canada, France, India, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. His articles can be accessed through his website at http://dousimp.mnsi.net.