My previous letter concluded with Tammy and I moving with our children from Utah to Idaho in 2015, and I will continue from that point. We bought a home north of Rexburg in an area known as Salem. Our children were enrolled at either BYU-Idaho or Sugar-Salem High School, and they made some wonderful friends. Tammy also flourished in our new surroundings. She loved the rural lifestyle with plenty of property to create her own little farm.
She’d always had a soft spot in her heart for animals, but in Springville we’d had a small yard that limited the types of pets we could have.
However, soon after we arrived in Idaho, Tammy began to assemble an ever-growing family of pets, including chickens, pigeons, cats, a rabbit, and of course, Tammy’s favorite pet, Indian Runner ducks. She named them all and enjoyed caring for them. She also created several garden areas around the property she would carefully maintain.
After moving to Idaho, Tammy and I stayed busy running our publishing company. I was the president and editor-in-chief, while she was the vice president and chief financial officer. I was also making good money writing a weekly online column, along with receiving royalties on my published books. We felt blessed. So Tammy didn’t need to work beyond her company duties, but several years earlier in Springville she had taken a part-time position as the computer lab teacher at our children’s elementary school. She loved working with the students, and the job was very rewarding to her.
When we prepared to move to Idaho, Tammy looked for a similar position, and she was hired as the assistant librarian at Madison Middle School in Rexburg. She was later hired as the librarian at Central Elementary in Sugar City, which was much closer to our home. She also took on the task of creating a computer lab at the school, modeled after the one she’d had in Springville. I would visit Tammy at the elementary school every couple of weeks, and I helped her out during open-house events such as Back to School Night. It was fun to be greeted by the students as “Mrs. Daybell’s husband.”
Tammy had always strived to be physically fit, and in Idaho she turned part of our front room into her workout area. She enjoyed doing yoga, and she liked to play several exercise video games such as Just Dance, Walk It Out, and Exerbeat. It wasn’t until the final year of her life that she started having noticeable physical setbacks. She caught a cold during the holidays, and she battled chest congestion and a deep cough throughout early 2019. She was also experiencing menopause symptoms with regular hot flashes. She was now 48, but she said she felt she had aged ten years in just a few months Her exercise routine faded away and she became content to just sit on the couch, watch TV, and work on her laptop.
My children and I encouraged Tammy to visit her doctor for a full health exam, but she resisted going. She had grown up with a firm belief in using holistic medicine and natural healing remedies to regain her health. I had seen these methods produce many positive effects over the years, with Tammy having rapid recoveries. But this time seemed different, as if something had shifted within her body.
I regret not being more insistent in having her get a physical exam, because there were four major reasons for concern, and they all got worse as 2019 progressed.
First, there were Tammy’s lengthy colds and prolonged coughing fits. Second were her lethargy and overall lack of energy.
This wasn’t the same woman who could work in the garden and care for her animals all evening without stopping. She began using the phrase “need to sit down” almost daily after any sustained physical activity.
The third reason for concern were her swollen joints and bloating in her abdomen. Tammy initially tried to brush off these symptoms as temporary water retention, but they never went away. One day she came up to me and partially lifted her shirt. She grabbed hold of her belly and said, “Look at this! I can almost hear my guts sloshing around.”
Around that same time, Tammy and my son attended a health wellness fair. They were examined by a nurse, who was bothered by how swollen Tammy’s legs were, and that she had developed varicose veins. The nurse urged her to see a doctor about it, but Tammy refused.
She finally admitted that her condition might be more serious when she called me into the bedroom one afternoon. I found her sitting on the edge of the bed, wiping away tears from her eyes. It was late August 2019, and the new school year was about to begin. As she sat on the bed, she had a pair of pants halfway up her legs. She said, “These pants fit me just fine at the end of the school year. Now I can’t even get them over my hips.”
She stood up and demonstrated to me in frustration. None of her other school pants fit either. We went to the store the next day to buy replacements, and she ended up having to go up two pant sizes. She was very discouraged about it, and she eventually resorted to wearing full-length skirts most of the time to school.
The fourth cause of concern was a series of fainting spells. Tammy felt her equilibrium was being affected, as well as her stamina. It wasn’t unusual to find her in the kitchen with both hands on the counter with her head down. She would say, “I’m okay. I’m just a little dizzy.”
Tammy’s first major fainting incident happened in April 2019. She had finished putting the animals away for the night, and as she crossed the back driveway, she blacked out and crashed forward onto the asphalt, injuring her wrist. She came into the house and explained what happened, saying her wrist might be broken. I urged her to go to the emergency room, but she refused. She took an herbal remedy instead, and the pain went away in a few days.
That summer we went to the LDS temple, and during one of the ceremonies Tammy fainted, collapsed backward, and then threw up all over the front of her dress. She was very embarrassed as the temple’s medical team rushed into the room to care for her.
In September, she essentially repeated her fall in the back driveway. She fell in almost the exact spot and reinjured her wrist. This time she didn’t object when I insisted on taking her to the doctor, who prescribed pain medication and gave her a wrist brace to help heal the damage. I suggested she take a couple of school sick days to recuperate, but she shook her head and said, “No way. You know how much I hate a substitute messing up the library. I’ll just sit there if I have to.”
From that day on, the setbacks came more frequently. Her nose was running constantly, and she would have sneezing fits. She also began to complain she was having out-of-body experiences. She described how her spirit would hover above her body for a few seconds at a time. In early October, one of those incidents happened while I was in the living room and she was in the kitchen. I suddenly heard a loud crash and I rushed into the kitchen to find Tammy had actually fainted into the open fridge. She had landed hard against one of the shelves and was slumped down in the bottom half. I helped her stand up and told her I was very worried about her. She just waved her hand and asked me to help her lay down on the couch.
The day before she passed away, she came home completely worn out from setting up the displays for the school’s upcoming book fair. That evening she told family members she wasn’t feeling well, and later had a bad coughing fit before throwing up. We went to sleep, and when I woke the next morning, she had passed away. I will describe that terrible morning and subsequent events in a future letter.
But as word spread of her death, everyone was devastated, because she had been such a powerful, wonderful influence to so many people. We all feel that loss everyday. I miss her and love her.
Tammy was a true angel on earth, and I know she is still watching over our family. My children and I have felt her presence many times since her death. We sense she is particularly interested in her precious grandchildren. We believe families can be together forever in heaven, and although she has moved on ahead of us, we know we will be reunited with her someday.
Bookshelf
Members of the LDS Church seek to find their ancestors because we believe that if people don’t learn about the gospel of Jesus Christ in this life, they will have the opportunity to do so in the Spirit World after they die. We believe they will be able to reunite with their loved ones there and live as families in heaven. That’s why the LDS Church builds beautiful temples across the world, so gospel ordinances can be performed in behalf of our ancestors.
Throughout the 1990s, that was a key focus for us and our extended family members. We completed the temple work for hundreds of ancestors over a period of years. Then later on we discovered that a woman named Rachel Marlar had been overlooked in our records. Several years had passed since the temple work had been done for Rachel’s parents and siblings, and we sensed she was very anxious to join her family in Paradise. We submitted Rachel’s name for temple work, and when family members performed ordinances in Rachel’s behalf, they could feel her presence in the temple, as if she was watching them take place.
The unusual part came two days later when Rachel appeared to Tammy’s grandma Lucille. Rachel stood at the end of Lucille’s bed as a spirit dressed in white, and she told Lucille how grateful she was that she could now join her family in Paradise. One interesting fact is that soon after Rachel visited Lucille, we found an actual photo of her taken in the 1800s. Lucille saw the photo and verified that the woman in the photo was the same woman who had appeared to her in her bedroom.
That is why when I wrote “Chasing Paradise”, the main family has the last name of Marlar, and why Lucille plays a key role. As I wrote the novel, it evolved into a full-blown adventure that takes place both on Earth and in the Spirit World as a young woman seeks to reunite with her family in Paradise.
You can check out “Chasing Paradise” here (paid link)
Musical Notes
Tammy and I enjoyed taking our kids on several “day trips” each year. One memorable trip was when we decided to visit the city of Preston, where the ultimate Idaho movie “Napoleon Dynamite” was filmed. Our family has watched the film often enough that we can quote the dialogue by heart.
For this little adventure, Tammy printed off an online guide and map that showed the locations where key scenes took place. We drove slowly past the downtown landmarks, then stopped to take photos next to Napoleon’s tetherball pole. Finally we began our quest to find the Dynamite family home. It was surprisingly quite a ways out of town, but we found it!
Growing up, the song “Private Idaho” by the B-52s was my main connection to the Gem State. But that song is clearly not a fair representation of the lifestyle or the musical tastes of eastern Idaho, where Rexburg is located.
A better fit is Tim McGraw’s “Where the Green Grass Grows.” Just replace the line about his “corn popping up in rows” with “spuds”, and it works! I loved driving in my truck along the Fremont County backroads with the windows rolled down, potato fields on every side, and the Grand Tetons in the distance.
I just remembered one detail: it snows about nine months of the year. But we certainly stayed busy during the winter. Our youngest son was in the high school pep band and was also a star in the school musical, and it was fun to watch him as we sat among our friends and neighbors. I also enjoyed cheering for the Sugar-Salem athletic teams.
Then the snow would melt for a while, and we would explore the outdoors, such as Mesa Falls, or float down the Henry’s Fork River. Three of my children are raising their families in the Rexburg area, and I’m grateful my grandchildren will grow up in a peaceful place with good people, “where the green grass grows.”