Fred Neal Ransdell

On September 12, 2023, Fred Neal Ransdell, beloved husband, father, and friend, passed into the arms of our Lord after battling Parkinson's Disease for more than 25 years.

How can I tell the world how wonderful you were? Where shall I begin? While WW2 was raging in Europe and the Pacific theater, you were born in May 1943 as the youngest child to Donald E. (“Butter”) Ransdell and Ruth Snyder Ransdell in the small peaceful town of Edinburgh, Indiana, where the Blue River runs through it. You spent many a summer day with your friends swimming in Big Blue. Your sister Helen was ten years older than you and your big brother David was 5 years older, so in many ways, you were like an only child. Your dad worked as a cemetery caretaker and your mom occasionally worked as a cafeteria lady in the high school. You loved your family, you loved your friends, and you loved your town. After high school, you attended Elkhart University in Indiana, where you obtained your Certification as a Dental Technician. After Elkhart, you entered the U.S. Navy and honorably served stateside as a Dental Technician and General Field Medic.

After military service, you moved to Arizona where you honed your love of hiking and fossil-hunting and Camelback Mountain became one of your favorite hikes. You followed your big brother David to Garland, Texas in hopes of a better job in home sales. After that short stint, your next career as a traveling Pharmaceutical Salesman proved much more successful and Garland is where you raised your daughter and son. You were into a healthy lifestyle and enjoyed hiking, jogging, and skiing. You were also a regular churchgoer and attended Buckingham United Methodist Church. Around 1976, several church members started up a Spades Card Club on Saturday evenings. Once a month, one couple would host a light dinner, and 8-10 more couples would come and bring their own beverages. Each month a different couple would host and this would continue for more than 40 years! Every month brought the sharing of joys and sorrows amongst the card club members. They talked of their kids, their jobs, their illnesses, and everything in between because the group cared about each other. Along the way, new members replaced outgoing ones who were moving out of the area and some new members were from different faith denominations. It was all good and brought deep connections to good people, which is something you dearly cherished. Sadly, the Spades Club played its last hand when COVID brought get-togethers to a standstill. With the advent of COVID vaccinations, the group did not resume its activities as the health and mobility of its members were declining all around.

So far, your life had been pretty average, and that continued for almost 20 years. During that time, you divorced, became a single parent, and switched careers to intermodal transportation. This new desk job allowed you to focus more on your children without having to travel. As a single dad raising a teenage boy, you were not looking to remarry, but that was soon to change. In 1987, you attended a co-worker’s wedding and became smitten there with a brown-eyed law student from a large Hispanic family. After 6 weeks of courtship, you asked her to marry you. In 1988, you married Rita Denise Garcia at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church and settled into suburban life with your new bride. This deep and abiding love affair was a partnership of faith and commitment, and its passion and strength continued until the day you took your last breath.

You were never a wealthy businessman nor were you a prominent politician, yet you touched thousands of lives by your example of what a man of faith should look like. Your quiet leadership began in earnest when you were diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease around 1995.

CHAPTER 2 – SHOOTING THE FINGER AT PARKINSON’S

Your hand tremors began slowly but eventually, you were diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease (“PD”). Like most people, you were angry that this disease had hit you just when you and your bride were planning on so many new adventures. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair. Your bride encouraged you to follow your dreams, and not to let PD minimize your aspirations and connections with people. And that’s exactly what you did. You went to school at night and finished your B.S. degree in 1994. You joined the Dallas Paleontological Society and later became its president. You went on many fossil digs. You volunteered at the Dallas Museum of Natural History and worked as a preparator.

During your time with the Paleontology Society, you would give presentations to school children on dinosaurs. You answered their questions and took picture books to explain how the creatures looked and acted. The kids always loved your presentations, almost as much as you loved giving them.

The healthy lifestyle that you had followed so closely throughout your life paid off as you continued to jog, to hike, and to keep moving. Your closest fitness advisor was your neurologist – you followed all his recommendations and became an active member of the Dallas Area Parkinson Society. If your doctor said dancing was good for you, you joined a PD dance program. If he said that fitness boxing would improve your balance, you were all in. If he said that you needed physical therapy, you agreed to it. Birthday parties, pool parties, anniversaries, State Fair outings, Halloween parties, and concerts at the AAC were all on the menu of your life. And if that wasn’t enough, you decided that the Grand Canyon was calling your name. And so, on four separate occasions after your diagnosis, you hiked down the Grand Canyon just for the fun of it. In 2010, you chronicled your first ten years with Parkinson's Disease in a book you wrote and published, aptly called Shaky Man Walking.

In 2003, you were far from done with new adventures as you reluctantly agreed to your wife’s begging to host foreign exchange high school students from the Baltic region of Europe. The first girl from 2003 was Natasha from Ukraine, the second girl (Katie) in 2004 was from Russia, and the third girl in 2006 was Kaja from Slovakia. Each girl lived with you and Rita for approximately 10 months as each attended Berkner High School. These smart, multilingual girls injected new life into the Ransdell home with all the trials and tribulations that teenage girls experience when they are 16 and 17 years old. Each girl became part of the family and in our hearts became our adopted daughters. You continued your strong bond with them by regularly talking with them via Skype and visiting them in Europe just a few years back. You considered yourself as their second “papa” and many blessings flowed and continue to flow from their life with us almost 20 years ago.

You were also a real papa to your daughter Randi and your son Brent. The love and support of an attentive father cannot be underestimated as you modeled behaviors of kindness, responsibility, patience, and love. You attended high school football games just to see your kids play in the band and on the drill team. You didn’t just drop them off at the movie theater, you joined them at the movies. Eventually, your kids left for college, graduated, married, and produced 5 wonderful grandchildren for you to love. Blessings continued to flow even as PD continued to progress in its intensity.

Your wife encouraged you to retire early as she worried about your 30-mile-long drive to work with tremors, and so you retired at the age of 62. Even so, you assumed new duties at home to prevent Rita from working double duty herself. Laundry, dishes, grocery shopping, paying bills, and making dinner all became part of your new job description. You took on these new tasks willingly, lovingly, and without complaint. And so, the marriage continued to flourish, strengthened by selfless love.

After 2010, PD began to gain momentum and you began to experience more balance issues. You encountered more falls and some fractures, ultimately resulting in the use of various walkers. You took it in stride and accepted your new normal. Once again, you modeled serenity in the face of adversity. This was not lost on any of us who observed these physiological changes on a daily basis. In 2010, you also published your book and continued to live life to the fullest.

In 2016, your medications were no longer very effective in controlling your tremors, so you applied for a Deep Brain Stimulation procedure. After determining that you were a viable candidate, your DBS procedure was performed at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

In deep brain stimulation (“DBS”) surgery, electrodes are inserted into a targeted area of the brain, using magnetic resonance imaging and a second procedure is done to implant an impulse generator battery (“IGB”), in the chest, similar in size to a heart pacemaker. Together they work to reduce tremors and the patient can control the strength of their signals through a hand-held device. Immediately following your procedure, you were able to drink a cup of coffee without tremors, but you said the best part was being able to hold your wife’s hand without shaking.

In October 2020, your world and mine changed forever. During rehabilitation for hip surgery, you were having more difficulties with your meals, so a swallow study was done. We discovered that you were suffering from silent aspiration due to curvature of the spine and that any liquids or food taken by mouth could go down the windpipe and cause aspiration pneumonia. Another gift from PD. The doctor gave you two choices: continue to eat by mouth, or have a G-tube surgically inserted to eat liquid nutrition and water by stomach tube. He said that eating by mouth would probably result in aspiration pneumonia within a year or less. If you chose the G-tube, you could live longer, but no telling for how long. You looked at me and looked at your adult children and chose the G-tube.

There is no doubt in my mind that you did not want to eat by stomach tube. In spite of this horrible dilemma, you chose life, even though the sacrifice was something beyond measure. The pleasures of eating are something most of us take for granted. Toast and jam. Ham and eggs. Enchiladas. Cheeseburgers. Sandwiches. They all went away in one procedure, and feeding you liquids 8 times per day was the price you paid for wanting to live just a little longer. With each passing month, your body suffered new assaults on the spine, the kidneys, the lungs, the skin, and the stoma (hole). Your complaints were nearly non-existent and we agonized to see how much your choice had cost you.

During the last week of August 2023, you asked for your stomach tube to be removed. On September 5th, the tube was removed by your doctor and on September 8, 2023, we placed you under hospice care at home following two consecutive trips to the ER. We stood around your bedside and loved you and comforted you with prayers and music and kisses. Finally, on September 12, 2023, you were released from your suffering and taken by the Lord to heaven. It is said that grief is the price paid for loving someone too much. So be it. Many blessings came our way from loving you and being loved in return. May God hold you in His loving embrace for all eternity. Now that you are gone, I must wait until we are reunited again through the power of the resurrection. Fred, you were more than my best friend. You were my warrior, my hero, and my love. And I will always be your bride.

Fred Neal Ransdell was a man of faith and part of the “Silent Generation”, the youngest of three children born to Donald Ransdell and Ruth Snyder Ransdell in Edinburgh, Indiana in May 1943.

Fred is survived by his loving wife, Rita Denise; devoted children Carol Randi Ransdell Boswell and William Brent Ransdell, son-in-law Danny Boswell, and daughter-in-law Rebecca Ransdell; grandchildren Taylor, Bronwyn, and Logan Boswell, and Isabel and Jonas Ransdell; and many much-loved family and friends, including his cousin Linda Kay Ransdell; nieces and nephews Tami Dargavel, Ginger Watts, Jeff Smith, and Mark Ransdell; and great nieces and nephews Paris Ball, Blake Dargavel, Amber Obregon, and Tony Smith.

Fred is preceded in death by his father, Donald E. (“Butter”) Ransdell, mother Ruth Snyder Ransdell, sister Helen Carico, and brother David Ransdell.

Services for Fred are being held on Monday, September 25, 2023, at St. Joseph Catholic Church, 600 S. Jupiter Rd., Richardson, Texas 75081. A Rosary will be held at 1 pm, with the Funeral Mass at 1:30 pm – followed by a procession to the Columbarium for committal and inurnment of the ashes.

A celebration of Fred’s life will be held in the St. Joseph Dining Hall immediately following the Inurnment, where friends and family can share stories of Fred’s goodness and humor.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations to the Dallas Area Parkinson Society as it provided virtually all of Fred’s exercise and vocal programs at no cost due to generous private donations.