Fogle Author Series to detail author's near-death experience

Life can change in an instant.

Fortunately for Dean Waggenspack, a 2022 near-death experience in the Virgin Islands did not end his prematurely.

Instead, the life coach and his wife, Rosaleen, have a rejuvenated appreciation for life and a renewed sense of the goodness in people following a miraculous rescue.

The Dayton couple co-authored “The Ledge and the Abyss: Near Death, Rescue, and the Search for Meaning” in the aftermath of their ordeal. The book, which was released earlier this year, recounts Waggenspack’s accident while hiking, the measures that were taken to save his life, and how he has come to grips with the experience.

An Alliance High School and Mount Union graduate, Waggenspack will appear at 6:30 p.m. Monday at Rodman Public Library to discuss his ordeal as part of the 2024 Fogle Author Series. Books will be available for sale, and the Waggenspacks will sign books following his remarks.

Registration is required to attend the program at rodmanlibrary.com.

The Waggenspacks were embarking on a Thanksgiving getaway on St. Croix that was to include their four adult children when Dean’s life-changing accident occurred.

Dean and Rose, along with their eldest son Stephen, were scouting out activities on the island and decided to check out the tide pools.

The Annaly Bay/Carambola Tide pools are a popular destination for tourists. Accessed by a two-mile hike through a rainforest, the pools seem safe and easy to access. Rose, Dean and Stephen were in one of the tide pools with a water depth of less than a foot when suddenly three waves came up over the rocks. Dean was knocked over and sucked down into a small hole. He was deposited into a pitch-black cavern, where he was up to his elbows in water and completely disoriented.

“I was down there and figured I was going to die because I was trapped,” Dean said. “The tide would eventually come up and I would drown.”

From Rose’s perspective, her husband of nearly 40 years had been there one moment and was gone the next. After 10 minutes had passed and Dean had not surfaced, she and Stephen went for help, thinking their mission was one for a recovery of Dean’s remains and not his rescue.

They managed to find two tour guides who knew exactly where to search and promised that they would find Dean.

After 40 minutes of being trapped in the chest-deep water, Dean was rescued. He had hypothermia and had swallowed substantial amounts of salt water and abrasions all over his body.

Flown by helicopter to Gov. Juan F. Luis Hospital in St. Croix, he spent Thanksgiving in the facility. However, within 24 hours, he was off oxygen, sitting up, and was able to carry on conversations with his loved ones.

The Waggenspacks’ outlook on life has changed as a result of the ordeal and they discuss the ramifications on their book. All proceeds made in sales are being donated to the hospital where Dean recovered.

Ahead of his visit back home to Alliance, Dean Waggenspack discussed his life and writing process:

Q: You grew up in Alliance. Please talk a little bit about your experiences here.

A: I lived in Alliance until I was 21, graduating with my bachelor’s degree at Mount Union. My dad was a school teacher, initially at Stanton and then at Alliance High School. I remember lots of good times playing baseball in the Hot Stove League. I went to elementary school at Parkway and State Street for junior high. I had my sophomore year at the "old" high school and was in the second class to ever graduate from the "new" high school. I worked the summer before the high school opened taking care of the newly planted grass at the new high school. We went to the Rodman Library often.

Q: You worked for Fortune 500 companies and are now a life coach and write a blog. Can you talk about your career path?

A: After getting my MBA in finance from Duke University, I went to work for NCR Corporation in Dayton, Ohio. I spent 30 years there in a number of management roles in finance, marketing, customer service and sales support. I then taught high school in a rural district outside Dayton for four years. In 2013, I started my personal blog, writing about whatever interested me, usually centered around careers and navigating life. I started my own career/life coach business in 2015 and today the business is focused on writing executive resumes. In 2019, I did a Tedx Talk on "Redefining Retirement." In 2022, I wrote and published my first non-fiction book, “Doable Change: Making Incremental, Achievable Difference in Your Career and Life.” It took me about five years to get the courage to finally write and publish that book. I've written a second non-fiction book, “The Ledge and The Abyss: Near Death, Rescue, and the Search for Meaning,” in 2023. I plan to write more books.

Q: What made you and your wife decide to write a book about the ordeal you and your family experienced?

A: There are a number of reasons. It is an incredible story that I wanted to share with others. It has three distinct phases. The first is my unexpected near-death event, with both my wife's and my perspectives. The second is the incredible rescue. The third is my search for meaning, trying to make sense out of why this event happened to me and what I am supposed to do about it. I wrote the book to honor the people that saved my life. Their willingness to risk their own lives to save mine, and their skills in bringing me back to health are a testament to the goodness in all people. I want to share with the reader my personal journey of trying to reconcile what happened to me, why it happened to me, and what I am supposed to do about it. Finally, we are donating all of the profits from the book and any donations we get to the hospital in St. Croix, the U.S. Virgin Islands, where I was saved.

Q: What do you hope people take away from reading your book?

Most importantly is that we all have the opportunity to make moments matter every day. I would not be alive except for a number of choices multiple people made at different times in their lives that led them to the place where they could save me. There are so many incredible stories of the rescuers and the health care workers. I have learned in my search for meaning that we all have the chance to make moments matter in our own lives and the lives of others, if we learn to recognize those moments. In addition, this book shows the goodness in strangers. In this time of so much division in our country, the goodness of ordinary people shines through to make a difference. It restored my faith in our shared humanity and I hope the reader gets that, too.

Q: Did you always aspire to be a published writer?

A: No. I did not. I can't point to a moment when I wanted to become one. I have always been a reader, mostly non-fiction. I always wrote notes of things I liked or learned about in books. When I started my blog, I found joy in writing. I decided around 2017 that I could write the book that became “Doable Change.” I kept setting it aside, thinking that no one would be interested in what I had to say. In 2019, I did a Tedx Dayton Talk and found that I did have something to say. It took a couple more years to finish that first book, after I recognized that telling what I had to say was worthwhile. Now I have a lot of ideas I want to write about.

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Fogle Author Series to detail author's near-death experience