The last noble act of a generous life
I was not among those who gathered in White’s funeral home in Kentville last week to say goodbye to Wayne Baltzer.
If I had been present, I would have heard how he taught his daughters to be good people.
How he never complained when asked to fix his youngest daughter Kayla’s perpetually broken Mini.
How he drove Taralee everywhere — and no matter how tired he was, crawled out of bed to give her a drive home from the Kentville bars she sometimes went to in her fun-loving 20s, just to know his oldest girl was safe and sound.
If I had taken the roundabout way home after the funeral, I would have driven past the Michelin plant in Waterville, where Baltzer had toiled for a long time, and where the flag was lowered to half-mast to mark his death on May 9 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at just 63.
Most everywhere I turned last week, in fact, I heard more about his selflessness and humanity, and understood, more deeply, the esteem in which this quiet man who wielded no flashy power or influence in life was held.
From his son-in-law, SaltWire colleague Brian Mumford, who told me how Baltzer “was the most dependable and honourable man you could hope for in a father-inlaw,” how “he grew up dirt poor and worked his ass off his entire life” and how, after being laid off with 24 years in at the Ralston Purina feed mill, he went back to get his high school equivalency certificate to make a better life for his family.
But mostly from his wife, Kim, who told me how he was “born in the wrong time” because if the right educational supports were in place when he was struggling in school, Baltzer might have become a historian or museum curator.
His passion, you see, was “chasing the dead” to use his wife’s evocative phrase: He was a relentless family genealogist who helped find and resurrect abandoned graveyards.
Baltzer also worked tirelessly to unearth information about the poor farms, a type of rural orphanage and poor house, once found in the Annapolis Valley — and paid particular attention to identifying the lost graves associated with those sad places because unidentified graves always felt unjust to him.
DEDICATION DESPITE ALS
After ALS began to take its terrible toll, it was impossible to continue this research. Yet Baltzer still somehow managed to attend the dedication ceremony for the Billtown poor farm cemetery, a place that he seemed unable to shake, and on which he worked long and hard.
And yet this was not the final selfless act in Wayne Allan Baltzer’s generous life. This deed occurred after his death, even if the groundwork for it was laid back in the fall of 2021.
Back then he had pain in his right arm, first diagnosed as a bulging neck disc, and something had noticeably changed in his gait, thought to be the result of a long-ago on-thejob knee accident.
In time, there were more tests, then a diagnosis of
ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, for which there is no known cure.
“He signed the papers that day,” said Kim.
One document confirmed he did not want to be put on a respirator or feeding tube when the end neared.
The second document was a consent for autopsy in which he donated his brain for research, both into his ALS, and also the dyslexia that made his school years so difficult.
“His view was that maybe if he did this it would help someone else someday,” she said.
ALS is rare, hitting 120-160 patients a year in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Those numbers haven’t changed much over the years. The age of the people it hits has.
Kimberly Carter, president of the ALS Society of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, told me that when she started there, 13 years ago, not a single patient was under the age of 60.
Today, within the two provinces, there are currently a dozen ALS sufferers under the age of 40.
Most people who get the disease die within two to five years, Baltzer only lived 18 months after his diagnosis.
In the end, this man who loved the outdoors and was a proud brewer of his own beer was unable to move and could only communicate via blinks on eye-gaze technology as he did during his last birthday party.
The next day, he was admitted to Valley Regional Hospital with pneumonia, which a doctor said he was unlikely to survive.
The family was summoned.
At around 3 a.m. on May 9, the respirologist removed his oxygen mask.
“He took a couple of breaths then he passed away naturally, peacefully,” his wife said.
She said that she wouldn’t have changed a thing in her husband’s last hours: Baltzer didn’t sit for days in the hospital hooked up to machines. His family were right there by his side in his final moments.
“In retrospect, I felt that the doctor kept him alive long enough for us to say goodbye,” Kim said.
Baltzer is not done with this world quite yet.
The Maritime Brain Tissue Bank does research, mostly into Alzheimer’s disease. Its core purpose is a repository of brain tissue.
Donations of brain tissue like the one made by Baltzer are kept there until a lab somewhere asks for it for research.
“The more people we have studying those diseases, the better chance we have to learn more about them and to discover cures,” said the bank’s laboratory manager Andy Reid.
Those ALS and dyslexia research labs could be anywhere in the world, which means Baltzer’s final noble act is like a pebble dropped in a lake, sending out ripples that just grow and grow.
John DeMont is a Halifaxbased columnist with SaltWire Network.