South Strafford
It was their song, the song that seemed to sum up their courtship and 52-year marriage with its lyrics, “You’re still the one that makes me laugh. Still the one that’s my better half. We’re still having fun, and you’re still the one.”
When he heard the song John Reese expected to become so overcome by emotion that he would have to pull the car over to the side of the road. But that didn’t happen.
“Why am I not bawling?” he asked himself.
Then he realized that while his wife was no longer a physical presence, she was still very much an emotional and intellectual presence in his life — and the lives of everyone else she’d known well.
“She’s not here, but she’s not gone as far as I’m concerned. Her memory is with us in everything we do,” John Reese said in an interview in the South Strafford home he and his wife had shared since 1998, when they moved to the Upper Valley from New Jersey.
Deborah Frankel Reese died on Oct. 12, 2016, from pancreatic cancer at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. She was 75.
Born in Orange, N.J., in 1941 she grew up an only child in Essex Fells, N.J., less than 20 miles from New York City.
She met her future husband at Grover Cleveland High School in Caldwell, N.J. in the late 1950s, when she was co-editor of the school newspaper The Caldron and John Reese was the sports editor. With brown hair and brown eyes, and a lively, self-possessed manner, she was popular with girls and boys alike.
“We were really good friends,” John Reese said. “We had a lot of interests in common. We just hung out, being of a like mind.”
That didn’t stop him from having a crush on her. But at the time, Debbie Frankel had a beau who attended Dartmouth College and when it was time for her to apply to college, she drew a generous radius around Hanover that took in much of New England and part of New York state.
Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., fell within the radius and that is where Frankel went to college, majoring in English and minoring in studio art, a field in which she’d demonstrated obvious talent from a young age.
When that relationship ended, Frankel began to look at John Reese, who’d gone off to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, in a new light. And when she informed her father, who’d been a football player at Dartmouth, that she and Reese were now officially dating, his response was, “Finally!”
The couple was married in January, 1964. Born during World War II, not after it, they were just a little too old to be baby boomers. “We were born about five years too soon,” said John Reese.
Which meant that by the time the 1960s turned into the 1960s that people think of now — the era of the sexual revolution, the height of the Civil Rights movement, and a nascent feminist movement — the couple were already married and had children.
“We couldn’t go to Woodstock because we had babies,” Reese said.
“Had she born 20 years later, her life would have taken much the same path, but it would also have been very different because I think she would have become an artist of the highest caliber, ” said Elizabeth Dycus, who became one of Reese’s closest friends in Strafford.
Their generation, Dycus said, was not particularly encouraged to think about a future beyond marriage and motherhood.
The Reeses’ daughter Rebecca, born in 1967 and like her grandfather also a Dartmouth graduate, doesn’t recall that she and her mother had many conversations about that question, she said in a phone interview from New York state.
But, she added in an email, “when I was a child, she sure as hell made sure I knew girls could do anything boys could do.”
Other lessons her mother imparted, Rebecca Reese wrote, include: “If you want to do something, now is a good time. Yesterday is even better.
“A good garden is all about good soil.
“Make a good plan. But leave room for spontaneity/flexibility within your plan.
“Don’t be afraid of change.”
Her mother, she said, had “a vision in her head of what something should be, and this could be good or bad. The best way to get disappointed is to have high expectations. But she was usually able to realize that vision remarkably well. She used to have very big plans for something and we’d poo-poo that. And then she would make it work.”
Deborah Reese had a successful marriage and family life — along with their daughter, the Reeses have a son, Michael, who lives in California with his family — and she worked throughout her life.
She was an editor for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in New York City, and took on numerous volunteer jobs during her years at home with her children. She became active in Democratic politics and social justice causes in northern New Jersey, including the integration of the school districts in Montclair and Upper Montclair, where the family lived for 25 years.
When her children were old enough to be on their own, Reese returned to work in the health care field.
“We both in our lives tried to keep all those balls in the air, to keep a family, and a career and (in Reese’s case) her painting,” said Dycus.
Reese’s last canvas, painted in late summer 2016, is on an easel in their South Strafford living room. A landscape, it was done in Nantucket where she and her husband, and children and grandchildren, liked to spend time in the summer, showing a long dirt road narrowing as it leads through sand dunes and beach grass to the horizon. (A show of her paintings, “Of Transcendent Joy” is currently on view at Long River Gallery and Gifts in Lyme through Jan. 8)
Reese’s art was singularly important to her, but so were her friends, her husband and daughter said.
She had friends from elementary school, middle school, high school, college, and every stage of her life — and she kept up with all of them religiously, on the phone, by letter, in person, at reunions and on Facebook.
Prior to her 45th college reunion in 2008, Reese, who was class secretary, sent out surveys and gathered personal histories, writing a comprehensive account that turned out to be, in essence, a history of an entire generation of women — and a culture sandwiched between 1950s and 1960s America.
She also wrote family newsletters, was an organizer in 2009 of the 50th reunion of her high school class, worked on elementary school reunions and even after she was diagnosed with cancer in the spring of 2015, flew to Santa Fe, N.M., for a special reunion of her 8th grade class.
With the advent of Facebook, Rebecca Reese said, her mother “could do what she had always done: be the connecting point.”
Once the Reeses had moved to South Strafford, it didn’t take long for Reese to become involved with work in the town, as well as becoming active in Democratic politics in Vermont. With a friend she helped found Strafford ArtWorks, an organization that brought together local painters for critiques and exhibitions.
She also co-edited the community newsletter Strafford News for four years with Kate Linehan.
“She was very kind, very loving, extremely generous and extremely intelligent,” said Linehan.
Dycus has an almost cinematic recall of meeting and talking intensely with Reese for the first time, she said.
“There are some people in your life, from the first moment you meet them you remember them forever,” Dycus said.
“At that late point in life, to form a close friendship, it was a surprise. Debbie just moved right into my heart,” Dycus added.
Once Reese was diagnosed with cancer in the spring of 2015, Dycus was one of the friends who was permitted access to a blog that Reese wrote.
Because Reese thought of herself as a writer as much as she thought of herself as a painter, Rebecca Reese said, she was not surprised that her mother decided to chronicle her illness, through treatment, a period of remission and then recurrence of the cancer. Friends and family had access to the blog through a password.
It was a frank, nothing-held-back account that acknowledged her sadness that she would not get to see her grandchildren grow up, that she couldn’t maintain the gardens she loved, that it had become more difficult to paint, that she couldn’t give the causes most important to her the kind of attention she felt they deserved.
“It was really kind of a raw and very honest account of her fears and everything she was going through. People were amazed at about how brutally honest she was,” Rebecca Reese said.
“Life’s just not fair sometimes,” said Dycus. “But she didn’t whine. She taught us a lot in her living and in her dying.”
Reese died in the hospital, with her husband, children and grandchildren at her bedside. Those close family bonds had brought them through, just as they had sustained the generation before: her parents were married 50 years, and John Reese’s parents, 60.
“I think it’s part of the way we were brought up, and we instilled it in our kids. I couldn’t have picked a better wife for my son or a husband for my daughter; that came from somewhere,” John Reese said.
There will be a memorial service for Reese in the spring, but for now, said her husband, “grieving is not going to bring her back; it’s not going to help me.”
While his wife was of the glass-half-empty persuasion, Reese said, he is a glass-half-full man. There is more to be grateful for than not, he said.
“I wound up married to Debbie Frankel!” he said, raising his arms as if he’d just crossed a finish line in first place.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.