In Her Words: Becky Reese, Former Teacher, Helps Others Through Education & Advocacy
With a teacher's heart and a caregiver's resolve, Becky Reese transforms personal adversity into a lifeline for her husband and the aphasia community.
Ricky and I have known each other our whole lives. We were born in the same hospital, six days apart. We grew up together. Our families went to the same church. In high school, I dated Ricky’s best friend. When Jeff dumped me, I started dating Ricky. We started dating when we were 16 and got married when we were both 23 years old.
It was 2018 and everything was just going fine in our life. I had been retired for about a year after working for 35 years as a schoolteacher, and was trying to find my way in retirement. I was volunteering and getting more involved with my church. Ricky was running our family business, Reese Chevron, a service station in downtown Sarasota. And then one Saturday morning in March, at age 58, he had a stroke and fell out of bed. I knew it was a stroke, because my father had a stroke.
For me, one of the hardest parts was going to the hospital every day for 60+ days. The last week before Ricky got admitted to a skilled nursing facility is when I broke down. He had another fall, and they said to me “You're going to have to get a care partner. You're not going to get into a skilled nursing facility.” At that point, I came home, and I told my daughter, “I can’t get up. I can’t do anything.” A friend took me to the doctor, and I got meds. I was completely out for about a week.
My daughter and my son stepped in. My father-in-law, Dick Reese, who was 82 at the time, got back to running Reese’s Chevron, the family business. My daughter called our family and our friends from church, and said, “Becky can’t do this anymore.” Ricky was at the skilled nursing facility, and we needed people to stop in every day. My daughter made a calendar, and people came and went. Friends and family went to the hospital, went to the rehab every day, or to the skilled nursing facility, and stayed with him during the day. I would go and make an appearance for like five minutes, and I’d come home. That was it. The stress level was so high. But the day he came home, I was fine. My sister was here. I didn’t need my meds anymore. I was very fortunate to have help from family, especially from my kids and my sister, who’s a nurse and stayed for weeks.
When we left the hospital, we met a young woman who was a substitute speech language pathologist. She did research and gave us two important pieces of information. She found an intensive speech program at the University of Central Florida and a local support group, The Suncoast Support Group. Both were life changing.
I came home and my daughter looked up the support group. We got home on June 24 and on July 2, she said, “I think you should go,” So I said okay, and I explained to Ricky that there would be other people with strokes, that kind of thing. We walk in and he immediately sees other people who have the right-side paralysis, braces on their leg, their right hands aren’t working, trying to talk about this and that and everything. In the support group meeting, caregivers went into a separate room, and I was able to ask all these questions. I got a wealth of information from them. They were just wonderful, so welcoming. We went out to dinner with them afterwards, and when we got in the car to leave, he signed with his hand that everybody was like him. That brought tears to my eyes. This started the aphasia track.
At this time, the Aphasia Community Center was starting out. They had applied for their 501c3, they were just starting meetings. I said, “I’ll go, but I’ll just observe and listen to everything,” because I was still learning what aphasia was. Soon they asked if I would be a board member, and I said yes. In November of 2018, there was a huge fundraiser that a group in Sarasota put on for Ricky, because we were a business in town. I said the only way I would do it would be if I could give some of that money back to the Aphasia Community Center. I also told them there was going to be a lot of people there and they said they were prepared. It was at the Gold Coast Eagle Distributing event space, and they provided free beer. We had an unbelievable turnout and raised $20,000.
The Aphasia Community Center started to meet at Willer Hall in my church once a month because they were desperately trying to figure out where to go. Things were going great. We had a whole day session once a month and it was wonderful. And then Covid hit, and like everybody else, we went to Zoom and made Zoom classes, Zoom games — that kind of thing. After we came out of Covid I was at a church meeting one day and I heard somebody say, “You know, they’ve got all those empty rooms over there, now that they don’t have any kids in the preschool.” I said, “What empty rooms? What do you mean?” and my little wheels were going. The rooms were gross and disgusting. And I was like, “Oh, you know, I could see this!” and we met with the church to discuss rent for room 5. That was in November 2021. Everybody worked on it — tearing down, painting, cleaning. That's what made it such a special place. And then it just started blossoming from there.
After the stroke, one of my goals was that I did not want anybody to leave rehab not having resources, like I would’ve if it weren’t for that speech therapist. My goal was to be a mentor at the hospital. When we were there, they had something called Mobility Mentors, who were two guys in wheelchairs who came around to people who wanted to talk to them with no nurses, no doctors, nobody else around. You could ask them any question about anything. At that time, we weren’t sure if Ricky was going to be in a wheelchair or not, so it was appropriate. I thought to myself, “This is fabulous. I’m getting all this information.” About three years after Rick’s stroke, I contacted the Mobility Mentors and asked how do we get our foot in the door at the hospital to become Aphasia Mentors. We wrote up the program, and then we got an appointment, and we pitched it, and they said, “Yep! Now you just gotta jump through the hoops,” which we did. Now Erika and Tom Boyle and Ricky and I are trained as peer mentors to meet patients.
People who come into the rehab typically only spend two weeks there, and then they’re gone. We get a call when they get somebody in who has had a stroke or has had other trauma and been diagnosed with aphasia. We aren’t given their names or anything, just their room number and their initials. We visit them bedside, and we introduce ourselves. Tom and Ricky have a script that they wrote, and we practiced. We have uniforms and name tags, and we give information about our center. People in that situation are like deer in the headlights. We say to them: We have been here. We know what you’re going through. We know you’re worried about money. We know you’re worried about getting on the toilet, getting out of the car, all those things. Here is information so that when your insurance runs out, and it will, and you’re sitting home and saying to yourself, “What on earth are we going to do with the rest of our lives?” You can call us. We have all these activities, all these things that you can come and do for free, and then the spouse can have respite time that you don’t have to pay for. We have members at the center now who we mentored when they were in rehab.
What prepared you for this role as caregiver, advocate, and organizer?
I had a lot of experiences in my life growing up that gave me that grit and fortitude. I had a father who was an alcoholic. I didn’t know how food or bills were going to be paid. My mother was the breadwinner. I had a sister who died when I was 16. She drowned. Then my father had a stroke. I had taken care of my mother when she was older. I had a lot of things that gave me a backbone. If I would not have had those challenges in life, it probably would have been more difficult to deal with our situation now.
I also have my faith. I’ve said “Okay, God, I know you’re not going to give me anything more than I can handle, but this is a lot right now, and I know there’s a reason for it.” I know there’s a purpose. Is my purpose to help other people? I can teach and help, and I like sitting there listening and working with people, whereas other people get frustrated and lose their patience. I know that in learning it’s the small things that matter, and a lot of times it’s the process versus the product. I see people where they’re at and where they can go and what little things they can do, and those are the successes.
If you could go back in time to when you were 25 years old, what advice would you give yourself?
Don’t sweat the small stuff. Your life can change in a minute like mine did, and you just gotta go from there. You can’t make the plans.
Belle Curve Stories are about women navigating life with grit, grace and growth. What do grit, grace, and growth mean to you?
Grit means you stick it out no matter what, even if you hate it, even if it stinks. This isn’t what I wanted, but I’m doing it. I’m learning so many new things, many that I didn't want to learn, but I had to learn. That’s the grit part.
Grace is just forgiving. I can’t worry about the past. I can’t worry about those things. Life changed, and now it’s from here I go on.
The amount of growth that I have had in the last four years in areas that I didn’t know I was going to grow in has been tremendous. First of all, learning a whole other subject matter, OT, PT, speech, medical, all that kind of stuff. You have to be willing to do it to make the sacrifice for the loved one.
As told to and edited by Teresa Bellock and Sandra Ditore.
Becky Reese, 64, worked for 35 years as a schoolteacher before retiring in 2017. She has been a member of the Suncoast Aphasia Community since 2018 and today she is an active board member for the Aphasia Community Center in Sarasota, where she is the director of fundraising and social media, in addition to being the primary caregiver for her husband Ricky. She is also a proud mother of two adult children and grandmother to eight children.
