Fanny Davis Diehl (January 11, 1925 – Feb 7, 2024)

I always said my mom would live to be a hundred, and she came close. Born in 1925 to Catherine Wortham Davis and Robert Davis, she embodied the spirit of that decade, from the short skirts and wild nights to the post-war optimism and financial high-flying. She spent her early years in Memphis, TN, hoping to be stolen by the fairies or the gypsies, whichever came first. What came was her father’s death—from tuberculosis when she was thirteen—and the family moved to Houston, Texas, near her mother’s people. She and her sister June grew up as Houston society girls, but Fanny (and her sister) had a hankering for other things—an East Coast education, New York City. After attending Vassar, Fanny worked in New York for a couple of years before marrying Arthur C. Diehl of Wilmington, NC. Their first two children were born in Brooklyn, then Fanny and Arthur moved back to Houston for his career, and they had two more children. But they weren’t happy in the South or the family insurance business. Fanny and Arthur were very liberal politically; Fanny worked for the Democratic Party in every town she lived in. They were also art aficionados—literature, visual art, jazz, ballet, and theater. The family of six finally settled in Montclair, New Jersey, where Fanny renovated a hulking white elephant into a showplace, and Arthur got a job in publishing in Manhattan. In 1965, Fanny’s eldest child, James Hill Diehl, aged fourteen, was killed riding his bicycle. Arthur committed suicide four months later, something that had been brewing for years, but which none of us understood. It was not easy bearing up under those events, and her grieving and confused children were often critical of how she did it. It should be noted that none of us has had to be the adult through such horrific tragedy. Fanny moved the family into the city, and several difficult years passed. One summer, at our vacation home on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, she met her second husband, Paul Sweetnam. Her children were unanimous in their disapproval, but she married him anyway and might have been happy for a little while. Paul’s shortcomings became clear to her, and she initiated divorce three years later, by the time building was completed on a glorious house on the N.H. coast that she had designed herself. Her talent for architectural design led to much urging to make a career of it, but interpreting others’ visions was never to her taste. She opened a cookware store—The Cook’s Fancy—in Portsmouth, N.H. and became part of the city’s revival into an arts, music, theater, and gay-bohemian culture spot. Those were good days with good friends and her children near. There followed years of friendships and romances, a move to Maine, children grown, travel to every continent but Asia, and the serious pursuit of photography. Fanny’s pictures are often of places, less often of people, and most often photomacrograms of flower parts arranged in abstract compositions.

In her sixties, Fanny decided she’d had enough of East Coast winters and moved to Santa Barbara, California—later to Lompoc and Sonoma, California. She always extolled the glories of that state, a place she loved so much she couldn’t understand why her daughters and grandchildren didn’t promptly relocate. In her late eighties, her vision declined to the point that she had to give up photography, something she missed greatly. Several years later, her eyes worsened, and she could no longer read. Though she adjusted to listening to books on tape (novels, history and books on contemporary politics, hour by hour, all afternoon), she wouldn’t let us get rid of too many of her books. “I look at them and remember the stories and I remember when I read them and what I was thinking.” She was especially fond of Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Hawkes, and Charles Dickens. She was always as anxious to talk about what she was reading as she was to express her outrage at Republican perfidy or reminisce about her childhood, youth, middle age, and last week. With her eyesight gone, she took to composing birthday poems for all her family members, which she would perform on video. Her other passions included animals, especially dogs; clothes; flowers; chocolate; old movies, and David Letterman. In her last years, her three children spent a lot of time with her. I read her poetry, we struggled to make Siri play her favorite songs, and she enjoyed cakes and wine, tea with Kate, breakfast with Susan, and long conversations with family and friends.

Her sister, the novelist June Arnold, and most of the friends of her youth pre-deceased her, but she still had a retinue of admirers. She is survived by her three children, Davis Diehl of Devon, PA, Margaret Diehl of NYC, and John Diehl of Sonoma, CA; her grandchildren, Ramona Kistler and Delilah Maestri of Pennsylvania; her nieces Kate, Roberta and Fairfax Arnold, and her nephew Gus Arnold, as well as treasured sons-in-law, daughter-in-law, grandsons-in-law, a great niece and nephew, cousins, step-grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and nieces and nephews by marriage. She loved you all.

In lieu of flowers, please give to the animal welfare organization of your choice.

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