Schools’ Darrin Reed, 48, dies: ‘My memories of the past all include him’

A former Laguna Beach Unified School District employee, described by friends as the heart and soul of a tightly knit community, died Tuesday following a hard-fought battle with leukemia, his husband said Wednesday.

Darrin Reed, who served as executive assistant to the district’s superintendent for more than a decade before retiring last year, was 48.

“He was a lovely, lovely man with a zest for life and a passion for his work,” said school board member Ketta Brown, who knew Reed for about 15 years. “It’s a loss that’s going to reverberate.”

Brown said Reed was a constant smiling presence throughout Laguna — an active member in his church and a regular performer with Lagunatics, the city’s iconic musical-parody group.

“He lived his life the way you wish everyone would: just every day to the fullest,” Brown said, her voice breaking. “He always had the next dream, the next aspiration on the horizon.”

During his time with the district, Reed served three superintendents.

Current Supt. Sherine Smith recalled that when she started at the district in 2010, Reed was among the first to welcome her.

“He took me around and made sure everybody met me,” she said. “He was just so helpful and loyal and kind.”

Reed’s partner, Ray Kawecki, said that although many community members are known in large part for their accomplishments, his husband was loved “just for Darrin being Darrin.”

And that was one of the first things that attracted him to the man he “snatched up” a quarter century ago.

“We connected on every level ... it was just cut way too short,” Kawecki said Thursday. “Even the 25 years seems like much too little time. My memories of the past all include him.”

They met in 1990, Kawecki wrote in an emailed tribute, after a job helping Little Caesars pizza franchisees get started in Long Beach and Huntington Beach brought Reed to California. They were married in 2008, “under the rotunda of San Francisco City Hall,” Kawecki wrote.

The couple moved in 1993 to Laguna, where Reed at first felt intimidated and was worried he wouldn’t fit in, Kawecki remembered.

But soon, he became the deeply embedded Lagunan he was. Kawecki said the couple’s daughter and four grandchildren, all of whom have ties to the school district, live next door.

When Reed was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia in September 2012, it set off what would be a prolonged struggle that required more than $3 million worth of hospital stays and treatments — much, but not all, paid by insurance, Kawecki said.

Even as Reed endured a string of procedures — including rounds of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant — he kept a positive attitude, Kawecki wrote on Reed’s Caring Bridge web page in 2013, continuing to tinker in the kitchen, where he baked loaves of banana bread and cakes for his nurses at City of Hope cancer center, in Duarte.

“There were many times in the hospital bed where he’d say, ‘I don’t want to die,’” Kawecki recalled. “But his body just wore out.”

When Reed missed a district staff welcome-back breakfast last August, it was the first time he’d been absent from the event in 14 years, though his illness had already prevented him from working for months.

In the months since, through good days and bad, including emergency room visits, Kawecki never left his husband’s side. He said he slept on cots or chairs, never wanting Reed to wake up alone.

Reed died peacefully at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, about a day after a dozen friends and family members toasted him in the intensive care unit.

“Let’s party!” he said, before closing his eyes and falling asleep, Kawecki wrote.

Kawecki invited “anybody who ever knew him” to celebrate Reed’s life at a memorial service set for 10 a.m. Sept. 13 at Laguna Beach United Methodist Church, 21632 Wesley Drive.

“The more the merrier,” he said.

—Bryce Alderton contributed to this report.