Deborah, more commonly "Deb," was an astonishingly creative person with the soul of an artist. With her husband Ben, she built, furnished and decorated a brand-new interior into an old Nazerene church. She created stained glass for its many six-foot tall windows, entirely built a kitchen to her exact preferences, constructed the dual bathroom sinks and the shower, and scattered hand-built dollhouses everywhere you looked. She painted, decorated, wallpapered, hammered and sawed and trimmed until what used to be one huge empty space became a highly eclectic and frankly amazing home.

She grew up in Kansas, a period in her life she did not recall especially fondly. When her parents moved to Wyoming, she went with them and there met her first husband, Noah Gregory. He was an oil worker; she eventually joined him laboring out in the oil fields. It took years for her skin to recover from the abuse. The conditions in those fields and inside the holding tanks were not kind to anyone, and the more so in the winters.

She trained in martial arts for some years along with her three sons, Justin, Mike and Brian. This is where she met Ben, to his endless delight. When her marriage to Noah Gregory ended, as did Ben's to his then-wife, Anne Williams, Deb and Ben became a couple.

She also worked as a nurse's aide, and as a shipping manager at Stormer Hobbies. Then with Ben as a business partner, they opened a lingerie store specializing in stockings and garters with an emphasis on sheer fabrics and lace. She was following her feminine muse, which was in large part a focus on highly sensual pinup stylings, makeup, and attitudes.

She deeply loved cats and was fond of dogs as well. Her hobbies included collecting and wearing stockings, garters, corsets and flowing dresses, sewing, crocheting, knitting, mosaic work, building dollhouses and collecting ultra-feminine dolls, decorating, listening to rock and hard rock music, watching films, collecting Chinese ceramics and porcelains, cooking, growing flowers, 3-D printing, and surfing the Internet. She had a truly wicked sense of humor and wasn't the least bit shy about unloading it on the unsuspecting.

Her politics were solidly left, and her dismay in the rightward shift of the US political leadership in 2016 was unrelenting. On politics she and Ben were in almost total agreement. She was somewhat relieved by the nation's rejection in 2020 of the Republican president. It is a blessing... of sorts... that she did not live to see his re-election in 2024 and the consequent political and military events that followed.

Deb passed away during the COVID epidemic. Not from COVID, but from cancer that remained untreated until far too late. This was a direct result of Montana hospitals being overloaded due to those who had failed to take the epidemic seriously. It is possible that the cancer might have done for her in the longer term, but it was multiple failures of the medical system that actually caused her death: Failure to attend to pathology reports, inadequate care that led directly to untreated sepsis, transfer from doctor to doctor and facility to facility without her medical records keeping up, and near-daily patient neglect in-hospital. A tragedy by any standard. It is very difficult to write about this evenhandedly, even though it has now been years after her passing.

--CBB