Dana Reeve knew her son would become an orphan, so she started planning for his future. Both Dana and Christopher Reeve had siblings who could have taken Will, but she decided he would fare better by staying where he was, surrounded by the friends and environment he cherished. “It was completely like Dana to want Will to be as comfortable and secure as possible. That was the kind of woman she was,” journalist Roger Friedman, who knew the Reeves well, wrote in a 2006 Fox News article.
While they didn’t have family in Bedford, New York, they had the Puccis, their next-door neighbors who might as well have been family. She asked them if Will, who was close with Ralph and Ann’s son, Michael, could live with them after she died. They didn’t hesitate. For the next several years, Will became another Pucci. In Will’s eyes, his mother made the right decision for him. “They are the reason that I was able to emerge from the darkest period of my life relatively unscathed,” he told Bedford & New Canaan Magazine in 2021.
Will remained close with the Puccis for life. In 2014, he took a trip to Japan with them, a snippet of which he shared on Instagram, seen above. The previous year, they also vacationed in Turks and Caicos together. “Da squad at Da Conch Shack,” he captioned an Instagram post of him with Michael Pucci and his sister Nicole.
