Diana.

I should know by now, in 2025, that when people call you on the phone instead of texting, it means someone has died. But I wasn’t thinking, so when Pat Maley called me this afternoon I answered as I always do from one Pat to another — by giving him shit about nothing.

“Why are you calling me? Didn’t we just see each other this weekend? Isn’t that enough for you?”

But he didn’t laugh the way he was suppose to. And by the tone in his voice, I knew what had happened, I just didn’t know who.

“Diana,” he said, his voice broken, “Diana passed away this weekend.”

I immediately logged into Facebook, even though I hate Facebook, because that’s what you do when people die, now.

The first thing in my feed were photos I had taken of Diana years ago shared by Olympia institutions K Records and KAOS 89.3 FM, but I was also greeted by a friend request from Suzette Arens  — her mom.

Tapping on the “accept friend request” button, the echos of my conversation with Pat on the phone repeat in my head, “I don’t care about us, I just worry about her mom. They were so close.”

I’m gonna miss and mourn my friend forever and it hurts, but her mom? That I can’t really imagine, and it makes me the most sad about any of this.

Parents losing children, no matter their age, is a tough one for me.

Suzette (she’ll always be Diana’s Mom to me, so it feels weird even typing her first name, even though I’ve known her 30 years as well) and I chatted briefly, she explained what happened. How it was all so sudden, and that she and Diana’s partner and their cats were there when it happened.

It is all very surreal, to be texting your friend of 30 year’s mom. Both of you trying to let the other know how much she loved them.

I moved to Portland in 2008 it was the end of Diana and hanging out regularly, but when she was graduating with her Masters in 2012 she asked if I’d come up, and of course I did.

I was so proud of her. I sat right next to her parents in the audience.

There’s a lot of communication that happens when someone dies; you reach out to the people who will want to know first. The first people you think of.

For me it was our friend Paul Goldberg, who I knew was also close with Diana but might not hear on Facebook. Then it was calling Nikki McClure, knowing she wouldn’t hear online. Nikki in turn called Lois, she called Calvin.

So 20 minutes later when Diana’s mom asked me if Calvin knew, I could say “Yes.”

I started getting texts from friends as far as Minnesota and New York who knew her, checking to see how I was doing.

“I’m okay, I’m okay, I just really worry about her mom and Claude.”

I honestly don’t remember when or how Diana and I met, but I know by 1994 she was one of my best friends, and I hers.

I know that’s the year, because it was the first Yoyo A Gogo, sure, but also we watched almost every episode of the X-files together. Me, her, Cigarette Smoking Man, Scully and Mulder would sit on the loveseat in her apartment on Division and try and solve the mysteries that are unsolvable.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Diana and I went to at least 50 rock shows a year together for over a decade. In her tiny Ford Fiesta or my red Dodge Dart, we’d go up to Seattle to see a band we loved, see them again in Olympia the next day, Diana might book them on her show if the timing worked, and then back into one of the cars down for the two-hour ride down to Portland the following day.

She had her finger on the pulse and introduced me to so many bands. She loved the people in the bands, she loved the music, and she was a fierce advocate for everything indie. She was friendly, warm and connecting.

Her radio show is stuff of legends. She was a KAOS true-believer; from the John Foster and Bruce Pavitt school of “There’s plenty of places doing top-40 popular stuff, KAOS is a places of independents and so we should feature and promote those bands over others.” Her record collection is a tribute to that, and what she played on her show Wednesday nights and the bands she had on are that.

From KARP to Beck to Lois, I sat in on so many of those shows, helping her work the sound board or taking pictures, or just wandering around until she was done and we could go out.

I think there’s historically been a real problem with the NW Music scene where the contributions of women (who aren’t the front-person of a band), get disappeared from the narrative. I’ve saw it happen to Diana time and time again.

Diana’s contributions to the scene, I think, were just as powerful and meaningful as any of the men who had KAOS shows and went off to go start very successful record labels.

Diana and I had talked on and off for years about doing something to her show and what she had achieved with it; to make an online archive, or something, but we never did. I regret that.

I’m listening to Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17 on shuffle as I write this. My memory is bad, and I’ve been crying, so I can’t remember which one, or what song or what album, but I know Diana was recording one of them on the day Kurt died. “We just had to keep going,” she told me, “we just had to keep going even though something horrible had just happened and someone we loved had died.”

I am so lucky to have been one of Diana’s closest friends.
I’m so proud of her and the life she lived.
I’m happy to have loved her and be loved by her.

April 21, 2025.