I’ve been sitting on this for a while, processing. As we get older, you think it would get easier, the recognition that we are all mortal and will die. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t get any easier. Every goodbye is hard; they never get easy.
Our good friend Diane passed away on Dec 20, 2025. She was what I always considered a stealthy force of nature. They thing was, she presented as this fairly proper and demure lady. But she was, in fact, a serious badass with a will of iron. She ran and won ultramarathons (we’re talking 50 and 100 mile races, you know, 100 miles without stopping), marathons and assorted other distances. She hiked and ran in Peru and Patagonia. She once described her training schedule for ultras and by the time she was done I knew I’d never be able to do one – I just didn’t have her sheer force of will or chutzpah or craziness or whatever mindset it takes to power through that level of pain/difficulty.
We’ve known Diane and her husband Skip for a long time. Chuck met them way back not long after he moved to California and joined the same running club Diane was in. They didn’t run together (she was much, much faster than him) but they hung out with the club. I came to the table later, after I started working with Skip at USC (so I met Skip before I met Chuck!). Getting ready for a multi-day bike ride, Skip suggested I come run with the club and, you guessed it, that’s where I met Chuck. After Chuck and I got married, we ended up living not that far from them so would get together occasionally, including, but not limited to, a glorious trip to France and Italy in 2007 and various running events.
When Chuck was diagnosed with cancer in 2008 we both came to the realization that we weren’t going to live forever and it was important not to waste the time we had and remember to appreciate the people in our lives. Skip and Diane lived pretty close but we had never made much of an effort to get together. We vowed to change that and we started having weekly dinners at each other’s houses (rotating locations) for the next 16 or so years. We even maintained the tradition during the pandemic when we did outdoor dinners at their house and listened to a neighborhood kid (and professional musician) and his friends play for the neighbors for free while we all dined on takeout Italian food. It was a magical break during a terrifically tough time.
Our dinners were often interrupted by life (travel, family, injuries and the like) but we always circled back and enjoyed sharing tall tales of all our various adventures. So this past Thanksgiving it was the same: we’d get together after the holiday and swap tales of what we’d all been up to. The universe had other plans unfortunately. In that brief window of time, Diane was diagnosed with pneumonia and lung cancer and in the space of about a month was – gone.
I was able to say goodbye before she passed, for which I am grateful but, oh, how I wish she’d had more time with Skip, for more adventures, for more, well, life. But boy, what she did with the time she had – now THAT was a life!
I am pretty sure that Diane’s idea of heaven is a very long run on a mountain trail in some amazing place. So that’s where I’m imagining her – chugging up the steepest climbs and telling anybody she sees “this isn’t much of a hill!” And since this is heaven, her best four-legged running buddy, Rocky, is tucked in right beside her.
Godspeed, Diane. See you on the other side.