Peter Hoag
June 23, 2010
There is so much I would want to say about Diane's kindness to me over at least four decades. When I moved east for college, she started a pattern of coming up to New York to take me (and later my sisters and husband) to the opera or ballet. The first of these was "Jewels" at the New York City Ballet in my freshman year, and later there were so many operas that I wouldn't be able to count them, but some stand out in memory – especially Placido Domingo and Denyse Graves in Samson & Delilah. By the 1990s and continuing until just a few years ago, she reached out to include the youngest generation in these special occasions.
In 1973 Diane and Giff opened their home to me when I had a summer job in Washington. The three of us drove from Vienna to downtown D.C. every morning and back again every evening. It was the summer of the Watergate investigations. Diane saved all the front pages of the Washington Post because something big was going on. We talked politics during the commute and then we came home and watched the news and talked some more. I was privileged to be included in many of their social gatherings and shared the warmth of their hospitality with their circle of close friends and colleagues from the co-op movement and other activities.
Around the time that I was working for the State Department as a brand-new attorney, Diane decided to go back to school to get her master's degree in international affairs. This would have been in the late 1970s, and she must have been in her late 60s. When she was finished with a coursebook, she would sometimes lend the books to me, knowing that I was trying to learn about the world of diplomacy. We had countless conversations about foreign policy, one of our many shared interests.
Moving forward to more recent years, I am sure that everyone who knew Diane in her 90s was astounded by her energy, intellectual acuity, good humor, and serene disposition. She faced numerous challenges in her later years and kept bouncing back. She received several serious medical diagnoses and did not let those phase her. Soon before she was to have a mastectomy a few years ago, my mother and I visited her in Vienna. Diane was fortifying herself for the impending surgery by memorizing the Song of Mary from St. Luke's Gospel, and in fact she had memorized it (though I won't be able to do it from memory here and thus will read it):
My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden.
For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is on those who fear him from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm,
he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts,
he has put down the mighty from their thrones,
and exalted the humble and meek.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent empty away.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his posterity forever.
Diane did succeed in committing the Song of Mary to memory, and I know she drew comfort from it when she faced her surgery on that occasion. What I remember her saying is, "What a wonderful thing, to be the handmaiden of the Lord." When I realized how much these verses meant to her, I found several musical settings of them and we listened to the recordings together. Several years later, when I had similar surgery to get through, I felt that Diane was my shining example and I listened to those recordings again. When I knew, last week, that she was close to death and I was too far away to join her in the final days, I listened once again to the Song of Mary and felt Diane's spirit saying once again, "What a wonderful thing, to be the handmaiden of the Lord."
In 2008, I happened to be in the Washington area on the day of the Democratic primary elections in Virginia and Maryland, when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama wer
