Dear Diane

Dear Diane Ragsdale :

Pardon me for writing you here. You are the person I would turn to in a moment of great loss and confusion like the one that has visited us all now, and, cruelly, you are not here. What to do with the swamping waves of emotion and tangled knot of denial mixed with disbelief, mixed with a terrible sense that I wasn't there in the incomprehensible moment? How to stop the compass from swirling madly trying to find True North now when it simply isn't there anymore? This is something we'd have spent hours talking about.

So many memories, each so visceral as to seem less like memories than like my DNA.

Dublin, Ireland. 2004. I was standing on the sidewalk at day one of a conference I felt entirely overwhelmed by, trying to sort out how to center myself and walk back in. (OK. And smoking. Remember smoking?) You, tentatively, asking "Are you David?" I was both shocked and grateful someone was reaching out. The Guinness was delicious. The conversation, moreso. I wasn't crazy. Neither were you. And we saw that in each other within the first few sentences exchanged.

Everything we did together for the next 20 years, every step I took in the American theater, followed from that moment. And was wound up by your brilliance, your ferocious commitment to truth, beauty, and the greater good. The emergence of the new play development sector as a sector. The playwright residencies. The producing fellowships. The Directors Circle conversations. HowlRound Theatre Commons . The IPC. And these are just some things that you did that I was lucky enough to be part of. All over the world, there are traces of you.

And the people you brought into my life. Jamie Bennett Susan Feder Mark Russell Katie Steger Todd London Lane Czaplinski among them. And the people who came up through all you helped build, people that enrich my life to this day. That's too big a list to get right, but I'm forever grateful to have shared the emergent lives of Jamie Gahlon Vijay Matthew Kevin Becerra Ronee Penoi Amrita Ramanan Jamil Jude Daniel Pruksarnukul Travis Ballenger

And the ideas. The ideas! We had some crazy ones. Yours were huge, like your brain and your heart. Some impossible dreams. And you had an unerring sense of right. Of the possible. Of the obligation we accepted in our roles. Of the responsibility that came with the platform.

And you could be so annoyingly right about all of that. I loved that you didn't let other people's annoyance at the truth of what you were putting out keep you from putting it out. Even people with enormous power over your future. I know you still had scars from some of that. I was always honored to be on the receiving end of your questions, your doubts, your frustrations, your efforts to put aside the slings and arrows. I hope that those of us who shared the privilege of access to this part of your life were enough. Present enough. Smart enough. Outraged enough on your behalf. I hope we listened fully enough for you to shift the weight of those moments.

I loved, and marveled at, your turn toward Beauty as the path toward all that was good and possible. And your approach to Leadership as a study, a practice, a calling. How lucky all those students and colleagues at Banff, The New School, MCAD to have had the generosity of your attention and your mind.

We used to laugh at each other, in the middle of every conversation-- in person, on the phone, on Zoom-- when we'd realize we'd been going for an hour (more!) without even saying (or asking) a single thing about our personal lives. We would just fall right down the rabbit hole of all the work that there was to do now and how to go about it. It was like one 20-year conversation on a bar stool in Bono's bar in Dublin.

At one point I had to force myself to stop writing crazily long comments on your posts at Jumper and just email you my responses. Everything you wrote there invited deep discussion. The email exchanges became as epic as the calls. But nothing beat an evening on a bar stool. Bartenders must have hated seeing us coming. Order one drink, pick up the years' long thread of conversation right in the middle-- animatedly and unembarrassed-- and hours would evaporate while we chewed on the challenges of the nonprofit arts complex. Dublin. New York. Boston. Amsterdam. Houten. Well. Groeningen. Montreal. DC. No matter the city, the conversation was our home.

So, now we are here. Our conversation will go on. I don't know how I'd ever not be visiting you in my head. And, truth be told, that's where a lot of our relationship has lived the past few years. Too much space came in, to many months would go by without a real world conversation. But pretty much not a day passed that you didn't have something to say to me. Did you know that? I think you knew that. I was even talking to you on Thursday- out loud, by myself- as I walked down Columbus Avenue in San Francisco on my way to Trader Joe's. I wanted you to know why I'd not gotten to the annual follies of the January conference season that I assumed you were attending and was going to schedule a debrief with you.

Were you still with us? It didn't occur to me that you might not be. And I don't know where to put that. Well, now I've put it here and I'm not going to erase it.

There's so much I want to tell you, to ask you, to know about the last moments. I can't bear to ask. I can't bear not knowing. I can't bear the weight of the wondering since it means that, finally and irrevocably, you are gone from this world.

Yet, even as I write that-- to try to make myself accept it-- I find the strength to resist it. You are everywhere, and forever. I won't write you more emails, or spend more time in a Zoom call, or even share a pint with you. (Well, there's the whole wheat allergy thing, so I wasn't going to share a pint with you anyway. A Manhattan.)

But nothing will stop me from carrying on the conversation with you. There's much to be done. There's every reason to do it.

So, friend. Sister. I will love you and miss you forever. And I will see you in everything.

You are amazing. I am amazed. And ever shall be.