Things we learned from Diana.
Whenever we lost someone important, part of Diana’s process of preserving their legacy and memory was creating a list of things we learned from them. Friends, family members, or even cherished pets, there was always something to learn. This is Diana’s list.
Keep Learning
Any new city we visited, Diana would find a rehabilitation or animal care center nearby and arrange a tour of their facilities. These visits have two-way benefits, where she could gather new ideas and learn new techniques while reciprocating with unique knowledge and suggestions as well.
Treat every new acquaintance as your friend/ally
For Diana, every person she met was a new opportunity. Someone to teach. Someone to learn from. Someone to play board games with. Someone to go to a concert with. No early judgements were ever made, and as a result, she had fantastic friends, allies, and volunteers from all walks of life.
Find the potential in people, even when others have failed
Diana had a knack for finding people’s hidden talents, and providing them the motivation and purpose to succeed. Many she worked with came from various backgrounds and work histories – this did not matter to Diana. She was able to get them excited about the cause and flourish under her leadership and inspiration.
Challenge the normal
Due to her tireless research, networking, and experimentation (which was sometimes heartbreaking), Ohio Wildlife Center and other organizations Diana influenced were able to save animals of a weight or age never saved before. She was proud of her unmatched survival rate, even when she was purposely given fosters that were most unlikely to survive. Wildlife rehabilitators are many times forced to play the odds – set minimum weights for viability and make the best effort. Diana’s message was to challenge the norms. Research, collaborate, get smarter, persevere, and don’t let anyone tell you what you cannot do.
Be a friend of the Earth
Diana and I are pile people. We have a piles of paper all over the house that somehow makes sense in our head, and that’s our to do list. They can be bills, coupons, Christmas cards, it didn’t matter. But Diana always had a separate pile of plain paper. That pile usually came from a printer error – you know when the driver isn’t quite right and ends up wasting a bunch of paper by printing one line on each page, and you quickly have to cancel the job? Diana would NOT allow that paper pile to go to waste – it was her note paper pile. We had more than she would ever need. But she was determined to at least put it to use.
If you ever were the passenger in her car and were paying attention, you may have noticed some of her hair in the cupholder. This is because she had a lot of hair, and some would brush out. I was always tempted to throw that hair out the window, but I wasn’t allowed. Why? Dangerous to birds. Diana was one person. Could she make a difference? Yes. And so can all of us. The welfare of birds far outweighed someone seeing some hair in her cupholder. That’s just an example of the depth of her values.
When grocery donations were part of Diana’s responsibility, she created a complicated network hierarchy to distribute it. “Normal” people pick up the boxes, pluck out a few things of use, and throw out the rest. Not Diana. She would extract anything and everything that could be used by current OR future ambassadors and fosters, bag and freeze for the future, including steaming some vegetables so they could be frozen, and then find others with larger properties and wildlife to take more. And those people gave to others, too. When only all those options had been exhausted, was disposal okay. And it wasn’t in the trash – we had to box it all and ran it to our compost stations. It was hard to keep up. But Diana did.
