Skip to content

Diana Washington and Levi Russell

Diana Washington and Levi Russell were sister and brother during Levi’s eighteen years of life. After his death around 1992, Diana continued to regard him as her baby brother and preserved his memory through stories, photographs, choices she made for her family, her son’s middle name, and the garden she tended.

Overview

Diana was seven when Levi was born. She heard the doctors’ language, sensed her parents’ fear, and encountered neighbors’ judgments, but regarded him first as her baby brother. That conviction remained central to their relationship.

Neither the prognosis nor clinicians’ recommendation of Rosewood changed Diana’s view. She remained close to Levi through recurrent illness, painful gastrointestinal symptoms, hospitalizations, and his growth beyond the chairs, strollers, and single-person lifts that had once worked for him. As neighbors became less patient with a disabled teenager and then a disabled young man, she continued to claim him openly as family. She later brought that same certainty to her chosen bond with Marcus Washington I: she did not need anyone’s permission to recognize someone as hers.

Diana did participate in Levi’s care, but she resisted the expectation that a disabled child’s sister should be defined by burden or patient self-sacrifice. She was openly protective and joyful with him, and neither sibling’s place in the family could be reduced to caregiver and dependent.

She was his protector, interpreter, and advocate, but also an audience for his joy. Diana laughed with Levi, tracked butterflies beside him, and attended to his pleasure as closely as to his pain. She enjoyed being his sister at seven, thirteen, and twenty-five. Her understanding of his laughter, shrieks, and other sounds came from sustained attention and the conviction that his communication deserved to be learned.

Their Years Together

From Levi’s Birth

Diana was seven when Levi was born in November 1974. Her loudness and warmth were already part of her personality, and she brought them into an active relationship with her brother from his infancy rather than observing his care from a distance.

Levi’s meningitis, hospitalization, diagnosis, and prognosis brought fear into the household while Diana was seven and eight. She was old enough to register Rochelle’s distress and Chris’s quiet, even without fully understanding the medical details. She heard doctors say “Rosewood” and understood from her parents’ response that the family might have to defend Levi’s place at home.

Rochelle visited Rosewood and rejected the proposed placement for Levi. Diana understood her mother’s refusal as an act of protection against an institution backed by medical authority. It became an early model for defending family even when professionals advised otherwise.

Learning Levi’s Language

Diana learned Levi’s communication through eighteen years of daily proximity. She distinguished happy shrieks, distressed whines, contented hums, and the recognition grunt he gave when someone he loved entered the room. Sounds that an unfamiliar listener might group together conveyed different meanings to her.

Levi was minimally speaking and used a handful of stable words and word forms, but his receptive language was stronger than his expressive speech. He tracked conversations with his eyes and responded to his name and his sister’s voice. Diana spoke to him at her usual speed and volume throughout their lives, addressing him as a full participant rather than reducing her language to match his limited speech.

His stable spoken forms included ‘’Diii’’ for Diana, ‘’Mmm’’ for Mama or attention, and ‘’Nah’’ for refusal or protest. He also used ‘’Buh’‘. Diana understood it as butterflies; Rochelle considered it simply a sound, and the disagreement remained unresolved. Diana heard those forms alongside Levi’s laughter, hums, grunts, groans, whines, sighs, gaze, expression, breathing, and body tension rather than treating speech as his only language.

By adulthood, Diana read Levi’s sounds, gaze, expressions, breathing, and bodily changes with practiced ease. That attentiveness became part of how she moved through the world. It helped her understand Marcus Washington I, whose brief vocalizations also carried meaning, and strengthened her habit of including people whose communication others underestimated. She first developed that sustained attention with Levi in the Russell home.

Growing Up Together

Their relationship changed with their ages without losing its intimacy. As a teenager, Diana accompanied Levi to Teddy’s garden, sat beside him, adjusted his hat, and pointed out butterflies. At eighteen, she could still lift him alone with effort; as he approached adult size, she helped with transfers that generally required two people, often herself and Chris. She also challenged people who treated her grown brother without respect. At approximately twenty-five, she still checked on him in the morning, felt his forehead for fever, and spoke to him about her life at her usual pace.

Some neighbors who had tolerated Levi as a disabled child became less accepting as he grew into a large disabled Black teenager and young man. Suggestions about “places” for him became more insistent. Diana’s protectiveness sharpened in response to the way his size, age, race, and disabilities shaped those reactions.

Within their family relationship, Levi remained the brother whose laughter, shrieks, and ‘’Diii’’ down the hallway Diana knew. His body took on the broad Russell build, but Diana continued to recognize his signals and enjoy his company.

The Garden

Levi’s happiest place was the garden his grandfather Teddy Dorsey kept at his grandparents’ home. Years later, Diana described to Mama the blanket where Levi lay among marigolds, zinnias, and other bright flowers that attracted butterflies. Someone could carry him outside when he was small. By his teenage years, moving him onto the garden blanket usually required two people: Chris and Teddy, or Diana and Chris. Those transfers became harder as Levi grew and his relatives aged. The blanket, flowers, and butterflies remained familiar, as did his tracking gaze, shrieks, laughter, and full-body joy.

Diana remembered Levi in Teddy’s garden across his life, from the small boy giggling on the blanket to the young man whose deep laughter seemed to carry through the ground. She shared that memory with Denise. After Daddy heard about Levi and the butterflies, he planted a garden in the Washington backyard.

Diana’s Protection and Advocacy

Diana protected Levi openly and confrontationally. She challenged people who disrespected him and did not soften her objections to match expectations that a disabled person’s sister should be quietly patient or self-sacrificing.

Medical, educational, and service systems often treated Levi primarily as a case or a support need, while some neighbors treated his care as a burden. Diana insisted on his personhood: he laughed at butterflies, tracked conversations with his eyes, hummed when content, shrieked when happy, and mattered without having to meet anyone’s measure of independence or productivity.

Levi’s treatment reinforced Diana’s conviction that speech, cognition, productivity, and independence were inadequate measures of a person’s worth. She recognized the patterns that repeatedly devalued him and resisted them during his life and afterward. Her advocacy grew from being his sister, not from an abstract obligation to disability rights.

Cultural and Institutional Context

Diana and Levi’s bond took shape within the racial and disability barriers their Black family encountered in Baltimore during the 1970s and 1980s. Those barriers affected Levi’s care, schooling, and the ways outsiders interpreted his presence as he grew.

Clinicians recommended Maryland’s Rosewood Center for Levi after his neonatal meningitis. Rochelle visited the institution, rejected the placement, and brought him home. Her decision protected her disabled Black son in a period when institutional care and medical authority did not reliably honor families’ knowledge of their children. The place felt wrong to Rochelle; she could not live with leaving Levi there.

Keeping Levi at home required extensive labor from Rochelle, Chris, Diana, Teddy, and Evie. The family received no meaningful in-home care or respite, and Medicaid did not supply the adaptive equipment they needed. Chris’s repeated lifting and carrying contributed to accumulated physical injury, while the family improvised ways to move Levi safely as he grew. Rochelle also had to advocate for him in healthcare settings that questioned her intelligence and motives and repeatedly offered institutionalization. Their reliance on family labor reflected inadequate outside support, not an absence of need.

Diana’s role as Levi’s interpreter and advocate was shaped by the intersection of ableism and racism. Levi was a minimally speaking disabled Black boy and, later, a disabled Black young man in Baltimore. Medical professionals recommended Rosewood, the family struggled to obtain adequate equipment and support, and intermittent school attendance did not give him consistent access to education. Diana refused to let limited speech or institutional expectations make her brother invisible.

As Levi became a large disabled Black young man, some neighbors grew less accepting and more insistent about “places” for him. His size and race shaped that response alongside his disabilities; people who had indulged a small child now treated an adult’s presence as a problem. Diana’s protection included opposing those judgments and defending his right to remain with his family and community.

Diana carried both Levi’s joy and the injustices he faced into her later practice of drawing people into rooms and refusing to let them be overlooked. She had seen disability and race work together to limit what others believed Levi could understand, where he belonged, and which supports he deserved. Her loud warmth was a deliberate practice of inclusion shaped by those experiences, while remaining part of a personality she had begun developing before Levi’s birth.

Levi’s Death and Diana’s Vigilance

Levi died in his sleep around 1992 at approximately eighteen. Diana was about twenty-five.

Diana went to wake him as part of a routine she had followed for years. When she entered his room, its stillness and the absence of the greeting he usually gave her told her something was wrong before she touched or called to him. She recognized that he had died.

Although Levi was eighteen and physically grown when Diana found him, she still thought of him as her baby brother. His adult size did not change the family role through which she experienced his death.

No autopsy was performed, and no meaningful investigation gave the family an answer. Levi had lived with recurrent seizures, cyclic vomiting syndrome, respiratory vulnerability, and broader medical fragility, but none of those conditions was established as the cause of his death. The family knew only that he had died in his sleep.

Diana carried the morning and the absence of answers for the rest of her life. She had spent eighteen years participating in Levi’s daily care: checking his temperature, listening to his breathing and sounds, and recognizing changes in his body. The familiar act of waking him became inseparable from the loss.

The checking had begun when Levi came home after his birth, not when he died. Since she was seven, Diana had listened through walls, touched his forehead, and read his sounds with the belief that close enough attention could help keep him safe. Finding him dead shattered that belief after eighteen years of practice. She continued asking whether an earlier check, a night spent in his room, or being there when something changed might have saved him, without a medical answer that could settle those questions.

She checked harder afterward. The vigilance in her parenting and even her repeated opening of the oven during biscuit lessons grew from a practice she had lived with for eighteen years and a loss that had broken her confidence in it. She could no longer trust checking to keep someone alive, but she could not stop trying.

Diana’s Preservation of Levi’s Memory

After Levi’s death, Diana continued to make his life visible through photographs, stories, her son’s name, and the Washington family garden. Preserving him was an extension of the advocacy she had practiced since childhood.

The Photographs

Diana kept and displayed photographs spanning Levi’s eighteen years. She showed them and told stories rather than hiding her disabled brother’s life. The images recorded him as a baby and toddler, a boy in the garden, a teenager in a wheelchair, and a young man on a blanket still watching butterflies with the wide-eyed attention he had shown at four.

Marcus Washington III later inherited the photographs. Diana had kept Levi’s image and account present; her son, who also carried Levi’s name, continued that Russell family practice within the Washington household.

The Name

Diana named her son Marcus Levi Washington III, joining the Washington family’s naming tradition with her brother’s name. Putting ‘’Levi’’ in her son’s legal name was a deliberate act of preservation: documents, roll calls, and uses of Marcus III’s full name would speak her brother’s name too.

Marcus III had the broad Russell build: large hands and feet and a long, substantial frame recalling Chris and Levi. He was also loud and openly joyful. When Teddy and Evie met their great-grandson, they recognized in him traits of Levi, the grandson they had carried, tended, and positioned in the garden for eighteen summers. Diana recognized Levi in her son too. Marcus III could run, speak, and play basketball in ways Levi could not; the resemblance brought Diana both joy in her child and grief for the brother she missed. Neither child replaced the other.

The Garden

Diana told Mama about Levi and Daddy planted a garden in the Washington backyard. Diana tended it, knelt among its flowers, cried there, and sometimes spoke to the butterflies. The space let her remember the young man who had laughed at butterflies in Teddy’s garden and grieve as his older sister.

The garden was a private space where Diana could set aside the expansive public presence others knew and be openly vulnerable about missing Levi. Her grief remained a part of her life even as she filled rooms with warmth.

Later Advocacy

Diana’s commitment to welcoming strangers and making room for people others overlooked drew strength from her eighteen years with Levi. She had made space for him as a boy, teenager, and young man when outsiders questioned his worth. After his death, she continued the practice through the people she included and the warmth she brought into rooms.

Levi’s life sharpened Diana’s understanding that systems could devalue people who did not meet expectations for speech, cognition, productivity, or independence. She rejected attempts to institutionalize or ignore him and carried that refusal into her later relationships. Both siblings were loud; for Diana, using her full voice also asserted the presence of people others tried to dismiss.

Legacy in the Washington Family

Levi’s influence reached Marcus III through Diana. Their family recognized connections among the three in loudness, joy, the Russell build, inclusion of people pushed to the margins, and Diana’s vigilant care. Photographs, Marcus III’s middle name, and the garden made that inheritance visible. At seventeen, Marcus III filled basketball gyms with an energy that recalled the young man who had laughed with his whole body at butterflies.

Levi’s memory also reached Marcus III through Marcus Washington II, who knew Levi for approximately five years. Marcus sat with him at family gatherings and in the garden and remembered Levi’s shriek of recognition when he entered a room. Those quiet, firsthand memories differed from Diana’s more expansive stories. Together, the parents gave their son two perspectives on his uncle.

Marcus III knew Levi’s name, photographs, and garden. He knew his mother’s fierceness, warmth, and vigilance, and that his father could answer questions from direct experience. He did not yet fully understand the connection between Diana’s childhood care for Levi, her grief after finding him, and her repeated checks on her own son.

Marcus III remembered Diana through daily conversation and her familiar presence in the household. Levi came to mind more intermittently, prompted by butterflies, flowers, gardens, orange blooms, or laughter that shook someone’s whole body. At times he addressed his uncle privately and briefly: ‘’hey, Uncle Levi. You see that one?’’ The gesture was spontaneous, not a ritual.

The stories, photographs, garden, and name kept Levi available to Marcus III as he grew. Diana’s act of preservation endured in her son’s full name, in the garden he helped tend, and in a family that continued to speak about the young man who had laughed at butterflies and died in his sleep at eighteen.

Relationships Family Relationships Sibling Relationships Diana Washington Levi Russell Russell Family Washington Family