Diana Washington and Marcus Washington III
Overview
Diana Rochelle Washington and Marcus Levi Washington III were mother and son. Diana remained central to Marcus’s life after she died of triple-negative breast cancer in 2010. She taught him basketball and passed on her jersey number, twenty-three, which he wore on every team. She also modeled an expressive warmth that included people others overlooked. Marcus shared her smile and dark eyes, which crinkled when he laughed, as well as her loud laugh and love of the game. He continued to speak and write to her after her death and to hear her voice internally. In 2014, that continuing conversation remained a strong presence in his daily life.
Relationship During Diana’s Life
Diana introduced Marcus to basketball in the driveway of their West Baltimore home. Her instruction came from her own love and strategic understanding of the game rather than from parental pressure: “You gotta see the whole court, baby. Not just your man. The whole thing. That’s what makes you dangerous.” Although Marcus played shooting guard, she taught him to think like a point guard by anticipating plays, reading the court, and using judgment rather than speed alone.
Diana gave Marcus the middle name Levi to carry the memory of her brother Levi Christopher Russell into the next generation. In her son’s broad frame and full-bodied delight, she also recognized something of Levi’s spirit; the resemblance brought her both happiness and grief. She taught Marcus free throws and how to tie a tie for church. Her care could be vigilant, shaped by years of checking on Levi and by the morning she found him dead, but she made being wanted something Marcus could hear and feel.
She also insisted that athletic opportunity include education: “Basketball opens the door, baby. The degree is what keeps it open. I don’t care if you play for the NBA or the YMCA—you’re getting an education. That’s not negotiable.” Marcus remembered her instruction during his University of Maryland visit, where academic eligibility mattered to him alongside playing time.
Diana attended Marcus’s organized games from the same third-row seat at center court until illness made attendance impossible. She stood, cheered loudly, and made her support publicly unmistakable. Marcus grew up knowing that she was watching and cheering for him.
Beyond basketball, Diana’s warmth shaped Marcus’s approach to other people. She and her mother-in-law, Denise Washington, shared a temperament rather than a blood relationship: both drew others into conversation and noticed people who were alone. Diana made lonely people feel seen and filled rooms with her energy. At the recreation center, Marcus continued that practice with children, teasing them, showing up consistently, and including the quieter ones.
Family and Cultural Context
Diana and Marcus’s relationship developed within their Black West Baltimore family, where basketball, church, intergenerational care, and remembrance of deceased relatives were parts of daily life. The family’s experiences of racial inequality and grief also informed how Diana cared for her son.
Diana taught Marcus basketball because she loved the game and wanted to pass on opportunities she had not received. She also understood that a large Black boy could be judged through assumptions about intelligence, threat, and worth. Her instruction to see the whole court taught basketball strategy while reinforcing the value she placed on awareness and anticipation beyond the game.
Diana’s place in the third row at center court made her support for Marcus visible. She cheered at full volume and claimed his achievements publicly. In a setting where Black mothers could be expected to sacrifice for their children and blamed for their difficulties, Diana refused to make her support quiet or invisible. Her presence expressed love and asserted that her son was extraordinary and should not be overlooked.
Marcus resembled Diana in his loudness, warmth, and room-filling presence. He also adopted her practice of including people who might otherwise be left alone. At the recreation center, he teased children while making sure the quieter ones belonged. Diana had modeled that practice throughout his thirteen years with her; it became part of his own manner rather than a rule he consciously followed.
Marcus continued talking aloud and internally to Diana and consulting her about basketball, Keisha, and other parts of his life. Continuing relationships with the dead have precedents in West African ancestral reverence, the Black church’s language of the dead as “just on the other side,” and families’ refusal to let losses through violence, disease, or systemic neglect end a person’s place among them. Denise understood Diana’s later intervention in the scout-game seating as providence. Marcus did not give his own experience the same explicit theological explanation. His relationship with Diana was neither treated by the family as pathology nor reduced by them to unresolved grief. He experienced her as still present, without needing to settle whether every aspect of that presence was literal or metaphorical.
Triple-negative breast cancer disproportionately affects Black women, a context for the illness that caused Diana’s death. Marcus lost the parent who had been his primary emotional anchor, taught him basketball, cheered at his games, and helped him understand his quiet father and quieter grandfather. Denise and Marcus I continued to care for him in their shared home, but Diana’s distinctive voice and energy were absent. Her practice of including others had begun when her brother Levi was born, when she was seven, and remained part of what Marcus tried to carry forward. In the four years after her death, his own loudness partly answered the silence she had left.
Diana’s Illness and Death
Diana was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer in 2010 and died later that year at approximately forty-three. Marcus, then thirteen, understood that she was ill and was devastated by her decline and death. Diana continued attending his games from the third row during treatment, even when doing so exhausted her, until she could no longer manage the trip.
Four years later, Marcus still felt the absence of the person who had taught him basketball, cheered at his games, filled their house with noise, and helped him understand his father and the wider world.
At seventeen in 2014, he was still learning to live with her absence while pursuing a life she would have taken pride in.
Continuing Relationship After Diana’s Death
Marcus continued to talk to Diana aloud when alone in his room, truck, driveway, or the gym, and at her grave. He wrote to her and spoke with her internally throughout his days. Her familiar voice coached him through games, critiqued his decisions, and reminded him to see the whole court. He answered and argued with her, telling her about his day, Keisha, and the Maryland scout. In this continuing relationship, she answered him.
Marcus experienced Diana’s voice as an adviser, a conscience, and a standard for his choices. He believed good play made her proud and mistakes let her down. Seeing Keisha in Diana’s former seat at the scout game felt to him like his mother endorsing her: ‘’this one, baby, this girl right here, she’s good for you.’‘
Unlike Denise, Marcus did not describe that belief in theological terms. He nonetheless felt that Diana continued watching over him and arranging care for him from wherever she was, ensuring that he was not alone.
Marcus kept Diana’s belongings in a Nike basketball-shoe box from a pair he had outgrown three years earlier. He repeatedly intended to buy a formal keepsake box but continued using the shoebox because, to him, it had become hers.
The box held Diana’s silver Pandora bracelet, worn smooth from daily use; her simple gold wedding band; her handwritten macaroni-and-cheese recipe; photographs and birthday cards; the bracelet from her final hospital admission; and a program from the eighth-grade basketball game that was the last she could attend. Her floral perfume, a gift Denise had bought at Macy’s, lingered faintly on the fabric and paper. Marcus held the cool bracelet in his large hand and let its charms press into his skin. When he tried on the ring, it reached only the first knuckle of his pinky.
Marcus remembered his father giving Diana the bracelet around his own eighth or ninth birthday. Its basketball charm represented him; the heart represented Marcus II; the cross came from Denise; and the book reflected Diana’s love of reading. Holding it recalled her reassurance before tests and games: “Stop borrowing tomorrow’s problems, baby. You got enough today.” Diana had made failure feel less permanent to him.
The recipe card preserved her careful handwriting and exact preferences: two cups of elbow macaroni, four tablespoons of butter, one-quarter cup of flour, two cups of whole milk, two cups of sharp cheddar, and salt, pepper, and paprika to taste. Her notes specified “whole, not that skim nonsense” and “the GOOD kind,” then added, “Don’t forget the paprika, baby. That’s what makes it special.” Denise used the recipe on Sundays, but Marcus still missed an element he could not name in anyone else’s version.
Before his eighteenth birthday, Marcus planned a memorial tattoo of Diana Rochelle’s name and was still considering whether to include dates. The shoebox alone no longer felt sufficient; he wanted a permanent acknowledgment on his skin that she had been real and still mattered. He put the keepsakes back in the box on the top shelf of his closet, behind his shoes.
Diana’s Seat at the UMD Scout Game
Diana’s third-row center-court seat remained empty for four years after her death. Other spectators sat around it but not in it, leaving the place associated with her as distinctly as Marcus’s number twenty-three. Repetition and loss made both the seat and the number sacred to the family.
At the December 2014 UMD scout game, Keisha Clark unknowingly chose Diana’s seat between Marcus’s grandparents. She wore a purple coat, a color strongly associated with Diana, and laughed with them in a way that recalled the warmth around Diana. Marcus, who was falling for Keisha, struggled to process the sight of her occupying the place his mother had held throughout his childhood games.
Diana had sent Keisha to her son and guided her into the seat, though neither young person knew what she had arranged. Marcus felt his mother’s involvement without knowing its cause. Denise regarded the placement as providential, while Marcus felt Diana’s continuing attention and care without framing it as doctrine.
Influence on Marcus
Diana shaped Marcus’s loudness, warmth, stubbornness, love of basketball, and instinct for including others. Grief remained beneath his energetic manner. He often filled silence with noise and continued talking to his mother four years after her death.
Marcus connected his ambition to play college basketball, his recreation-center volunteering, and his habit of showing up for others to Diana’s influence. His pursuit of college play carried forward her hopes for him, while his attention to people who needed inclusion reflected her practice of making space for them.
Diana continued to act on Marcus’s life in ways he did not fully know, including Keisha’s placement at the scout game. He continued to speak with her.