Remembering Ethan
About this image: Flavors (2013) - Ethan was a big fan of ice cream. Good ice cream. A lot of good ice cream. When I was laid up after my knee surgery back in 2012, Ethan & Jen brought me more pints of Amy’s Ice Cream than I thought was legal for an individual citizen to possess. It was such a sweet & very Ethan thing to do (deliciousness! excess! <3 ) He didn’t do very many landscapes, but this piece featuring an ice cream shop that was important to him is one of my very favorites among his works.
Man, I do not want to write this. It’s not that I don’t want to share the thoughts & recollections that are flooding in, it’s that I didn’t imagine that the flow of new memories and experiences would stop quite this soon. Compassion & apologies to anyone who is hearing about this for the first time in this way.
Ethan Diehl was a skilled developer, a talented artist, one heck of a talker (he never once met a stranger!), and a wonderful friend. Above all, he had one of the most generous hearts I’ve ever had the pleasure of being connected with.
He had strong beliefs about the “right” way to do things. Very. Strong. Beliefs. You could always count on the fact that he would be doing whatever needed to be done, and he would do it the “right” way. The “right” way included working very hard, tracking every detail, and never giving up until the problem was solved. This made him a strong and skilled developer and a teammate you could rely on to do some seriously heavy lifting. His ability to track down minutiae and debug nearly anything was legend. He wasn’t afraid to follow every long and thankless rabbit trail if it meant solving the puzzle.
He also had very strong beliefs about how other people should be doing things (i.e. the “right” way). This sometimes made him an extremely challenging teammate. 😄 That said, he had a surprising amount of tolerance and respect for other ways of doing things, as long as you first acknowledged that his way (the “right” way) was also valuable. Once he felt seen & valued, his generosity was endless. ENDLESS. This created space for us to respectfully exchange our very different ideas and approaches, knowing that we were working toward the same goals. If our team was Star Trek TNG, Ethan was a lot of Data & a little bit Worf, while I was straight-up Counselor Troi. We had a lot to learn from each other.
Ethan and I were next-door office neighbors for nearly seven years. We rarely worked on the same projects, but we spent a lot of time bouncing ideas off of each other and leaning on each others’ expertise. We weathered one massive organizational change after the other, and if we weren’t in the same trenches together, we were within shouting distance. I leaned hard on his vast institutional memory and deep knowledge of mystifying tools and processes. He pioneered remote work for our department, and paved the way for me to do the same a year later - one of the many ways he changed my life for the better.
Ethan was an amazing artist, taking all of those unique qualities that made him him - his love of beauty, his keen observation of the shape and form of things, his colorblindness, his insane capacity for detail, his tenacity and work ethic - and pouring them into the exquisite detail of his art, the loving rendering of each and every pixel of the beautiful grayscale images he created.
Aside from the time element, Ethan never saw any conflict between his logical, developer self and his expansive, artistic self. There was no either/or in him - always both. He lived a beautiful example of making space for all the various parts of ourselves, and he enthusiastically encouraged this in all the other developer/artists he met and befriended. There are so many folks in this quirky little UT-developer lineage we occupy that embody this combination of logic and art, and he loved thinking of us as a collective, delighted in each individual creative triumph, cheered louder, and spread the word farther than any crack team of brand ambassadors ever could.
Because…he knew everyone. EVERYONE. He’d either met them downtown, sat next to them on the bus, had lunch with them every other week, worked with them, was their challenge analyst, went to college with them, grew up with them, sold them a painting, met them at an art show, or one of the 10,000 other ways he connected with people. His network of connections was vast, and he used it primarily to talk up and lift up and build up the people to whom he was connected. In reflecting with a mutual friend this morning, we realized how much of our time connecting with Ethan was spent talking about how awesome our mutual friends were. Ethan might not always tell you to your face how amazing he thought you were, but you can count on the fact that he was paying attention, he felt it, and he told a LOT of other people.
I feel so fortunate that our friendship reached a point where we could say these things to each others’ faces. Ethan was always deeply supportive of me and the work I do in the world. I can hear his, “That’s good. Keep it up, Jules.” even now.
Even with his prodigious powers of connection and conversation, “reading the room” was never the sharpest tool in Ethan’s toolbox. As strong as his powers of observation were for form, pattern, and structure, this didn’t always translate into the arena of feeling and emotion. To say he missed a lot of signals is a bit of an understatement. However, when feelings, emotions, and experiences were made explicit to him, his capacity for compassion and care was oceanic. A few years back, when #metoo was first happening and I shared some of my stories on social media, Ethan called me, crying. He was distressed that he didn’t know these things had happened, and didn’t know what to do. He offered support and care, and only after he was sure I was ok, he asked whether I thought his actions had hurt women. We had a beautiful, candid, and compassionate conversation that he seemed to take deeply to heart, and he changed his behaviors accordingly.
The past few years held a lot of challenges, and perhaps his physical body just couldn’t handle everything his generous heart wanted to hold. Whatever the cause of his way-too-early passing, my heart is lightened when I think of him free from pain, free from the boundaries of time and space, free to connect with as many folks as he can.
Today, I celebrate Ethan by enjoying his beautiful art (http://www.ethandiehl.com/), eating the spiciest food I can handle (and maybe some good ice cream), and talking to people I love about our amazing mutual friend. Love you, E.