AUBURN, Maine — I lost two of my favorite New England poets and a brilliant junior high science teacher over the past three months.
All three contributed to the greater good and gave us insight into life’s travails and achievements in our brief lives. Gifted poets and teachers have the aptitude to get inside our heads with their life-changing works and their flair in a classroom.
Eileen Merullo, 95, served in the classroom and her country during World War II.
According to her obituary in the Revere Journal:
“She graduated from Revere High School in 1940 and received her B.S. from Boston University’s Sargent College in 1944. Immediately upon graduation, she enlisted in the United States Army and served as a registered physical therapist in the Army Medical Corps, working with wound- ed soldiers in the Amputation Center at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. Always proud of her military service, she was a lifetime member of the Revere chapter of the Disabled American Veterans, and a charter member of Women in Military Service of America, as well as other veterans’ organizations.”
Mrs. Merullo inspired her students, sparked my curiosity about the natural world and is the reason why I have never lost interest in science.
I will miss her and the way she handled herself in the classroom. She didn’t take any guff, but her compassion for her students came shining through during each lesson.
Diana Der-Hovanessian, who died in March, wrote a poem entitle “Shifting The Sun.” I read this poem to mourners at St. Anthony’s Church in Revere, Mass., when my father, Albert John Blasi, passed away from Alzheimer's in 2014.
SHIFTING THE SUN
When your father dies, say the Irish
you lose your umbrella against bad weather.
May his sun be your light, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the Welsh
you sink a foot deeper into the earth.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians
When your father dies, say the Canadians
you run out of excuses.
May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the Indians
he comes back as the thunder.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the Russians,
he takes your childhood with him.
May you inherit his light say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the British,
you join his club you vowed you wouldn’t.
May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the Armenians,
your sun shifts forever
and you walk in his light.
Losing any parent is an ordeal and it is easy to get lost in a maze of grief. I am just fortunate I can still walk in his light. Der-Hovenessian’s poem is a powerful look at how people around the globe deal with the death of a patriarch.
I heard Donald Hall’s poem “Affirmation” on National Public Radio.
Those tender words about aging stuck with me and I began to read other poems by Hall and discovered he was a former Poet Laureate. He passed away at 89, but “Affirmation” has never left me.
Affirmation
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
“Affirmation” is blunt and doesn’t shy away from aging as life slowly slips away from all of us. But it was privilege to know them through their inspirational poems and in a classroom.
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