Janet Haas 1960-2019

A musical memorial service was held at Lexington High School for Janet Haas, an exemplary music teacher and accomplished musician, who collapsed in school in early December and was rushed to the hospital. She died a month later of a brain tumor. She was born in 1960 and was planning to retire in June. As one colleague said, “This should have been her retirement celebration.”

The service included a short video and beautiful music, played by her music students, from fourth graders through high schoolers, alumni, and colleagues. It including “Nimrod,” from the Enigma Variations by Edward Elgar, “Over the Rainbow,” played by a string orchestra of elementary students, and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. The Adagio is a great favorite of mine. It accompanies the David Whyte poem, "Well of Grief" that I wrote about 17 months after David died.

I hardly knew Janet Haas. An avid garage sale customer, I once found a violin for $25. Senior year, our daughter R’el, who played the flute and sang, decided to take it up and joined Mrs. Haas’ intermediate orchestra. To me she seemed a stern taskmaster: at one concert she announced that they would not be playing one of the pieces: it wasn’t ready.

I was pleased to hear of her gentler side, the extra attention she gave students, her interest in early music, figure skating, and gardening. The video showed a home movie clip of her smiling and patiently teaching a little boy how to move on figure skates.

According to Lexington Wicked Local, when Mrs. Haas began teaching in Lexington the high school orchestra had 17 string students. Thirty-one years later there are nearly 200 string players in three orchestras.

The announcement in Lexington Wicked Local reads like the obituary of Doc Graham (Field of Dreams), full of love and admiration for a life well lived:

Haas is remembered not only as a brilliant musician, teacher and colleague but also as a woman of the highest professional, personal, and musical integrity. She deeply wanted her students to experience the fullest passion for music. When she saw a need among her students or in a program she quietly rose to address that need. If a student wanted to learn to play bass at a school that was not in her schedule she would find a way to fit them in. She was a living example to her students of commitment, honesty and perseverance. Praise from Ms. Haas was a precious gift that meant her students had done something special and important.

After the service, we spoke to some of the other music teachers. Mr. Leonard, the music director who worked with us when we donated some of David's insurance money to buy new choral risers, pointed out John, with a bushy red beard, clearing the stage. He said that John was very careful handling the risers and made sure the brass plaques with David's name on them always faced out. Jim and I went up on stage to thank John for his care. We shook hands. It was a sweet moment.

David played the clarinet. He sat near the back of the section, stage right. I can see him intently blowing into the clarinet, or chuckling with another student. He graduated in 2006, thirteen years ago.

It was a bittersweet afternoon.

Carved in Granite

Peter and Xiomara, with 6-year-old Andrew and nearly-4-year-old Victoria, visited last weekend. On Saturday we went to Bedford Farms, a local ice cream stand. Our congregation, the Arlington Ward, always frequents Kimball Farm in Carlisle, but I’ve heard good things about Bedford Farms and it is nearly 4 miles closer to our house. (The ice cream was delicious. I had a blueberry swirl. Jim had outstanding ginger.)

On the way to ice cream, we passed the cemetery, and Jim turned in. Andrew wanted to know what it was and I explained it in simple terms.

We drove to David's grave and I knelt at the stone with Victoria and Andrew. As I read aloud:

I suddenly realized that Victoria would recognize it as her birthday. Victoria was born at 11:40 p.m., 40 minutes after David died. She will always share that date with him. I wasn't prepared to face that fact with her on the way to ice cream. But for Victoria it was simply a curiosity, that her birthday was on a stone in the grassy ground. Death isn’t tinged with sadness, horror, and longing for her. It’s just a fact: two things happened on the same date, both of them theoretical and mysterious to my three-year-old granddaughter.

Two months after David died, I wrote:

I’m sitting on the soft brown couch in Riverdale (the Bronx), listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, little Victoria kicking her legs and waving her arms. Andrew is munching on Lucky Charms in between kissing his baby sister.

Victoria was born 40 minutes after David died. She’s now two months old. It will always be easy to remember the date. Will I remember it more for the death or the life? The life I think. Every year Victoria will change; she’ll have her first birthday, her fifth, her sixteenth. David’s date will be static, slowly fading into the past, but never forgotten.

And now, nearly four years on, I start having the answer to the question I posed. Both events will always be significant; any mention of that date will immediately bring to mind two events. And, yes, Victoria will change constantly and her birthday will have new meaning each year as she grows up. But we won't forget David. New experiences surround us every day, but the fact of his life will never fade. We continue to have six children.


October 12, 2019 will be the fifth year that we host the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) bloodmobile for a blood drive in memory of David, who received many transfusions from MGH in the 15 month course of his treatment there. That has become, by design, the focus of our remembrance of David: the month of his birthday. And on August 12, 2019, Jim and I will be in the Bronx, with a homemade strawberry birthday cake for Victoria.

Haverford College Class of 2014

Spoleto: chamber music, Shakespeare’s Pericles, a Cuban big band, and an all-male dance company of Algerian, Israeli, and Palestinian street dancers. We drove the nearly 1000 miles down to Charleston in one day, stopping only for gas and a short supper. We took a leisurely four days to drive home, stopping for lunch with good friends in Richmond, and supper and an overnight stay at my brother Steve’s in Bethesda. Friday and Saturday we were at Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College (a mile away), Philly, and then drove to Manhattan for a vegan meal with R'el. We spent Saturday evening and Sunday morning with Peter and his family, then headed home.

We stopped at Haverford College for David’s fifth college reunion. At 23, he was the oldest freshman at Haverford in 2010. We know this because he told us, with a chuckle, that the dean, at a meeting of the whole freshman class, had listed interesting facts about the incoming class (how many international students, etc.). The youngest student was 16, the oldest 23. He studied Chinese and Spanish and biology and chemistry. Then he joined the Army in 2011, became a medic, and got leukemia in 2014, a few months before his Haverford class graduated.

Last year, at my Bryn Mawr College 40th reunion, Jim conceived a plan of attending David’s 5th reunion and having a short memorial for him. Jon Schweitzer-Lamme, chair of the Haverford Class of 2014 reunion committee, knew David, it turned out, and was happy to organize it.

Stacie Giles, my dear friend in Richmond, and her husband, Frank, came too. She was going to her own 40th reunion at Bryn Mawr. Stacie's short-story murder mystery was recently published in an anthology, Deadly Southern Charm.

We arrived Friday evening and went out to dinner with Natalie, a good friend of David’s at Haverford. They studied Chinese and Spanish together and annoyed/amused their friends by speaking Chinspanglish. David was a very private person and I don’t recall him ever talking about his friends. We first knew of Natalie when she walked up our driveway to attend the visiting hours in our home before David’s funeral. She and David had emailed all through his illness and she followed my blog. It was a bold thing for her to come up from New York unannounced, but I was thrilled to learn of her friendship and connection to David and immediately invited her to sit with our family at the funeral.

We spent dinner talking about David and about her present life. Then we drove to Haverford and sat under a big reunion tent between Founders Hall and the old Ryan gym, where I used to practice fencing with the Haverford team. (Bryn Mawr didn’t offer fencing. I had learned it at the YMCA in high school. Since Haverford was all-men at the time, I couldn’t compete with the team  at meets, but occasionally got to compete unofficially with women from other colleges.)

The memorial was simple and intimate. Nine classmates stood in a circle near a young tree on Founders Green and talked about David. One woman remembered that David wouldn’t laugh at her jokes. They remembered being surprised that he was the famous 23-year-old: he didn't look that old.

After that sweet meeting, we took a short tour of Barclay first floor. David lived in room 102, the corner dorm room facing Founders Hall. Natalie lived on the same floor. I have fond memories of Barclay: some of my favorite Class of '78 Haverfordians lived in Barclay during our freshman year.

I wasn’t sure how the memorial would go, and how I’d feel about it. Would it be awkward, being the older, bereaved parents of a young man who had only attended Haverford one year? Would anyone but Natalie and Jon recognize David’s name? But it was a sweet experience. Bittersweet, to see these charming, promising young adults living interesting lives and returning to see college friends and roam the campus.

This week, all of eastern Massachusetts is resplendent with pink-lavender rhododendron shrubs. By far the most abundant color of rhododendrons right now, it blooms before the whites, reds, pinks, and oranges. The blessing of a cool (no, cold), rainy spring is that the flowering shrubs bloom for extended periods. The rhododendrons are a towering mass of bouquets of blossoms. Some are fifteen feet tall. It's a pleasure to drive around and enjoy them.