This is the “Memorial” page for our departed classmates. We hope to update the Tributes with your input.

Please send any new information or Tributes to your web master (See Officers).

I came upon this very thoughtful poem and decided to post it here for you to contemplate.  It is used in the Reform Jewish liturgy, as an optional reading, before Kaddish. Please click the link to read it.

Ann Williams

https://new.alumnae.mtholyoke.edu/1960/files/2023/05/Epitaph.pdf

In this short Life by Emily Dickinson

In this short Life
That only lasts an hour
How much — how little — is
Within our power.

From our 55th Reunion Remembrance Ceremony:

“There will be no one like us when we are gone,
but then there is no one like anyone else, ever.
When people die they cannot be replaced. They
leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate
of every human being to be a unique individual, to
find his own path, to live his own life, to die his
own death.” “My predominant feeling is one of
gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have
been given much and I have given something in
return; I have read and traveled and thought and
written.” “Above all, I have been a sentient
being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet,
and that in itself has been an enormous
privilege and adventure.”

Oliver Sacks, NY Times, 2/19/2015

Judy Flanders Coon read her own poem.

Fearful but eager we came,
Belief in learning our common thread.
Became here sisters,
Unknowing Time would act a thief.

Memories give us back your lives,
We carry within all that you have been
And we have loved.
What we love well survives.

Deep sorrow in your absence,
Stark gratitude we had such friends.
Sisters still, we honor you.
What we love well transcends.

And after Susan Kovacs Buxbaum and Anne Goldberg Strauss read all of the following names, we strewed rose petals in the garden pond and watched them intermingle and float away… A very moving ceremony, indeed.

Class members are listed alphabetically by their maiden names. Key to the following: A Date in this color indicates a death since our 55th Reunion. A Date in this color indicates a death since our ‘Non-Reunion’ 60th Reunion. A Name in blue indicates a link to either an obituary or a Tribute from a classmate. Click to see it.