Boston Globe, MA
May 2 2008
Student pays tribute to slain mother at Northeastern commencement
May 2, 2008 02:56 PM
By Peter Schworm, Globe Staff
A graduating Northeastern University student paid tribute to her slain
mother today in an emotional speech at the school’s commencement,
saying her mother’s work as a therapist had inspired her to finish
school after the tragedy.
As a public disclosure of her private loss, the speech was a way for
Arminé Nalbandian to turn the page after Diruhi Mattian, a 54-year-old
psychotherapist, was slain in February while making a house call in
North Andover to a troubled patient she had known for a decade.
In the chaos of those first couple of weeks after her mother’s murder,
she said in the speech today, she wondered how she would proceed with
her life.
"And then something happened; I realized that there was nothing to do
but to go on,” she said in the annual student speech before a crowd
of more than 16,000 at Northeastern’s commencement at the TD Banknorth
Garden.
"There was nothing to do but to face this challenge just as I had
faced every other challenge before. So I picked up the pieces, relied
on the support around me and made my way back to the real world," she
said.
Four years after she sat beside her mother as they watched her sister
receive her Northeastern diploma on the same stage, the address helds
deep personal meaning. An original draft of her speech did not mention
her mother, so she reworked it.
"The first version didn’t sit right," she said in an interview on
campus earlier this week. "It wasn’t true to myself. It wouldn’t be
fair to me or to who my Mom was, to glaze over what happened."
Nalbandian, 22, hopes that sharing her story, how she has forgiven the
man charged with murder in her mother’s death and completed her final
semester despite missing six weeks of classes, will inspire others to
rise above adversity and to appreciate life as it happens.
On a personal level, she hopes it brings a measure of catharsis and
maybe closure.
"I’ve always been a private person, and I don’t like to share things,"
she said. "This is sharing everything, so it’s a real test for me. She
took the toughest patients, patients other people didn’t want to
take. So this is a way I can honor her."
A summa cum laude student with a double major in political science and
communication studies, Nalbandian has won a Fulbright scholarship.
A native Armenian whose family fled Soviet rule in the 1980s and
settled in Massachusetts when she was 4, she hopes to return to her
homeland this fall to conduct a yearlong research project on
Turkish-Armenian reconciliation.
Jim Stellar, dean of Northeastern’s College of Arts and Sciences and a
mentor to Nalbandian, said her determination to fight through her
grief and fight back feelings of revenge is inspirational.
"She’s hurt, but the anger isn’t there," he said earlier this
week. "She draws strength from her remarkable capacity to be
forgiving. She is teaching us all."