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Student pays tribute to slain mother at Northeastern commencement

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  • Student pays tribute to slain mother at Northeastern commencement

    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."
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