Deceased May 4, 1991

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25th Reunion Book Entry


In Memory

Bob Stratton died early in May in his apartment in Brooklyn. As of July, there was no definite indication of the cause, but circumstances suggest that it may have been of the relatively obscure illnesses that develop only in cases where someone’s immune system has broken down. In other words, an AIDS complication.

Whether or not it is what he died of, Bob suffered from AIDS—not only because he may have had it, but because he felt deeply and immediately for anyone who did. Last year, in Boston, he was a nursing assistant in a holistic-care team that provided services for people who were HIV positive with end-stage disease; more recently, when he moved back to New York, he hoped to pursue work as a pastoral counselor for AIDS victims.

Bob’s interest in counseling was one of several threads that wound around each other in his career. Others were teaching, theology, Christian ministry generally and a lifelong love of classical literature and language. In 1965, while a college student at Amherst, he taught English and Latin at Amherst Regional High School and Sunday school at Grace Episcopal Church on the Amherst town common. This year he taught at the St. Gerard Majella School in Hollis, N.Y.

In the years between, he frequently taught or was a counselor for children and adults who were retarded or neurologically impaired/learning disabled. One way and another, he was drawn where people’s needs were extraordinary and their resources scant. At one point in 1989, by his estimate, he was working 65 – 70 hours a week as a home health aide. Later he worked at the new Hospice on Mission Hill (Boston), which he described in a letter in 1990 as “the original (and for months the only) federally certified hospice for persons with AIDS.”

In his work, and in his friendships, Bob drew amply from religion: partly because he was devout in his faith, partly because he was thoroughly fascinated with the history, literature and liturgy of the church. From 1976 to 1979 he was a clerical assistant, sexton and parish secretary at St. Agnes Church in Liverpool, England, where he spent three gratifying years studying for his M.Phil. degree in psychology. Later he also earned a master’s degree in theology and pastoral counseling from Boston College.

Friends who knew Bob at Amherst will remember that he seemed to bear more than his share of frustration and pain in dealing with many things. They will also remember his sense of dignity and decorum—he wore a coat and tie to classes in 1968, no less—and his great precision with words. He also had a bittersweet sense of humor that could be endearing, and he combined it with an ability to feel wonder at, and delight in, all sorts of things that were new to him. Although Bob’s path after college led him away from contact with his classmates, he felt a continuous fondness for Amherst—from where, incidentally, he was proud to identify his degree not as a B.A. but rather, in the original Latin form, as an A.B.

Bob was often alone, and he was constantly pleased to rediscover friendships. He would appreciate the words of a minister who knew him well and who, on hearing news of Bob’s death, spoke of the concept of anamnesis: the ability to recall someone who has died, not as he was in his life, but in the present as he is now.

John Stifler ’68

25th Reunion
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Freshman photo and the Dedication to deceased students.