KATHLEEN WHITE—Aureet's funeral - January 9, 1991
My name is Kathleen White, and I'm a professor of psychology at Boston University, where Aureet earned her doctoral degree. I know that I shared Aureet with many other faculty who loved, respected, and admired her, as I did, but I feel that in an important way she was my student. From the time she took her first graduate course with me, through the dissertation that she did with data I had collected on young adults, and through her ongoing connection with the Family Relationships project, I considered her to be a very special person, and she was somebody with whom it was an honor to work.
For more than three years, Aureet was a member of my research team studying close relationships. As the members of that team who are here today know, that group was as much hers as it was mine. She was the glue that held us together. I have never had a better research team than that one. We were at our most vibrant, most productive level during that time, and it was because Aureet was at the center of the group. She was our sunshine, our stimulator, our energy. She helped the younger members of the group develop and clarify their ideas, find materials, get underway, fight discouragement, progress. To more advanced students, she was a wonderful provider of feedback, an encourager through the rough times, a model, a mentor. And in truly Aureet fashion, when I urged her to submit her scoring manual for publication, she urged me to submit mine. I now have two scoring manuals in press because of Aureet's mentoring of me.
Aureet's dissertation, as some of you know, was on the development of intimacy and interpersonal maturity during the young adult years. This was an extremely fitting topic for her, because Aureet was in many ways the epitome of maturity in close relations with others. She was a grown up in the best sense of the word. She had tolerance, understanding and empathy for others. She knew how to listen. She could also stick up for her own beliefs and values. She was a fully developed individual, with a great ability to connect with others in close, caring, reciprocal and equitable bonds.
Aureet was very special to everybody in the group, as she was to everybody here today. We love her and we will miss her — but we are so grateful that she has been a part of our lives. We are all the better because of having known her.
