 |
Diana Aharonian, with her daughter, Natalie. (New England Centenarian Study) |
Diana Aharonian, 106; became inspiration
Diana Aharonian could recall rushing home from school the day her family's Massachusetts home was first wired for electricity.
Mrs. Aharonian, who died Wednesday in Needham at age 106, remembered pressing a switch and marveling at the glowing light bulb, she said during a 2002 panel discussion on aging.
Born in 1902, she was one of 1,500 members of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University's School of Medicine, the largest study of those over 100 in the world.
Mrs. Arharonian never smoked and never drank. She outlived her siblings, her husband, and her children.
"All those people who want to live to 100 - what's so good about it?" she said in a 2004 interview in The
In the lexicon of aging studies, Mrs. Aharonian was known as a semi-super centenarian, or those who live to be 105 and older.
"She was a tremendous inspiration," said Dr. Thomas Perls, director of the nationwide centenarian study. "She was cognitively intact and living independently for the vast majority of her life."
In 2002, she appeared on the panel of centenarians at Boston Medical Center, where she spoke about the arrival of electricity at her childhood home in Whitinsville.
She told The Times she considered 90 years an optimum life span. "That's a good age. That's old enough," she said.
Born the second of five children and raised amid a close-knit Armenian community, Mrs. Aharonian was valedictorian of her class at Northbridge High School. She studied piano at the New England Conservatory and enjoyed playing and listening to classical music throughout her life.
She could recall reading about the sinking of the Titanic in Boston newspapers and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I.
A stylish dresser, she enjoyed watching Busby Berkeley musicals at Boston movie houses in the 1930s and spent many years working for Liberty Mutual Insurance Co.
She was married to Hapet Aharonian for 27 years. Their first child, Abraham, fell from a roof and died at age 3 in 1928.
"Aunt Di was in some pain most of the time arising out of that," said her nephew, Edward Simsarian, who at age 85 still runs his law practice in Worcester.
After Hapet Aharonian died in 1950, her world revolved mostly around her daughter, Natalie, who studied piano at Juilliard and Yale before becoming admissions director at Wellesley College.
Mrs. Aharonian kept her own home in Wellesley until 2005, when she entered the Wingate in Needham Rehabilitative and Skilled Nursing Residence.
Her daughter, Natalie, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease last fall. She died Feb. 1 at age 78.
Upon the death, Mrs. Aharonian began to withdraw and stopped eating, her nephew said.
"She was able to do physically what she was supposed to do, but she wasn't emotionally able to accept it," he said.
Before her daughter's illness, "she was amazing," he said. She enjoyed the books of historian David McCullough and followed the Red Sox and the Patriots, he said.
A memorial service is planned for 2 p.m. May 17 at the Congregational Church of Needham. Burial will be in the family plot at Linwood Cemetery in Haverhill.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
