Now, family grieves for a young widow

PORTLAND, Maine -- Just as Lavinia Gelineau had mourned, her friends and relatives came to mourn her yesterday. They read passages she had read to comfort herself after the death of her husband, a soldier in Iraq. They sang the songs she had sung to find solace after he was killed.

Weeping in the pews of the Woodfords Congregational Church, they struggled together to make sense of the irrationality of war and family violence.

Lavinia Gelineau, a passionate, blunt-spoken Romanian immigrant, died last week, when her father strangled her in her home in Westbrook and then hanged himself. Her husband, Christopher D. Gelineau of the Maine National Guard, died last year, when insurgents near Mosul, Iraq, ambushed a convoy he was escorting.

He was 23. She was 25 and had spent much of the last year grieving his death.

From the pulpit, the Rev. Constantine Sarantidis told her family, friends, and colleagues that he did not want to dwell on Lavinia Gelineau's death. Instead, he and others spoke about her life, her devotion to helping other grieving military relatives, her wit, and her romantic side.

Her 250 mourners included men in uniform and young couples with their arms around each other. Some said they were comforted by a sense that the funeral was, in spiritual terms, a reunion for the young couple. Lavinia Gelineau was buried yesterday in Portland next to her husband, whose grave she had visited almost daily. ''I feel at peace," said Tyler Anderson, Christopher Gelineau's uncle, ''knowing that Chris and Lavi are together."

The couple fell in love in 2001, cleaning dorm rooms together at the University of Southern Maine, where she was studying English on a scholarship and he was majoring in computer technology. They married less than a year later and were inseparable.

''We would stay awake nights, and so many times we kept wondering: 'Oh, my goodness, we are so lucky. People live a lifetime of 90 years, and they never get to meet their half,' " Lavinia Gelineau said in an interview with the Globe last December. ''What is the chance? A girl from Romania comes to Maine, and a boy from Vermont comes to Maine, and what is the probability they go to the same school and they get to meet and complete each other?"

When her husband died last April, grief filled Lavinia. Her mother, who had moved in with her to escape her husband, Nicolae Onitiu, tried to take care of her daughter. While the mother made sure her daughter ate, neither she nor anyone else seemed capable of pulling the wan young woman from her pain.

''Society here is geared toward, 'Well, life goes on.' You wouldn't believe how many times I heard that," Lavinia Gelineau told the Globe in December. ''I'm really grieving as fast as I can. I know the whole world is not over, but my world is over."

Gradually, she found strength, said Christopher Gelineau's mother, Victoria Chicoine. The two spent hours together sorting through their grief and guilt at Christopher's death, she said.

Those feelings also led Lavinia Gelineau to publicly question the US role in the war in Iraq, friends said. She received angry e-mails from strangers telling her she was dishonoring her husband's memory. They told her to go back to Romania, friends said. But her husband's family only pulled closer to her, and yesterday they helped lead her funeral.

''The girl had life just blasting out of her all the time, and from the day we met, we already felt like she was part of the family; she fit right in," said John Chicoine, Christopher Gelineau's uncle.

Recently, Lavinia Gelineau bought a house and planned to get her master's degree in education. She had worked previously with troubled youth and with fellow foreign students at the University of Southern Maine. She had also counseled family members of military personnel killed in Iraq, friends said, an undertaking she had begun to see as a calling.

Last Wednesday, her father arrived at her house in Maine from Romania for a two-week visit. Friends said that she detested him, but that he talked her into letting him stay with her while he attempted to reconcile with her mother. Two days later, he strangled his daughter with a rope and then ended his own life, police say.

Yesterday, Mark Miller strapped on an acoustic guitar and led the mourners in singing ''Amazing Grace," which he had sung with his friend Lavinia Gelineau after her husband died. Andrew Gibson, a military chaplain who had counseled her, read passages that Lavinia had underlined in Mitch Albom's ''The Five People You Meet in Heaven." Sarantidis read from the same text he had prepared for Christopher Gelineau's funeral.

As the sun poured into the church, Miller offered a lesson from Lavinia Gelineau's life.

''One of the things Lavinia always said to me was, 'Mark, if you love someone, you must tell them,' " he said. ''So I repeat to everyone here this morning: that if there's someone in your life, who you love, you should tell them, because tomorrow is not a given. Life is very fragile."

Yvonne Abraham of the Globe staff contributed to this report.