Good evening. My name is Peter von Euler and this is my wife, Nancy. When we established this scholarship 6 years ago we had 3 goals in mind. First, we wanted to celebrate our daughter's rich, if too short, life. Second, we wanted to provide a little help and encouragement to our award winners so that they might achieve their dreams. And, lastly, we wanted to use the award presentation as an opportunity to share some information that maybe, just maybe, would save a young person's life.
Our daughter, Emma, was bright, beautiful, and talented. She LOVED music! She danced, sang, and played the flute, piccolo, saxophone, clarinet, and guitar. She dreamed of a life as a professional musician. By the age of 16, she had performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, West Point, and Canterbury Cathedral. Emma was also kind and compassionate. She was a defender of underdogs everywhere and always had a shoulder for her friends to lean on.
Emma never reached her 17th birthday. An illness took her life. It attacked her brain. She had struggled with it for a long time. Though formidable, it was mostly invisible. Many of her friends didn’t even know she was ill. No, it wasn’t cancer. It was mental illness. I wonder how many of you, as you heard that last sentence, scrambled to replay the lines that came before it. I wonder how many of you think it’s odd to imply that those illnesses are comparable. Emma’s life ended with suicide, just as someone with AIDS might eventually succumb to pneumonia, but the disease that took her life was mental illness. I’m telling you this, because I feel that we treat ill people in this country differently, depending on the type of disease. Let’s be clear, though, people with mental illness do not choose their affliction. They are not weaker human beings, and when they fight their disease they are no less heroic. Unfortunately, many of those people are young, and many keep their struggle to themselves.
Suicide is now the third leading cause of death for people ages 15-34. Suicide claims nearly as many lives each year as breast cancer; and as of 2010, more people in the United States lost their lives to suicide than in car accidents.
Many people think of suicide as being an extreme reaction to a failed relationship, lost job, or family crisis. The truth is, in 90% of deaths by suicide, the underlying cause is a diagnosable, although sometimes undiagnosed, mental illness. The good news is mental illness is treatable. But to be treated, a person needs to seek help. Everybody knows that diseases are best be treated if detected early. The same is true for mental illness. Don’t be afraid to seek help. Everybody knows that the struggle goes better when the patient has supporters, champions who walk alongside. Don’t be afraid to walk alongside a friend who’s struggling. We hope that you won’t consider it a cause for shame or a sign of weakness. We don’t look at other diseases that way. We hope that your generation is the generation that brings mental illness and mental health issues out in the open. Please, take care of each other.
Fairfield Warde –
This year’s scholarship winner is an avid violinist who has played in Warde’s Concert, Chamber, and Symphonic orchestras and is also a member of the Greater Bridgeport Youth Orchestra. She is a member of the Tri-M Music Honor Society, National Honor Society, and Math Honor Society. For all four years of high school she participated in a Music Enrichment program mentoring elementary school students, and she has been a mentor/translator at the Vasco de Gama Portuguese school. In her essay, she described herself as, “Being someone who wants to mesh the studies of music, art and psychology together in order to make discoveries that lie in between all of the disciplines.” Katie Reiss, we can’t wait to see what you discover!
Fairfield Ludlowe –
This year’s scholarship winner is a talented flutist, who is a member of the Tri-M Music Honor Society, the National Honor Society and the English Honor Society. She loves children and has worked as both a tutor and a flute teacher outside of school. She will be attending Fordham University next year, where she plans on majoring in Psychology and continuing with the flute. We are thrilled to present the Emma Jane von Euler Memorial Scholarship to Abigail Price.
