Hannah Ruth Meyer

Hannah Ruth Meyer of Swarthmore died on December 9 after a decades-long battle with an eatIng disorder. She was thirty-one years old. A graduate of the Swarthmore Rutledge School and of Strath Haven Middle School and High School, Hannah had a beautiful voice, a dry sense of humor, and a flair for languages and abstract thinking. She entered the University of Chicago as a math major, ended up a philosophy major, and was wriIng an honors thesis on personal idenIty when illness overwhelmed her during her final year of studies. Hannah found great joy in distance running, first at USATF naIonal meets as an unattached runner in track and cross country, and later on the SHHS varsity cross country team. In her first year of high school she was All Delaware County in cross country, twenty seventh in the PIAA State Championship, and the fourth fastest freshman in the Footlocker Northeast Regional Meet. 

Hannah is survived by her parents (Milton and Susan) and her brother (Nathan). Funeral services will be held at Congregation Beth Israel of Media on Monday 16 December at 1:30 pm. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in Hannah’s memory to the Princeton Medical Center Foundation in support of the Eating Disorder Program or the Critical Care Unit and sent to 5 Plainsboro Road, Suite 365, Plainsboro, NJ 08536. 

Eulogy by Reisa Mukamal:

I am so sad to be standing here before you for this purpose. But I want to do Hannah justice. I’m speaking as a friend of the Meyer family, as a champion of Hannah when I was her Bat Mitzvah tutor, and as a champion of the person I know Hannah to be. I think the poem, “Our Name” that Hannah wrote which her Aunt Anne read speaks volumes. You know a person through their writing. “She cherished many things,” Hannah wrote, “and spread her joys around; a butterfly pollinating the flowers ‘til the net was snapped down on her.” This is a child writing a poem about her great-grandmother whose name she shared who perished in the gas chambers. Not only is Hannah able to withstand knowing the horror but she somehow has an overview of her great-grandmother’s life. She writes with economy, emotion, and stunning beauty—all qualities she herself possessed. That poem was a turning point for Hannah. She had long wanted blue eyes like her mother’s but now identified with the brown eyes of her namesake. 

A story Milton and Susan shared with me gives another glimpse of Hannah’s heart. For Thanksgiving at the Walden preschool she attended, each child wrote or dictated something they were especially thankful for. Many wrote about parents taking them places like Disneyworld. Hannah said: "I am thankful that I made friends with Ellie. We are not just best friends. We are more than that. It's like we're sisters." My own thinking about the world often zeroes in on childhood, the roots of our whole lives. Milton recorded, with foresight, moments from Hannah’s childhood. They are like an ongoing open and thoughtful conversation between father and daughter, spoken in a safe cocoon. “We were on a hike in Ridley Creek State Park,” Milton writes when Hannah was five, “and Hannah asked out of the blue, ‘Daddy, you know how people say that millions of years ago dinosaurs lived here. Do you think that millions of years from now there will be creatures saying that about us?’" Another thing he recorded that year was a discussion they were having on the way home from school about the expression “out of the frying pan and into the fire.” That night, jumping into his lap and curling up in a fetal position, Hannah said, “Hey Daddy, this is the opposite of out of the frying pan and into the fire. Could we make up a saying for that?” Hannah was a wordsmith, for sure. Words mattered to her. Not just for the wonders of language itself, which she reveled in, but for fact-finding. She interrogated what people said, what her father said. Here is an example from age 5. Milton writes, “Hannah, Sara Venkatesh and I were hiking on the red trail at Tyler Arboretum on July 4th. Sara is exactly two years older than Hannah and an excellent athlete. She has also had lots of experience hiking and camping with her parents. Hannah has gone on a few long hikes with me of about five miles. We got to a creek that had various stones across it to allow passage. When Hannah and I had done the trail in the past I held her hand and guided her from stone to stone. When we got to the stream, Sara bounded across the stones quickly and with great relish. This got Hannah's attention and she asked if she could do the same. I said that she could not because the stones were slippery and falling on them could be dangerous. She naturally inquired why Sara was able to do it. I said that Sara had a lot of experience doing it but it was dangerous and her subsequent fall demonstrated this far better than my words. Without hesitating, Hannah said, "Daddy, how can I get any experience if you don't let me do it by myself?" I could not answer this reply and so she got a chance to get some experience. When we reached the next stream she asked, "Daddy, can I get some more experience here?" With her father, Hannah could win out with logic. As Susan says, they were two peas in a pod. There is nothing more delicious than a meeting of the minds. The loss of this is what Susan and Milton and Nathan now must face. 

I am grateful to have this sanctuary and be in it with all of you to honor and mourn Hannah. I am grateful that her family felt a kinship with Reconstructionism and joined Beth Israel. I am grateful that I witnessed the B’nai Mitzvah of Hannah and Nathan. And I am grateful whenever I hear Susan chant Torah on this bimah, which is often. I was honored to be Hannah’s Bat Mitzvah tutor. Susan accompanied Hannah to her lessons and learned alongside her. Hannah was shy but willing and sweet. She learned prayers, Torah trope, and Haftorah trope with only the most skeletal instruction. She wrote her D’var Torah independently. So did Nathan, I believe. In her D’var Torah, before speaking about her Torah portion, she laid out her position on the Torah as a whole. She wrote, “I understand the teachings of the Torah from a Reconstructionist point of view. In other words, I do not believe in the existence of a supernatural being who gave commandments. Therefore, I don’t take the commandments literally. Rather, I try to interpret the commandments and decide what they could mean for us today.” So like her to pull no punches and speak with scholarly transparency. She wrestled with slavery in Parashat B’har, writing, “God says that slavery is perfectly permissible, so long as the slaves are not Israelites. Enslaving people subjects them to cruel treatment that they have done nothing to deserve. The fact that the slave is a different nationality than the owner does not provide a reason for making slavery permissible. It puzzles me why the writers of the Torah could first talk of the brutality of Egyptians enslaving Israelites and then have no qualms with Israelites having slaves from other nations. This flawed commandment reminds me of the fact that, throughout history, slaves have often been of a different ethnicity than their masters.” She then made a connection with the Liberty Bell with its verse from Leviticus "Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof." Hannah writes, “Ironically, many of the people who helped create the bell owned slaves. Therefore, they didn’t really believe in liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” 

I return to Hannah age 4, a story that highlights both her reasoning and her wish for justice. On a cold day, her dad told her to zip up her jacket and put on her mittens. “Soon we’ll be home in our nice warm house,” he said. Hannah: It's good that people have warm houses to go to. Milton: We're very fortunate. Not everyone in the world has such a nice house to go to. Remember Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. She and her family lived in a one room house. And many people live out on the street because they don't have anywhere else to live. Can you imagine how cold they must be on a day like today? Hannah: Well, couldn't the people who don't have houses go to stay with the people who do have houses? In the midst of her struggles, Hannah entered the University of Chicago, a good match for her stringent academic standards. She insisted on applying only to a school that had no connection whatsoever to her parents, which could lead to an unfair advantage. In her senior year, with the unknown future looming, she couldn’t continue. Next steps were extremely difficult for Hannah. Her off-the-charts mental strengths were met with equally off-the-charts mental challenges. But Hannah had a fighting spirit and a strong body--she competed on the national level in running, for goodness sakes—and she never gave up hope for herself. This is a family that doesn’t give up. Through the years, I have marveled at Susan doing every possible tedious and brilliant thing to support her children while sustaining a robust career and managing to be the buoyant bright light that she is. We don’t know for sure what happens when we die. May you be blessed eternally, Hannah Ruth Meyer, you and your loved ones. 

Some things to remember about our Hannah by Susan Meyer and read by her brother, Richard

Although often at odds with and at war against her own body, there were parts of Hannah’s life in which she was utterly and joyously at one with her physical being. One was when she sang—everything from the Motown music she enjoyed with her father, to the funny songs her art teacher in middle school would play to the class while they worked (and that she would sing at the dinner table to her family), to the high trills in the aria of the Queen of the Night from Mozart’s Magic Flute. As a five-year-old, she would pipe out those soaring notes spontaneously and unselfconsciously—once while walking down 34th street in Philadelphia holding her mother’s hand. The other times when Hannah was at one with herself was when she ran, weightless as the wind, another joy she shared with her father. Hannah was overwhelmed by obsessive thoughts, especially in the last decade of her life, and had always been reticent about opening up to other people. But she made an exception for her father. The two of them would talk for hours—in his study, on the phone, over zoom—about philosophy, politics, NPR, and also about herself and what tormented her. These conversations are some of the most precious memories he will have of her. Among the pictures at the back of the sanctuary, there is a candid photo of the two of them talking, where the mutual ease and delight of their connection is unmistakable. In their final conversation in the hospital, Milton finally convinced her that if she did not start eating she would die very soon, something the madness of her affliction made it very difficult for her to believe. “I want to eat” were the last words she said to him, just before the devastating collapse that put her on a ventilator. 

Hannah was a careful and playful wordsmith, for as long as we can remember, from rearranging refrigerator magnets to composing verses in the style of Walt Whitman with her third-grade class under the inspiration of the incomparable Mr. Smith, to writing a darkly beautiful poem about the name she shared with her great grandmother (read today by her Auntie Anne). One day Hannah and her mother were making “found word” poems by cutting out snippets of printed text from magazines, circulars, and catalogues (in the days before all our media was digital). Susan remembers the slip of paper she picked to describe Hannah, originally in an advertisement for stylish rubber boots: “beautiful and indestructible.” Hannah had plenty of intelligence where abstract and theoretical matters were concerned, but a non-verbal learning disability made the workings of the ordinary physical world a mystery to her, and a source of stress and worry. But nature paid her its own beautiful tribute on the last day of her life. After hours of heavy rain onto the roof below Hannah’s hospital window, the setting sun started to stream in from the west through the lingering mist, and a faint rainbow was visible in the sky. Susan will forever remember it as Hannah’s rainbow. 

Hannah’s family would like to thank Rabbi Nathan, Rabbi Linda, Rabbi Elyse and the Beth Israel community for the love and support they have provided during these weeks of crisis, with special appreciation to Rabbi Brielle Rassler, chaplain at Princeton Medical Center, who shepherded us through this difficult passage with wisdom, grace, and constancy. We are enormously grateful to Reisa Mukamal and Rabbi Nathan for planning and conducting this service and the shiva minyan tomorrow. Finally, to our far-flung families and friends who are with us today, especially Milton’s brother Abe and Susan’s sister Anne: your loving attention and assistance over the crisis of the last six weeks has kept us from having to carry that burden alone. Our gratitude to you is beyond words. 

Hannah Meyer 2003

Our Name 

My great-grandmother’s name was Hannah.

 Also.

 She cherished many things 

And spread her joys around; 

a butterfly pollinating the flowers 

‘till the net was snapped down on her. 

My name is made out of the cloths of her sewing 

and it smells of smoke from the gas chambers. 

My name is the color of brown-

Her eyes 

and mine.