Rosamond (“Roddy”) Greeley Hamlin died on September 22 at the age of 86. After a long illness that caused physical decline, increasing pain, and significantly diminishing independence, she passed away peacefully at home as afforded by Maine’s Death with Dignity law, her children and grandchildren by her side. The sky thundered and pelted rain on Mt. Desert Island, and she relished the wind from the pines as she died. A person would be hard pressed to find anyone who did not love Rosamond. For twenty years she was senior assistant to the Dean of the Yale School of Music, and one graduate student confided that there was general agreement that if the Music building caught fire and only one person could be saved, they would save Rosamond. She was equally valued by faculty and staff, including among so many Robert Blocker, Aldo Parisot, Vincent Oneppo, Mary-Jo Warren, the Tokyo String Quartet, and Richard French, for whom she served as executor, and with whom she annually recited “Paul Revere’s Ride.” She studied at Winsor School, where she was head of student government, captain of the lacrosse team and a field hockey and basketball player, a member of the glee club, a violist, and a pianist, vice-president of the drama club, and the lead in the Senior class play (Galsworthy’s Escape). She moved on to Barnard to study music therapy, a field then in its infancy, and in her junior year studied music in Edinburgh, where she sang in the Edinburgh Bach Choir and continued to pursue a passion for both opera and operetta. (The Greeley family had hosted members of the D’Oyly Carte Company during their Boston tours.) She transferred to the Philadelphia Conservatory for a year and was then accepted into the New England Conservatory, but, as was common in the 1950s, she did not finish her studies because she married Cyrus Hamlin, the marriage lasting until his death 52 years later. She raised three children as well as working to support the family, especially at the Music School as well as earlier at Toronto’s Bloor Street United Church, where she was administrative assistant and, as she always was, the emotional heart of the parish. From her parents, Dana McLean Greeley and Deborah Webster Greeley, as well as summers at Unitarian Universalist youth conferences on Star Island, Rosamond committed herself to civil rights, social justice, and helping other people. She was a mainstay during the 1985 strike of Local 34 at Yale, when she worked on the hardship committee and was, with others, arrested on the picket line. She loved the music of the Anglican Church, she studied organ in Oxford during Cyrus’s sabbatical year, and as a young woman she played organ for the prisoners at Boston’s Charles St. Jail. She had a laugh that could be heard easily at rush hour in Grand Central Station, and she remembered seemingly thousands of birthdays and anniversaries. She is survived by her sisters Faith Scovel, Cindy McLean-Greeley, and Penny Elwell, their husbands Carl, Jim, and Reg, her children, Hannibal and his wife Cori Martin, Sarah, and Charles, and her grandchildren Sophie and Cyrus Gibson, to whom she was a deeply devoted grandmother. Notes and condolences can be sent to P.O. Box 1172, Farmington, CT 06034. In lieu of flowers, contributions can be made in her memory to Compassion and Choices, https://www.compassionandchoices.org/.
Arrangements by Jordan-Fernald Funeral homes, 1139 Main St./ PO Box 99, Mt. Desert.
Condolences may be expressed at www.jordanfernald.com.