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When love is not enough
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By: Fran Heller Contributing Writer
We mourn the death; we celebrate the life.
These were the words Rabbi Richard A. Block invoked in his eulogy for Peter Morgenstern-Clarren who died by his own hand in 2004, just one month shy of his 23rd birthday.
Eighteen months later, on October 1, 2005, Peter’s Garden was officially dedicated as a living memorial to Peter’s life.
This is the story of Peter’s life … and of his tragic death.
This is a story about how the spirit of a remarkable young man endures in some of the things he cared about most: nature, the environment and the laughter of children.
And this is a story of the devastating toll mental illness has inflicted on our adolescents and young adults as seen through the painful experience of one Shaker Heights family.
We mourn the death; we celebrate the life.
THE EARLY YEARS
Peter Morgenstern-Clarren entered the world on May 29, 1981. Peter was born “intense,” a precociously bright and feeling child who began to question, challenge and debate the injustices of the world around him practically from the time he could talk, claim his parents.
When he was 8, Peter wrote a book titled “Fifty Things You Can Do to Save the World.” At the same age he penned a serious protest letter to Channel 43 because they had shown a movie he thought was anti-Semitic. He ended his letter of indignation with the following declaration: “I will never watch your channel again. Your unfaithful viewer, Peter.”
ONSET OF MENTAL ILLNESS
At age 12, a radical change occurred in Peter’s behavior.
Sensing that something was not quite right, his parents, Patti and Hadley Morgenstern-Clarren (she’s a U.S. bankruptcy judge; he’s a doctor of internal medicine), took Peter to a psychologist. He reassured them that their son’s behavior was “normal” for someone his age.
Shortly afterward, the family, including Peter’s younger sister Rachel, now 21, went on vacation. Being with Peter 24 hours a day made them realize that there was something the psychologist had probably missed. As soon as they returned home, Peter and his parents revisited the psychologist who confirmed that the change in the youngster was radical and clearly needed medical attention.
Patti says her son became very withdrawn, quiet and slow-moving. Ordinary tasks became difficult for him, like getting out of bed, studying and interacting with other people.
DIAGNOSIS
The medical diagnosis for Peter’s illness was complex mood disorder, including dysthymia. His psychiatrist, Dr. Stephen B. Zinn, described dysthymia to the parents as perpetually thinking the glass is half-empty.
Psychiatrist Dr. Mark Munetz defines dysthymia as “a form of depressed mood that doesn’t reach the level of severity of what we call a major depression.”
It’s increasingly being recognized that mood disorders, including depression and anxiety, are more common in young people than we used to think, he notes.
“There was a time when it was believed that children did not have the psychological development to be depressed. We know that’s not true. We know that both depression and manic-depression, or bi-polar illness, can present themselves in the youth years and teen age years in particular.”
Munetz suspects that stress may have something to do with the increased incidence of mental illness in young people.
Rabbi Roger Klein of The Temple-Tifereth Israel is a friend of the Morgenstern-Clarren family, and he became Peter’s friend during his high school and college years. Klein notes how hard it is for young people to get a sense of their bearings and direction in a world that is very complicated and moves at such a fast pace.
WHO WAS PETER?
Rabbi Klein describes Peter as a person with “a highly critical mind and a high ethical sense, who was very concerned and passionate about the wrongs he saw in the world.”
Peter also was a gifted musician and lead singer and song writer for his college band, 8 Fingered Jacob. His acerbic lyrics bemoaned the sorry state of the world and challenged listeners to change it.
He also was a poet. His bittersweet poem “Gills” about his feelings for a girl, written when he was a senior at Shaker Heights High School, was included in the 1999 anthology, “A Celebration of Ohio’s Young Poets.”
Peter enjoyed learning languages and was fluent in Russian, Spanish and Portuguese, much of it self-taught, note his parents.
He was also an artist with a gift for portraiture. At the same time, he rallied for “Food, Not Bombs” at Public Square and protested as a gross invasion of privacy the administration’s decision to remove bathroom doors at Shaker Heights High.
After 9/11, a frightened Peter packed his bags and was ready to take a bus to Canada. His parents talked him out of it.
Peter was also connected to his Judaism. He was a bar mitzvah, confirmand and graduate of The Temple-Tifereth Israel high school. He was a member of NELFTY and served as a “Shadow Helper,” assisting a child with physical disabilities through a joint program of The Temple and The Jewish Education Center of Cleveland.
When Peter was 16, he spent the summer as a volunteer working with young adults with brain injuries at Menorah Park Center for Senior Living. He chose the program because it sounded like the most difficult job, he told a local newspaper at the time. “I have found the most challenging things are also the most rewarding emotionally,” he said.
Patti described her son as “very loving and very high maintenance.”
“He was always thinking about new ideas and new ways to think about old ideas, and he wanted to bounce them off whoever was around him, which took a lot of time and energy,” admits his dad.
In her heartfelt eulogy, Rachel talked of a brother from whom she had become disconnected during the previous five years.
“I know that he knows that I loved him, but when he left home, I realized that, despite my best efforts, there just wasn’t a way I could understand the depths of his depression and alienation.”
She also described how her older brother’s behavior made her more accepting of people who are different.
“I have been friends with many people who sometimes do things that other people don’t understand, that seem self-destructive or quirky,” she noted.“I know that the reason I’ve always been such a non-judgmental person in this respect is that having Peter as my brother, I always understood … you just have to take whatever good and bad the person can offer you.”
TREATMENT
Peter’s course of treatment included therapy with a psychologist and a psychiatrist as well as a regimen of drugs.
Like many young adults with emotional problems, says his dad, Peter would often skip therapy and stop taking his medication, particularly when he was away at college. “Once you drop down from a pretty stable emotional mood, it’s much harder to get back up to that stable mood,” explains Patti.
Peter’s medical costs varied from year to year. While some of the medicine was covered by the family’s medical insurance, it never covered the “talking” therapy.
Patti and Hadley were fortunate that the monetary cost was not a limitation in getting the help that Peter needed. That is not true for many people for whom the cost is prohibitive.
In watching her son struggle with his illness, Patti felt admiration for him in dealing with his issues in such a straightforward way. At the same time, she experienced an overwhelming sadness that she couldn’t fix it.
Did she rail against God for her son’s illness?
“I didn’t feel angry with God,” she insists. “I felt grateful to God for having Peter.”
Hadley says there was much that was positive in his son’s life. He is especially proud that, despite Peter’s significant emotional problems, he graduated from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in history in 2003. “Without the support and attention we gave him, he could never have done that,” acknowledges his dad.
COLLEGE YEARS
When Peter died, his friends and classmates created a book of remembrances about their college days. A roommate of Peter’s during his sophomore year recalls how Peter put his alarm clock in the mini-fridge to prevent himself from turning it off when he had to get up for morning classes. But the clock froze, so he took to sleeping on the floor so his roommates could awaken him.
In addition to tending to his studies, Peter was a social activist at college. The Justice for Janitors Sit-in was a nationwide strike designed to provide a living wage for janitors and people in similar jobs; Peter helped get benefits for the janitors at Wesleyan.
He also was part of a hunger strike to protest what he considered the university’s unfair dismissal of a talented college professor. That effort severely jeopardized Peter’s own physical and mental health, note his parents.
He marched on Washington, D.C., to protest a treaty on economic globalization and the inequitable policies of the International Monetary Fund, which he felt kept poorer nations mired in poverty and debt.
Peter felt such deep pain for what was going on in the world, explains Hadley. Most of us have the capacity to say it’s really bad out there, but I’m okay. But Peter was not okay.”
In his eloquent eulogy, Rabbi Klein described Peter as someone who “reached over into the hurts of the world without restraint, without moderation or perspective … and without being able to erect the barriers that we need to erect in order to protect ourselves … from being overwhelmed.”
THE LAST YEAR
OF PETER’S LIFE
After graduating from college, Peter came home to live. It was a year that Hadley described as very difficult. Hadley tried to get his son on a constructive path to adulthood, including completing a psychology class at John Carroll University. Peter was also tutoring children at Onaway School, which he had attended as a youngster.
Onaway principal Dr. Lynn Cowen describes Peter’s interactions with the children as very special. He became more than a tutor; he was like their friend, she says.
On the evening of April 21, 2004, Peter stepped in front of a moving train. He was placed on life support and died two days later. He left no note. He was 22 years old.
WHEN LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH
Peter was surrounded by love in a very close, intact family, but in the end, love alone could not save him from taking his own life.
In his eulogy, Klein celebrated the love the entire Morgenstern-Clarren clan had for Peter. “Nobody could say to that family, ‘Love him more.’ That’s what makes it so imponderable. That was a family filled with love.”
Patti thinks her son ended his life because he was in utter despair over the state of the world. She also says that her son felt that his own mental health was deteriorating, and he did not want to live in a compromised mental state.
IT’S NOBODY’S FAULT
Sometimes, despite the best treatment and the most loving, supportive family, these tragic outcomes happen … and it’s nobody’s fault, says Dr. Munetz.
“Historically, families have been blamed for the mental illness in their offspring. We know today that that was a huge mistake. That families are not involved, and this family, in particular, obviously was not involved; they did everything possible,” avers Munetz, who has also been a neighbor of the Morgenstern-Clarren family for 15 years.
The family drew upon their own strengths in dealing with the tragedy, but it took its toll.
Peter was very close to Patti’s parents, Stanley W. and the late Claire Morgenstern. Every Saturday, Stanley and Claire would pick up their grandchildren for “munchkin lunchkins,” a family tradition. Peter and his grandfather took a trip to Poland together.
Five months after Peter died, his beloved grandmother Claire passed away. While she had low-grade physical problems, Patti believes that Peter’s death was more than her mother could bear.
Judaism continues to serve as a support and solace for Peter’s parents, who attend services every Friday night. “The continuity of the prayers and music and feeling of community have been very important to us,” says Hadley.
It has been more than a year since Peter’s death. “Peter is always with me,” says Hadley, in a voice choking with emotion. “I think about him several times every day with great love and pride. I miss him horribly.”
GETTING OUT THE MESSAGE
Getting out the message about the devastation of mental illness is important to both parents. What would they like this story to convey to CJN readers?
Two things, says Patti: That mental illness is not different from an illness in any other part of the body. And that people should take every chance they can to appreciate their children and to tell them they love them. Even when they are being exasperating and difficult, adds Patti, with a small chuckle and wan smile.
“One of the things that I find most comforting is that the last thing Peter said to me was, ‘I love you, Mom,’ and I hugged him back and said, ‘I love you, too.’ I can’t imagine anybody ever regretting telling their child that they love them.”
PETER’S GARDEN
It is a weekday morning at Onaway School where parents and children are gathering in “Peter’s Garden,” waiting for the opening bell to ring.
Chloe, Micah and Nautia, all 6, are first-graders at Onaway School.
Chloe describes the garden as “pretty.” What Chloe likes best, she says, is climbing on the rocks.
Micah likes jumping on the rocks, too. He also likes the yellow and purple flowers and the sundial.
“It’s so fancy,” reflects Nautia, who likes to sit on the rocks and think.
Peter’s Garden is a learning garden that is open and available to both the school and the community. The garden is divided into three main areas: for observation, performing and dreaming.
The observation area includes a butterfly garden. There is also a bird habitat and a human sundial where children can measure their shadows and tell time the ancient way.
An open amphitheater accommodating up to 60 students comprises the performing area.
The dreaming area includes wooden benches and chairs for reading and thinking and a built-in chess board.
“When Peter died, we immediately felt the need to have something positive come out of his death,” says Hadley.
As Peter lay dying, Principal Cowen told Hadley and Patti that Onaway had had a long-term plan to create a garden; she wanted to know if it would be all right to plant a pear tree in the garden, because a pear tree had shaded Peter’s bedroom between their houses.
The Morgenstern-Clarrens instantly knew what they were going to do next. “We’d like to do the whole garden to honor Peter,” Hadley said to his neighbor. “It gave us a purpose, a focus for energy … that also could connect us with our families and our community.”
Before it was a garden, the area in question was asphalt. Peter was an environmentalist, and converting asphalt into a beautiful garden was symbolically meaningful to the family.
The family made a list of ways in which they thought Peter would have liked to be remembered. They passed these ideas on to their friend and landscape architect Bill Fehrenbach, who designed the garden accordingly.
Ground was broken in October 2004. Planting was started in the spring of 2005. Peter’s Garden has been funded by 404 private donors and families. Some were gifts in kind; others, cash.
The Morgenstern-Clarren family, through The Shaker Schools Foundation, is responsible for maintenance. A separate fund has been established for that purpose.
Cowen was walking along the second floor corridor the day of our interview and observed an art class sketching plants in Peter’s Garden. She recalled how Peter liked to draw and how drawing is also a talent of his grandfather Stanley.
Dr. Rebecca Thomas, librarian at Onaway School, notes that the garden lets Peter have a lifelong influence. “He’s going to touch people’s lives forever.”
These were the words Rabbi Richard A. Block invoked in his eulogy for Peter Morgenstern-Clarren who died by his own hand in 2004, just one month shy of his 23rd birthday.
Eighteen months later, on October 1, 2005, Peter’s Garden was officially dedicated as a living memorial to Peter’s life.
This is the story of Peter’s life … and of his tragic death.
This is a story about how the spirit of a remarkable young man endures in some of the things he cared about most: nature, the environment and the laughter of children.
And this is a story of the devastating toll mental illness has inflicted on our adolescents and young adults as seen through the painful experience of one Shaker Heights family.
We mourn the death; we celebrate the life.
THE EARLY YEARS
Peter Morgenstern-Clarren entered the world on May 29, 1981. Peter was born “intense,” a precociously bright and feeling child who began to question, challenge and debate the injustices of the world around him practically from the time he could talk, claim his parents.
When he was 8, Peter wrote a book titled “Fifty Things You Can Do to Save the World.” At the same age he penned a serious protest letter to Channel 43 because they had shown a movie he thought was anti-Semitic. He ended his letter of indignation with the following declaration: “I will never watch your channel again. Your unfaithful viewer, Peter.”
ONSET OF MENTAL ILLNESS
At age 12, a radical change occurred in Peter’s behavior.
Sensing that something was not quite right, his parents, Patti and Hadley Morgenstern-Clarren (she’s a U.S. bankruptcy judge; he’s a doctor of internal medicine), took Peter to a psychologist. He reassured them that their son’s behavior was “normal” for someone his age.
Shortly afterward, the family, including Peter’s younger sister Rachel, now 21, went on vacation. Being with Peter 24 hours a day made them realize that there was something the psychologist had probably missed. As soon as they returned home, Peter and his parents revisited the psychologist who confirmed that the change in the youngster was radical and clearly needed medical attention.
Patti says her son became very withdrawn, quiet and slow-moving. Ordinary tasks became difficult for him, like getting out of bed, studying and interacting with other people.
DIAGNOSIS
The medical diagnosis for Peter’s illness was complex mood disorder, including dysthymia. His psychiatrist, Dr. Stephen B. Zinn, described dysthymia to the parents as perpetually thinking the glass is half-empty.
Psychiatrist Dr. Mark Munetz defines dysthymia as “a form of depressed mood that doesn’t reach the level of severity of what we call a major depression.”
It’s increasingly being recognized that mood disorders, including depression and anxiety, are more common in young people than we used to think, he notes.
“There was a time when it was believed that children did not have the psychological development to be depressed. We know that’s not true. We know that both depression and manic-depression, or bi-polar illness, can present themselves in the youth years and teen age years in particular.”
Munetz suspects that stress may have something to do with the increased incidence of mental illness in young people.
Rabbi Roger Klein of The Temple-Tifereth Israel is a friend of the Morgenstern-Clarren family, and he became Peter’s friend during his high school and college years. Klein notes how hard it is for young people to get a sense of their bearings and direction in a world that is very complicated and moves at such a fast pace.
WHO WAS PETER?
Rabbi Klein describes Peter as a person with “a highly critical mind and a high ethical sense, who was very concerned and passionate about the wrongs he saw in the world.”
Peter also was a gifted musician and lead singer and song writer for his college band, 8 Fingered Jacob. His acerbic lyrics bemoaned the sorry state of the world and challenged listeners to change it.
He also was a poet. His bittersweet poem “Gills” about his feelings for a girl, written when he was a senior at Shaker Heights High School, was included in the 1999 anthology, “A Celebration of Ohio’s Young Poets.”
Peter enjoyed learning languages and was fluent in Russian, Spanish and Portuguese, much of it self-taught, note his parents.
He was also an artist with a gift for portraiture. At the same time, he rallied for “Food, Not Bombs” at Public Square and protested as a gross invasion of privacy the administration’s decision to remove bathroom doors at Shaker Heights High.
After 9/11, a frightened Peter packed his bags and was ready to take a bus to Canada. His parents talked him out of it.
Peter was also connected to his Judaism. He was a bar mitzvah, confirmand and graduate of The Temple-Tifereth Israel high school. He was a member of NELFTY and served as a “Shadow Helper,” assisting a child with physical disabilities through a joint program of The Temple and The Jewish Education Center of Cleveland.
When Peter was 16, he spent the summer as a volunteer working with young adults with brain injuries at Menorah Park Center for Senior Living. He chose the program because it sounded like the most difficult job, he told a local newspaper at the time. “I have found the most challenging things are also the most rewarding emotionally,” he said.
Patti described her son as “very loving and very high maintenance.”
“He was always thinking about new ideas and new ways to think about old ideas, and he wanted to bounce them off whoever was around him, which took a lot of time and energy,” admits his dad.
In her heartfelt eulogy, Rachel talked of a brother from whom she had become disconnected during the previous five years.
“I know that he knows that I loved him, but when he left home, I realized that, despite my best efforts, there just wasn’t a way I could understand the depths of his depression and alienation.”
She also described how her older brother’s behavior made her more accepting of people who are different.
“I have been friends with many people who sometimes do things that other people don’t understand, that seem self-destructive or quirky,” she noted.“I know that the reason I’ve always been such a non-judgmental person in this respect is that having Peter as my brother, I always understood … you just have to take whatever good and bad the person can offer you.”
TREATMENT
Peter’s course of treatment included therapy with a psychologist and a psychiatrist as well as a regimen of drugs.
Like many young adults with emotional problems, says his dad, Peter would often skip therapy and stop taking his medication, particularly when he was away at college. “Once you drop down from a pretty stable emotional mood, it’s much harder to get back up to that stable mood,” explains Patti.
Peter’s medical costs varied from year to year. While some of the medicine was covered by the family’s medical insurance, it never covered the “talking” therapy.
Patti and Hadley were fortunate that the monetary cost was not a limitation in getting the help that Peter needed. That is not true for many people for whom the cost is prohibitive.
In watching her son struggle with his illness, Patti felt admiration for him in dealing with his issues in such a straightforward way. At the same time, she experienced an overwhelming sadness that she couldn’t fix it.
Did she rail against God for her son’s illness?
“I didn’t feel angry with God,” she insists. “I felt grateful to God for having Peter.”
Hadley says there was much that was positive in his son’s life. He is especially proud that, despite Peter’s significant emotional problems, he graduated from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in history in 2003. “Without the support and attention we gave him, he could never have done that,” acknowledges his dad.
COLLEGE YEARS
When Peter died, his friends and classmates created a book of remembrances about their college days. A roommate of Peter’s during his sophomore year recalls how Peter put his alarm clock in the mini-fridge to prevent himself from turning it off when he had to get up for morning classes. But the clock froze, so he took to sleeping on the floor so his roommates could awaken him.
In addition to tending to his studies, Peter was a social activist at college. The Justice for Janitors Sit-in was a nationwide strike designed to provide a living wage for janitors and people in similar jobs; Peter helped get benefits for the janitors at Wesleyan.
He also was part of a hunger strike to protest what he considered the university’s unfair dismissal of a talented college professor. That effort severely jeopardized Peter’s own physical and mental health, note his parents.
He marched on Washington, D.C., to protest a treaty on economic globalization and the inequitable policies of the International Monetary Fund, which he felt kept poorer nations mired in poverty and debt.
Peter felt such deep pain for what was going on in the world, explains Hadley. Most of us have the capacity to say it’s really bad out there, but I’m okay. But Peter was not okay.”
In his eloquent eulogy, Rabbi Klein described Peter as someone who “reached over into the hurts of the world without restraint, without moderation or perspective … and without being able to erect the barriers that we need to erect in order to protect ourselves … from being overwhelmed.”
THE LAST YEAR
OF PETER’S LIFE
After graduating from college, Peter came home to live. It was a year that Hadley described as very difficult. Hadley tried to get his son on a constructive path to adulthood, including completing a psychology class at John Carroll University. Peter was also tutoring children at Onaway School, which he had attended as a youngster.
Onaway principal Dr. Lynn Cowen describes Peter’s interactions with the children as very special. He became more than a tutor; he was like their friend, she says.
On the evening of April 21, 2004, Peter stepped in front of a moving train. He was placed on life support and died two days later. He left no note. He was 22 years old.
WHEN LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH
Peter was surrounded by love in a very close, intact family, but in the end, love alone could not save him from taking his own life.
In his eulogy, Klein celebrated the love the entire Morgenstern-Clarren clan had for Peter. “Nobody could say to that family, ‘Love him more.’ That’s what makes it so imponderable. That was a family filled with love.”
Patti thinks her son ended his life because he was in utter despair over the state of the world. She also says that her son felt that his own mental health was deteriorating, and he did not want to live in a compromised mental state.
IT’S NOBODY’S FAULT
Sometimes, despite the best treatment and the most loving, supportive family, these tragic outcomes happen … and it’s nobody’s fault, says Dr. Munetz.
“Historically, families have been blamed for the mental illness in their offspring. We know today that that was a huge mistake. That families are not involved, and this family, in particular, obviously was not involved; they did everything possible,” avers Munetz, who has also been a neighbor of the Morgenstern-Clarren family for 15 years.
The family drew upon their own strengths in dealing with the tragedy, but it took its toll.
Peter was very close to Patti’s parents, Stanley W. and the late Claire Morgenstern. Every Saturday, Stanley and Claire would pick up their grandchildren for “munchkin lunchkins,” a family tradition. Peter and his grandfather took a trip to Poland together.
Five months after Peter died, his beloved grandmother Claire passed away. While she had low-grade physical problems, Patti believes that Peter’s death was more than her mother could bear.
Judaism continues to serve as a support and solace for Peter’s parents, who attend services every Friday night. “The continuity of the prayers and music and feeling of community have been very important to us,” says Hadley.
It has been more than a year since Peter’s death. “Peter is always with me,” says Hadley, in a voice choking with emotion. “I think about him several times every day with great love and pride. I miss him horribly.”
GETTING OUT THE MESSAGE
Getting out the message about the devastation of mental illness is important to both parents. What would they like this story to convey to CJN readers?
Two things, says Patti: That mental illness is not different from an illness in any other part of the body. And that people should take every chance they can to appreciate their children and to tell them they love them. Even when they are being exasperating and difficult, adds Patti, with a small chuckle and wan smile.
“One of the things that I find most comforting is that the last thing Peter said to me was, ‘I love you, Mom,’ and I hugged him back and said, ‘I love you, too.’ I can’t imagine anybody ever regretting telling their child that they love them.”
PETER’S GARDEN
It is a weekday morning at Onaway School where parents and children are gathering in “Peter’s Garden,” waiting for the opening bell to ring.
Chloe, Micah and Nautia, all 6, are first-graders at Onaway School.
Chloe describes the garden as “pretty.” What Chloe likes best, she says, is climbing on the rocks.
Micah likes jumping on the rocks, too. He also likes the yellow and purple flowers and the sundial.
“It’s so fancy,” reflects Nautia, who likes to sit on the rocks and think.
Peter’s Garden is a learning garden that is open and available to both the school and the community. The garden is divided into three main areas: for observation, performing and dreaming.
The observation area includes a butterfly garden. There is also a bird habitat and a human sundial where children can measure their shadows and tell time the ancient way.
An open amphitheater accommodating up to 60 students comprises the performing area.
The dreaming area includes wooden benches and chairs for reading and thinking and a built-in chess board.
“When Peter died, we immediately felt the need to have something positive come out of his death,” says Hadley.
As Peter lay dying, Principal Cowen told Hadley and Patti that Onaway had had a long-term plan to create a garden; she wanted to know if it would be all right to plant a pear tree in the garden, because a pear tree had shaded Peter’s bedroom between their houses.
The Morgenstern-Clarrens instantly knew what they were going to do next. “We’d like to do the whole garden to honor Peter,” Hadley said to his neighbor. “It gave us a purpose, a focus for energy … that also could connect us with our families and our community.”
Before it was a garden, the area in question was asphalt. Peter was an environmentalist, and converting asphalt into a beautiful garden was symbolically meaningful to the family.
The family made a list of ways in which they thought Peter would have liked to be remembered. They passed these ideas on to their friend and landscape architect Bill Fehrenbach, who designed the garden accordingly.
Ground was broken in October 2004. Planting was started in the spring of 2005. Peter’s Garden has been funded by 404 private donors and families. Some were gifts in kind; others, cash.
The Morgenstern-Clarren family, through The Shaker Schools Foundation, is responsible for maintenance. A separate fund has been established for that purpose.
Cowen was walking along the second floor corridor the day of our interview and observed an art class sketching plants in Peter’s Garden. She recalled how Peter liked to draw and how drawing is also a talent of his grandfather Stanley.
Dr. Rebecca Thomas, librarian at Onaway School, notes that the garden lets Peter have a lifelong influence. “He’s going to touch people’s lives forever.”
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tw1nkfrog wrote on May 12, 2009 12:48 AM:
-Traci Marcovitz
NELFTY 1994-1997
The Temple Alumni, Class of '97. "