In 1987, as I was leaving the house for my first day as a young English professor at Stonehill College, a Holy Cross school a half-hour south of Boston, my husband asked me, “Do you think you’ll ever get to meet Chet Raymo?”
Chet was professor of physics and astronomy at Stonehill, and we had been reading his weekly Science Musings column in the Boston Globe for several years. He already felt like a presence in our lives — someone who saw the world more clearly than the rest of us and opened our eyes too.
And then I went to campus that first day, and there he was, chatting with some of my English department colleagues. And thus began a 39-year friendship, memories that I’ve held close since his death on January 25 at age 89.
Chet taught us all how to pay attention. He knew how to be still. He knew how to look. He knew how to listen. He had a reverence for the world — but not in any abstract way. His reverence was grounded in the smallest, most particular things. On a campus stroll, he would stop you mid-stride to point out something you would have otherwise missed entirely. I remember the spring day he insisted I reverse direction and follow him to watch a killdeer — just to see how it behaved, feigning a wounded wing to distract predators away from its nest. And of course, once you saw a killdeer through Chet’s eyes, it wasn’t just a bird anymore. It was a small drama, a marvel, a lesson in presence.
There’s a short section of a poem by Mary Oliver that feels to me like it could have been written for Chet:
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
That’s exactly what he did — through his columns, his rich essays in Notre Dame Magazine, his many books, his teaching and his friendships. He paid attention to the world; he allowed himself to be astonished by it; and then he gave that astonishment back to us. And he did it with joy — and with a kind of playful seriousness.
This was, after all, the man who once invited the entire Stonehill campus to gather on the quad and wait for aliens to land — and he wrapped himself in tinfoil to attract them. And the same man who, when his novel The Dork of Cork became a major motion picture — Frankie Starlight — decided the world premiere should take place at Stonehill. It was an evening I remember as one of the great communal celebrations in Stonehill’s life. The whole campus turned out — dressed up, walking a red carpet, drinking fake champagne — because we all understood that something rare and beautiful had happened in our midst.
Over the years, my husband and I — and our three daughters — were lucky to become part of Chet and Maureen’s circle of friendship, through dinners, parties, conversations, travels to visit them in Ireland and the Bahamas. Even on a visit just to sit on their front porch, we always enjoyed the easy, enduring companionship that marks a life well shared.
I’ve always loved that our stories intersected even before we knew it — that Chet and Maureen met in South Bend at the University of Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s College. And they graduated the same year I was born, 1958. My husband and I met in South Bend too, when we were in graduate school at Notre Dame. And I would never have imagined the full circle of life that would lead us back here.
But apparently Chet and Maureen had imagined it: when I was named president of Saint Mary’s in 2020, Chet’s immediate message to me so perfectly reflected the two of them — generous and full of quiet affirmation.
It simply said: “Wow! Been looking forward to this fit for years. —Chet & Mo.”
That was Chet. He saw things — sometimes long before the rest of us did. He made connections. He glimpsed possibilities. He discovered meaning in the world and potential in other people.
And so if we are wondering how to honor him, perhaps it is simply this:
To pay better attention.
To allow ourselves to be astonished.
And to tell about what we see.
Because that is what he offered us: a way of being present in the world. And that’s how we can carry him forward.
Katie Conboy is president of Saint Mary’s College. This essay was adapted from her remembrance of Raymo, originally delivered at his memorial event at Stonehill College.