• Paula Routly ©️ Seven Days
• Dhyan Nirmegh

At the end of October, Seven Days published the extraordinary obituary of Florence Miles, a Huntington dairy farmer who spent most of her 100 years toiling on the side of a hill across from Camel's Hump. Informed and intimate, the tribute chronicled the long, colorful life of a woman who labored like a workhorse, married a soldier right before he shipped off to World War II and "literally cheated death more than once." Florence saw plenty of suffering. For example: As a young girl, she helped her mother give birth to a younger sibling, and neither mom nor baby survived.

The writing style — poetic, old-fashioned, rooted in nature — perfectly matched the subject and a way of life, both awful and awesome, that is vanishing in Vermont.

"Whoa! Who wrote this amazing obit, I wonder?" one of our staffers emailed me soon after it appeared.

Others noticed, too. Hal Rosner of Philadelphia emailed to say reading our obituaries had become "a new spiritual practice" for him. "Some of them have read like a short story. But I can never find a byline. The example would be Florence Miles. Who wrote it? It was wonderful, and I shared with some very literary friends."

Unlike our semi-regular "Life Stories" series, in which Seven Days writers report on noteworthy Vermonters who have died, the paid obituaries in our weekly Life Lines section are submitted by funeral homes or family and friends of the deceased. A little digging uncovered the author of Florence's remarkable story.

Rosner's literary friends might be surprised to know he never finished college. But Dhyan Nirmegh, born Raymond Leggett, studied the Miles family for decades. He was 13 when his parents bought land adjacent to theirs, in 1965, on Huntington's Shaker Mountain Road. Although the Leggetts' primary residence was in South Burlington — Ray's dad worked at the University of Vermont — Ray quickly befriended John Miles, the son of Florence and her husband, Frank.

• Courtesy
• Florence Miles

The boys were inseparable, according to Nirmegh, who discovered he loved farm life and the outdoors — even when it required getting up long before dawn to milk cows or collect sap. He spent every weekend and summers with the Miles family, working alongside them in the dairy barn, forest and fields. It was certainly a very different education from the one he was getting at South Burlington High School.

Florence called Nirmegh her "second son," and she was a powerful mentor to him. Even as an adolescent, "I listened to her. I took notes. I wrote about her," Nirmegh explained in an email that reads not unlike the unorthodox obituary he wrote for Florence. "There were times when she cried reaching to be understood."

Seeking to better understand him, I visited Nirmegh, now 70, on his family's land in Huntington. He was tending a fire outside a barn that serves as his rustic crash pad. There are nicer homes on the 130 acres, but he's given those to his two adult children. A very short walk brought us to the property line he shares with the Miles family. John lives across the road. The two old friends still cross paths in the woods hunting and cutting timber. I later got a look at a video of Nirmegh splitting 16-inch pine logs — easily cleaving one after the other with no more than two ax blows each.

It's a little hard to believe that this wiry lumberjack once followed the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh to Oregon and India — hence the name change — and ran a meditation center for two years in Maui. But Nirmegh, whose name means "cloudless sky" in Sanskrit, exudes a rare peacefulness and appreciation for life. We went inside the warm barn to chat. Under mounted deer heads and a Stihl baseball cap, his piercing blue eyes twinkled.

John and his sister asked Nirmegh to write their mom's obituary when she died, three weeks after her 100th birthday party; he did the same for their father, Frank, in 2010. He writes — and rewrites — longhand. With the help of his kids and a transcription app on one of their computers, he dictated and digitized Florence's story. His daughter made the final edits.

The only thing more painful than the death of a loved one is the realization that you didn't observe them well enough or ask enough questions to honestly commit their life story to words. Florence Miles, and Seven Days readers, were lucky in that regard, thanks to the curiosity and expert storytelling of an enlightened outdoorsman.

As Nirmegh wrote of Florence: "She never bragged and never talked about herself unless asked. What she accomplished was without fanfare. She has disappeared like the morning mist hovering over the river."

For our final issue of 2022, we sought out Vermonters lost this year who merited additional memorializing. Find those reported tributes in our year-end "Life Stories" package.

On a cheerier note: Don't miss our annual "Backstories" feature, in which our writers reveal what they went through to report the news.

It's an honor. Happy New Year.