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Len Weinik, RIP

This afternoon I was lost in Delaware. Looking for a place to turn around, I pulled into a driveway and up a short hill into what I discovered was a church parking lot and graveyard. Many of the graves dated back to the early 19th century. The church was extremely modest and really very beautiful. As far as I could tell I was completely alone in the place.

I love old graveyards and couldn’t remember the last time I explored one. I got out of the car with my camera and spent about 5 minutes walking around the old grave markers and taking photos. It was peaceful, quiet. An hour and a half later I got a telephone call from my sister. An hour and a half earlier, she said, my grandfather passed away.

I won’t lie and say we were close, because we weren’t. There wasn’t animosity or a bad relationship; there just wasn’t a warm or particularly familial one. We never got to know one another and now we never will. For me that’s the saddest part. It also makes the loss an abstraction. It makes it a loss of something I didn’t have. What I can take away from it is the thought that my future children (if they exist) deserve to have what I didn’t.

The photo was taken almost 2 years ago, just after Thanksgiving dinner. The photo isn’t pretty, but it is honest.

Sunday, September 24th, 2006 Photo, general Trackback URL for this entry

2 Comments

1. doug replies at 25th September 2006, 12:23 pm :

Your photo and comments moved me. Though the shot may not have been “ideal”, it is excellent in its context. What you wrote was very good too. My own relationship with Len had faded slowly and steadily since he and Nina first faced her illness. His attention and energy went fully to her care, naturally. Then they moved into V.House, she died and he truly gave up on life (other than chess- he beat me in an honest chess match less than a year ago!). He never was a particularly warm man and I’m afraid I got too much of that personality trait myself. I hope your (potential) kids find more warmth and time with their grandparents than you did with Len (and Nina too).

Again, thank you for a fine response to the bad news. It was very comforting for both of us here.
2. Michael replies at 17th November 2006, 9:30 pm :

I grew up hearing of Len, he was a cousin of my father George. He often spoke with great warmth of the relationship that they shared in their youth and adulthood, of his marriage to Nina and the effect of her illness on them all. Nina was his life’s breath. I too remember little of my grandfather Harry, it seems that Len and George started their families after the second world war and at the time of the grandshildren’s birth, Harry and Len were already older and had started to close the circle of family and friends. My father passed just over a year ago, at age 89, and in settling his estate we have found many a wonderful picture of the Weinik men in their youth and at family functions. Len is so similar in looks to the other Weinik men of his era. I would be happy to share them with you, so that maybe through this reconstruction, you and your own children may find a greater sense of kinship and extended family. And I trust the youngest generation of Weiniks, my son Max included, would like to meet their cousins too, or are we to be like our grandfathers?.
Your picture of Len, speaks volumes of what he was going through and state of growing old alone.