Photoessay #105 - A Loss

Last night I posted:

Update with sad news...Dan Beittel passed away today, very very sad, such an important person for my whole life, intelligent, thoughtful with grace, taught me a lot. You just can't replace people like that in your life. Dennis and I will attend the memorial in California in a few weeks. I wrote about them in Photoessay #64. Dan, I would be so honored to see you on the other side.

My friend writes:

again, so sorry about dan beittel. so sorry. this is the period of our lives when we say goodbye to the older generation, isn't it. and we can't say "what a shame, he/she was so young." nope, we are saying goodbye to people whose time is up, but that doesn't make it any easier, it turns out. so many of these older folks were so, so important to us. such role models. who can ever take their place? no one. not for us. we are saying goodbye so often these days, aren't we?


Today, I am feeling so sad ... because nobody can take their place for me. The Beittels were friends of my parents and then they became friends of mine. I have always admired all members of their family. Dan's father AD, active as a university president in the civil rights movement and a Congregational minister married Dennis and I. It was the last wedding he performed. All through my childhood, our families celebrated holidays together. I lived them with a summer during college. I have always been fond of their three now adult children, refer to them as my cousins. They went to UCSC as I did. Mark was a roommate one summer. I visited Mark in Italy. Ilana and I visited June in Washington Dc when Ilana was 11. I named my two older children after them and didn't even realize it until 10 years later. When we go to the Bay Area, I always visit them. We visited them last May when we were down for the softball trip, I posted the picture last month. The year before we also visited them and Dan took us to Muir Woods...in the pouring rain.

Dan was always thoughtful, brilliant, diplomatic, gentle, kind and principled. He loved to talk and ponder issues. He had traveled widely and loved learning about new things and views. Always welcoming and kind to me. Psychiatrist by profession. Always so much to learn from him.

I'm surprised that I can't find another picture of Dan though I know I have some. So I will post the picture from May again...and a picture of Muir Woods, somehow appropriate with the rays of sunshine pouring through the trees. A higher power sort of picture.