In Memory

Gundars Zentelis

 

From Liz Sanglier, his daughter: .

Over the weekend, as I was lying in bed and couldn’t sleep, I was scrolling through Facebook and saw Christopher’s post about a yearbook he found at a thrift store. I recognized it as a yearbook from Kalamazoo Central, and then as I saw the signature pages, I realized—with complete shock—that it was my father’s senior yearbook from 1961.

My father passed away in 2008. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor in January of that year, and by May, he was gone. Everything felt like chaos. He didn’t have a will, and even though he had few belongings, everything involving his estate was an ordeal. His house had gone into foreclosure while he was in hospice, and I remember the call from the bank telling me to come grab as much as I could from the house I grew up in, before they were going to come in and dump or donate everything.

I was grief stricken. I had just started a new job. I had to go through and basically pick through a lifetime of things he had accumulated and decide what I could fit in my car. If you knew my father, he was a book lover. His home looked like a makeshift library. It was overwhelming.

Somewhere in there, was a 1961 senior yearbook from Kalamazoo Central. I missed it.

My father almost dropped out of high school. He had immigrated to the United States in 1956; he and his family were refugees from Latvia in WWII and ended up in Displaced Persons camps in England before coming to the US. Despite the population of Latvians living in Kzoo, he still struggled with loneliness. But he pushed through and graduated and went on to WMU.

Christopher Dziepak found this book in a thrift store, 11 years after my father died, and posted a photograph asking if anyone wanted it. I just happened to see that post. He was gracious enough to send the yearbook to me.

It feels like a gut punch. And it feels like a hug.

Thank you, Christopher, for your generosity and your part in this little miracle. And thank you, Vanished Kalamazoo.

My father: Gundars Karlis Zentelis, 1943-2008.







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