To Timothy’s 
Husband and Family-

So sorry to hear of Timothy’s passing.  I called him Timothy, and adored him while we worked together at JE Caldwells on Connecticut Ave.  

The stories he could tell! I met Timothy after Galt’s had closed, he was working across the street,  I cannot the remember the name.  After I was hired by Caldwell’s I convinced him to make the move ‘up’ to Conn Ave.  We just had so much fun working there, everyone loved Timothy and he loved us back, well most of us.  He had the ability to see straight to a persons character and wasn’t shy in his opinion.... gawd he would hate today’s pampered, entitled, offended class of kids these days.   We all worked hard, and played harder.

Miss you babe!
Amy

Nice picture of us, probably 87 in the file here, happy times ! 






I lit a candle for Tim at St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Fayetteville NC.  We were "partners" for less than a year in 1984.  I have many memories of those times and of him.

i am so sorry that he passed. i wish i'd known him better. i deeply hope you will find comfort in his memories. 
all my love,
leslie

A Tribute for Tim Sweeney 

I'm known to some of you as Kelly Fox and to some of you as Tom Funk, and I'll let the person who delivers the eulogy at my funeral explain that, but for now I'll let it be a mystery to those of you who don't know my story. I was Tim Sweeney's husband. He was my husband. And today is Tim's (and his twin brother Terry's) sixtieth birthday. I had hoped to celebrate this milestone with Tim, but he died just five days shy of it.  On this day as we celebrate Tim's life it seems fitting that we join Terry in the celebration of he and Tim's birthday.  

Birthdays were special to Tim and me. Our June birthdays are six days apart, and we were both born under the sun sign of Cancer. Cancer is a water sign represented by the crab, and the moon is its ruling planet. They say that two Cancers are a good 
match, that they place a high importance on home and domesticity and on the nurture of others. While we were not obsessed with horoscopes, we loved the symbols of our shared sign: The moon, the ocean and the crab. We shared that love of home, and for us nurture took the form of good food. Some of our best times together were spent throwing dinner parties, and we had many of them, and some of them were quite elaborate. And we always celebrated our birthdays on their respective days, each with our own cake, our own wishes and our own candles to blow out. 

Tim received his Bachelor of Arts degree in International Studies and Economics from the American University in 1978. During his college years he had a sales job at one of the Smithsonian Museum Shops, and there he made his first jewelry sales. After college he took an apprenticeship with the Jewelry firm Galt & Brother, near the White House. Galt's had a storied history with residents at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and at its closing in 2001 it was D.C.'s oldest business having been in continuous operation for nearly two centuries. It was at Galt's that presidents and dignitaries called when looking to acquire magnificent luxuries from around the world, and it was at Galt's that Tim acquired his knowledge and training, and honed the skills that he used while selling fine jewelry during a career that spanned 36 years. 

When I met Tim in the summer of 2005 he called me a bunch of times, and that was my first exposure to his great talent at salesmanship. He talked me into being his boyfriend. To his customers at the jewelry store he sold diamonds, sapphires, rubies and emeralds, but to me, he freely offered his personality, charm, humor and affection.

Tim loved animals, and this was manifest in his tender care of his cat Poopie, of my dog Bruce and later of Sparky the Chihuahua we raised together. He would let Poopie and Sparky lick him on the mouth, and when he did, I would cringe in a corner. And he would carry on conversations with our pets and tell them stories about their parents, their siblings and some very inventive ones about me, and they seemed to understand what he was saying. 

Tim loved to garden, and his meticulous care of plants yielded copious flowers in summer. Especially memorable was his magnificent rose garden on our roof deck here in Washington. Not surprisingly, we both loved the night blooming moonflower, and every spring we each planted our own vines, I in the back yard garden, and Tim in the roof garden. By summer's end both of our vines were producing dozens of huge, fragrant white flowers that opened at dusk, and we marveled at their strange nocturnal beauty, and competed to see whose vines had the most blooms. 

In fact, Tim was very competitive, always mapping out a careful strategy, in games and in life. He was nearly unbeatable at card games. On May 17th he beat my sister Kathy and me in the last of hundreds of card games that we played, even though he was ill and on heavy doses of morphine. 

Tim was never depressed, and never given to despair. He was tenacious, never flinching in the face of a number of adversities in his life. On our last visit to the oncologist, she informed him that he had exhausted all of his treatment options. He turned and said to her, This is not going to be the end of me. And he believed it. It was this part of Tim's nature that was the secret to many of his successes. 

Tim was very true to his own values, and rather outspoken about them. Sometimes I had to rein him in lest he get both of us in deep water at a friendly dinner party. I kicked him under quite a few tables. 

We own two homes in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and we spent many weeks there during summer. Fancy dinners at home in Washington were eschewed in favor of tomato sandwiches, grilled shrimp, Low Country boil and pecan pies. We would go to the beach around 4 o'clock in the afternoon and stay until well after sundown. While swimming in the ocean we'd throw seaweed at each other and play the dunking game that was really a form of water boarding. Sometimes I'd swim up behind Tim and pinch his calf with two seashells simulating a shark attack, while causing him to have a near heart attack. We competed to see who could find the first sharks tooth. There weren't many of them and after a while I'd get a backache and eye strain. Tim always found two or three to my zero. While I would sit on the beach reading a book, Tim often went for long walks by the water's edge, sometimes with a pail and a fishnet. One day he came back to our spot on the beach and handed me a one-gallon zip lock bag of seawater containing a complete oceanic ecosystem, including sand, shells, seaweed, a sand crab and a small fish. I was speechless. He was so proud of his creation, and left it next to me to admire, and then returned to his walking. 

We planned our trips to the beach to coincide with the full moon, and after dark we had the beach to ourselvesit was our playground. At night the ocean appears black, but when the moon rises in the sky it illuminates the horizon and casts its shimmering beams in a trail across the water. One particular night, as we passed through the dunes walking to the car, we stopped. The sand was still warm beneath our feet, and the air smelled like the ocean as we turned back to take a last look for the night: Through sea oats rustling in the warm breeze we saw sand, ocean, sky, and a glorious moon spreading its beams across the dark ocean. Hearing the waves wash up onto the shore and taking in the beautiful scene, in that moment we both knew that we would hold these sensory images forever in our hearts.  

Tim was dapper, and once remarked that every day when he went to work he dressed as though he were going to a wedding, and he really did. His shirts with their French cuffs were always perfectly pressed, and he wore beautiful cufflinks, pocket scarves, diamond lapel pins, a diamond-encrusted watch, a bracelet with two big diamonds and at least three or four rings. I loved to tell him he looked handsome as he left for work, because the remark never failed to make him beam with pride. 

For most of our years together, Tim turned up his nose at white gold. I once gave him an imperial jade ring in a white gold setting, and he had it recast in platinum. But in the last two years of his life, he began collecting large silver pieces designed in the early twentieth century by the Danish silversmith Georg Jensen. And while I appreciated the beauty of their design, I was shocked by the number of pieces he would attach to himself before we went out to a restaurant, function or a party at the home of friends. Sometimes I tried to talk him out of wearing a particularly flamboyant piece, but he would wear it anyway. So we'd go out and wherever we went I employed breathing techniques when I saw people looking at Tim and his jewelry. And when Tim got sick, he continued to wear Jensen rings, necklaces and three bracelets when I took him for numerous tests, scans and treatments that all required him to take them off. One particular bracelet he wore every day required my help to put on and take off and this often became a battle of the wills that Tim always won, and my consolation was holding a plastic bag of jewelry while he was off with the doctors.

Nothing in my life prepared me for what happened during these recent months. As I worked less, and spent more time taking care of Tim I was surprised to find myself falling in love with him all over again. He lost a lot of things along the way: Weight, muscle mass and his ability to talk. During his last weeks he communicated with nods of his head, eye contact and barely audible words. He stopped wearing jewelry, and only pretended to eat the food I set in front of him. But his eyes remained big and blue, and he looked good with the gray beard he grew. In the wee hours of last Thursday morning, it was just Sparky and me at the bedside with Tim. It was clear that he was dying, and he seemed unresponsive, but I stroked his hair and told him that he looked handsome, and he beamed. As he slipped further away I told him stories like those he told Poopie and Sparky and said the Lord's prayer with him, but he was so far away I couldn't tell if he could hear me. I said, Tim, if you're ready, it's okay to go. Then, I said I love you. Do you love me? He looked at me and nodded his head, and then he was gone.

Here's one last birthday candle for you, Tim, and how I wish you were here to make a wish and blow it out.

OBITUARY

Timothy Dean Sweeney

June 23, 1955 – June 18, 2015

Joseph Gawler’s Sons, LLC

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