Tim Carwinski OBITUARY

Tim Carwinski OBITUARY

Everyday Tim Carwinski (nee Carraher) lost himself among the cypresses, cedars, and sequoias in the Jardin des Prébendes d’Oé.

Advocacy for the underdog would define Tim’s life, but first he needed to find peace in the winding 19th-century English-style oasis in the center of Tours, France.

His senior year at Boston College bruised him. As director of an LGBTQ+ support group he was a staunch advocate for his community, but also a target for students and administrators who opposed it. The animus played out in competing student newspapers and with slurs and vandalism.

Before that, Tim was a beloved friend and student at St. Giles and Fenwick schools, in Oak Park, Illinois, where he would begin collecting life-long friends. At Fenwick, he was a treasured member of the Blackfriars Guild, fostering his love of musical theater.

After graduating from BC, Tim taught English in the city on the Loire River in France. He found community among the students and teachers, and a love of good wine and food. Then there was the jardin, a refuge for self-reflection, where he built trust in his own tastes and instincts.

He took that confidence to Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, then to the Sorbonne, in Paris, where he earned a masters in global business law. His apartment in the Marais District was a test kitchen for culinary ambitions; a gathering place for friends to eat his first attempts at boeuf bourguignon and pot-au-feu, and to drink wine into the wee hours. Among the visitors was his future husband Patryk Piwinski, whom he met the year before at Sidetracks on Halsted.

Back in Chicago, Tim volunteered with the civil rights organization Lambda Legal. He worked on a seminal Ohio case that established the right of LGBTQ+ parents to seek legal custody of their children. He also worked to defend the right of the state of Wisconsin to provide LGBTQ+ couples with domestic partnership protections.

And he worked with the team that helped legalize same-sex marriage in Illinois. He anticipated this victory by proposing to Patryk a year earlier.

Tim took a job at the law firm Reed Smith, specializing in commercial litigation, while working pro bono to represent asylum seekers, for which he was lauded by the National Immigrant Justice Center, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

Throughout his career he supported Lambda with nearly 2000 hours of pro-bono work. Part of that advocacy contributed to the legal building blocks that were put in place across the country to argue Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark Supreme Court case that legalized marriage equality in all 50 states.

This paved the way for his marriage to Patryk in 2015, when they each adopted the portmanteau Carwinski as surnames.

Much like the apartment in the Marais, the Carwinski home was the center of a galaxy of friends, family, and chosen family—including their two cats Lillet Blanc and Cointreau Jr. Countless karaoke parties, backyard movie nights, and elaborate dinners soundtracked by Tim’s earnest turns at the piano that were only interrupted by his pursuit of live theater, international travel, Cubs games, and trips to the National Figure Skating Championships, where the shimmering sequined outfits he sported with his sister Sam became a reliable feature on national television.

Tim exercised his mind like a muscle, capturing a mastery of world history, French wine, Broadway musicals, and the Harry Potter universe, which he deployed as an online trivia master. With his gift for language he augmented his French and Latin fluency by attempting to learn Polish to communicate with Patryk’s family–one of the few things he ever failed at.

The strength of these passions was only matched by his righteous outrage at bigotry and intolerance, the current sitting Supreme Court, and direct sunlight, boats, eating with his fingers, and ground black pepper.

The communities Tim nurtured circled him when he was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer at the age of 42. At home and during farewell trips to France, Spain, Poland, New York, and Germany the connections he threaded throughout his life grew stronger. They are the legacy he leaves.

A portion of Tim’s ashes will be spread in the Jardin des Prébendes d’Oé in Tours.