Remembering Timm O'Cobhthaigh

A montage of Timm photos set to a song
by Pat Matheny (whom Timm greatly admired)

Spring has flown from Florida: the tide rises toward summer. The tabebuias have long exploded into flame and blossomed full away, replaced by the plush scent of jasmine tinged with traces of wildfire smoke.

Even in Florida, though, it’s been slow coming. A cool-ish winter lingered long. Even now, the Northeast continues to endure snowy spells, and the forecast for Salem Oregon looks much as I recall it when I flew in ten years ago: Cold, dark, rainy.

Time on Earth is gauged differently; our lives are water that passes fleetingly through its seasonal hands. But just ten years after Timm’s death, the human world has moved on in ways as to make Timm’s moment seem almost moot. Barack Obama still hadn’t been elected President yet (he was Timm’s favorite), and look at the White House now. The subprime mortgage crisis hadn’t yet put 8 million people out of work and social media just inaudible stream of the Internet. The United States was trying to back out of war in Iraq; a decade later we still wander those sands, firing Tomahawk missiles last weekend at a Russian puppet state that can’t stop from gassing its rebellious citizens. And talk of global warming is like a weather getting worse: whispers back then, too insistent to ignore now though no one yet is doing enough about it.

Mom working under a tabebuia tree in her back yard, early March 2018.

Ten years. What I sensed about Timm—that his early death would subsume into that torrent of new news and soon become nothing—was the genesis behind this memorial blog. It’s driving question has always been not why did Timm O’Cobhthaigh die of a heart attack on April 18, 2018, but rather who was the boy and then man who walked into that day, never to be seen again?

If you knew Timm and the result here has not quite added up to your take, sorry. Timm and I were brothers separated by seven years of life and about two thousand years of distance. He wasn’t around to ask, and the only clues I have followed are a few conversations with friends which trailed off quickly and several boxes of photos and journals retrieved from his apartment in Salem and shipped here.

My takeaway has been the discovery, too many years late, that Timm was my kid twin brother. We didn’t know each other and talked too little too late in the tale, but if you plotted our individual narratives on a graph, the lines would diverge here and there but mostly remain the same. Childhood freedom and damage, adolescent wounds and westward wandering, faith, learning, alcoholism and recovery, music, mania, writing, marriage (our first wives were almost carbon copies of each other), divorce, pictures, wandering, yearning, faith, learning: As I wrote here before, Timm must have scooped some of my DNA from our mother’s womb during his gestation. We were both tall (he stretched up with cowboy boots to clear a quarter inch above me), our hair was the same color, our eyes both hazel, our hands both articulate the same way. (Brother Will and Molly share many of their own unique characteristics—perhaps another pairing in the womb.) More than a few jaws dropped when I showed up at Timm’s memorial wearing his black jacket—perfect fit—talking with in a voice that was Timm’s register.

Damage defined our differences—Timm’s life-threatening car accident at 18 cut the hearing in one ear (lopping off the chances for a stage musical career; I dead-ended mine through bad choices) and adding a dimension of dissonance that hurt career focus and made balance difficult in things ranging from relationship to careening into the next accident. We grew up at different times of our parents’ marriage, so their difficulties reflected variously upon our ages. Because I was older, whatever refracted through that lens into my own psyche was of far more mediated heat; far as I can tell, I didn’t burn as bad.

Family members who read today’s entry will have their own opinions, but we all share the loss of our youngest over a span which grows ever more surprising. Or maybe it’s just something we shouldered and went on. Remembering Timm is a faded duty, but at this ten-year anniversary, it’s well worth the time.

What’s a twin to do with an other who only flickers in memory, except tend a garden, write a way through it, cry a little more, and dream of a shared time to come?

"Hidden Waterfall" by Timm

I plan this post as the last to this blog. Ten years gone, what else is there to say about Timm? The grief, once so jagged with high hurt and cried-out stillness, has smoothed into the long line of time passed without him. I’ve been through his pictures (scanning most of them), read through his journals, written an online bio of sorts, made my conclusions, left the unanswerables open to updating if new information comes in. (It hasn’t.)

For the past few years, I’ve marked the anniversary with an assortment of pictures from Timm’s life, but for this one I wanted to write something both personal about Timm and reflective of what has been lost.

So last week I crawled into the attic, moved boxes away (stuff from later writings and projects, subsequent living) and found the plastic storage container where I have stowed Timm’s remaining effects. Surely I imagined it, but it seemed that the breath of Timm’s history exhaled something as I opened it.

I pulled out a couple of journals, and for the past few days I’ve been reading them. The era was 1993-6, when Timm was in his early ‘30s, approaching marriage to Mik and then suffering deeply what he could neither avoid nor embrace, the intimate love of another person. He was a couple of years into AA recovery by then, enough to have stability and purpose. Enough rootedness to feel all the graves of his history cracking wide reaching for him …

The reading for long passages is exceptionally painful as Timm stays put and comes to terms with the things which have kept him on the run for years. He sees numerous counselors, attends church faithfully, goes to meetings of Sex Addicts Anonymous (compulsive sexuality is both a way to keep the feeling of past abuse at bay as well as an attempt to manage the absence of intimacy), works, and writes his feelings down.

Here’s Timm, yearning and burning to connect, writing in his journal in October 1996, age 32, about a year after he married Mik and twelve years before he died:

I have always been lured by that which is just beyond my grasp. As if by finally obtaining “it” (love, position, place, etc.), the missing piece will finally be replaced. It’s like I never “connected” when a child with my parents like I intended to. The result is that I was cheated and deprived of stability. The only thing I can like it to is of an astronaut floating in space trying to hook his lifeline or rope to something – anything—so he won’t just float aimlessly, spinning, being upside down or backward. When I am too far or too long disconnected or threatened with severance, I panic. I feel the panic now, I’m not connected.

I keep wondering if this emotional vertigo was skewed further by the damage done from the life-threatening head injury (and all the other jarrings of his accident-prone life). The 1981 car wreck—he was thrown from the back of a Volkswagen which was hit by a truck—had caused him to lose hearing in one ear and gave him life-long bouts of double vision and mental focus problems. It also made it impossible to perform music on onstage with others one of Timm’s life-long disappointments. What about intimacy? Hearing in one ear what the other cannot, how can one calibrate the emotional presence of another? Are they as much there as not?

Keep in mind that this was the child who in first grade was always the first to rush to the aid of another child in need. Timm’s compulsion to care, to connect, was inborn and essential to his nature, and this may have amplified the emotional damage when the wounds came.

Certainly, once Timm tethered himself in place and decide to face his demons, they came at him hard. Relationship choices barbed by past emotional damage made for a harrowing experience of marriage. (Timm and I also apparently chose the same woman to be our first wife.)

Yet spiritual growth and healing require taking ownership of one’s defining experiences; crucial to Timm’s narrative at this point is that he didn’t run. Timm endured panic attacks, major depression, medication, therapy, divorce, more therapy, sexual acting out (the degree of which to me seems pretty minor, but who knows what Timm shared and what he didn’t in his journals) ...

… and, very slowly over the years, peace. There was much evidence of that in the effects which Timm left behind. The good news is that when Timm went through hell he didn’t stop, and the brother and son we knew better in the Spring of 2008 was one who had come through those fires and found a way to say Yes to his life and make a solid contribution to the community.

There is no mention of photography in these ‘90s journals; Timm tends to be uni-dimensional in his accounts of life, writing only about inner torments—little about the job(s), his music, his love of being outdoors, etc.) I like to think that he found symbolic solace and connection through his photography. If you look at his pictures of children or flowers or serene outdoor vistas, you can’t help but feel a childlike wonder. And it is a conscious gift that he produces with labor and care. What he found, I think, is that giving beauty to the world, the child within could heal.

In the end, Timm found out that a shared beauty heals. It’s a gift that has such enduring power, reaching beyond whatever conclusions we try to make about who Timm was. That beauty is what, deep in my heart, Timm will forever be.

photo by Timm

In August 1993 Timm relates an experience in his journal I like to think was prophetic:

I had a very unusual experience last night. For the past couple of days, I’ve been a real basket case (emotionally drained) as a result of dealing with some childhood abuse issues. Last night I was laying in bed, very much awake, when I found myself looking down on a house with no road. As I descended there was lightning flashing & it was night.

I set down in a hallway and I walked to the first door. When I looked in, there I was as a little boy, cowering at the head of my bed, just wishing to be held. In the next room, I saw Dad standing over me and he was using his belt to whip me. Through the next door, I saw a little kid about two years old, who was me. He had been walking with me, and I remembered seeing him as I descended, wandering the halls and looking in the rooms. We walked to the third door, & there was the incident where I was molested. There were many other doors and incidents, but we didn’t go to these. Instead we walked down the hallway to its end, and there Jesus was standing with outstretched arms. When I walked up to him, I stopped, picked up the little boy, and handed him to Jesus, who held him. Then the three of us began to rise out of the building. And when we were about 50-75 feet above the house, Jesus told me that the little boy would never live in that “house of pain” again, where he had always lived, wandering the halls and rooms.

In these rooms were my “neediness,” fears of rejections, perceptions of self, etc. The insight I have now is to learn the appropriate ways of dealing with these things, now that only the memories remain. Their power to dominate is gone.

The only way out of that house of pain for Timm was through it; and not only did Timm find his way, but he carried another child out with him. That I think was the essence of Beauty Heals.

And it was the beauty of Timm’s life which was so celebrated at his memorial service in Salem on April 20, 2008, where three hundred co-workers, AA’s, sponsees, recovering addicts, fellow wounded healers and his mother and sister and two brothers gathered to thank God for who Timm will always be.

Timm in Bolivia, 2003

One of the first things I posted to this memorial blog back in early May 2008 was a poem by Timm that I found in one of his more recent journals – 2005, I think. Compare the hurt and lost soul of his 1993 journal entry with this, and then ask yourself if beauty healed Timm:

UNSEEN BEAUTY

A sea of color stretches
Between two majestic mountain peaks
Delicate blooms whose short life
Are brought forth by the summer’s warmth
In awe I gaze, perhaps the only to behold
Since the trail I take is rarely trod
Mixed with the sight my vision
Is tinted with sadness – a note of futility
Such a sight perhaps only I
Will ever get to see
It seems a waste of such mammoth proportions
And to God I cry – why?

Wind sweeps down from a snowy pass
As a cloud shadows my path
I strain to hear perhaps a voice
But only joy do I perceive
Joy? Snort I in disgust
Why would there be such a sense
From my master’s heart?
Doesn’t He know of this incredible waste
That has somehow escaped his plan
Now laid out in this alpine realm?
But only joy do I sense.

Butterflies flutter in their feeding dance
As they ride the streams of wind
A gentle buzz seems to emanate
From everywhere the flowers nod
On the verge of tears I succumb
To the joy that only I will ever know
I drink deeply from the well before me
Filling my soul with that beauty that heals
I forget my complaints and mortal thoughts
I am there and nowhere else.

When eventually I wandered out
As the sun began to set
The thoughts returned to my mind
But not with the same pain
Somehow I realized that it was not
A waste as I had protested
Humbled I realize the gift shared not by one
But by two – the master and I
His joy was in my delight
as a parent with his beloved child
And in a way, I saw as He did
The master and His creation
I was a part of the greater canvas
And his joy was in beholding us all.

"Eugene Bridge" by Timm

In response to that gift he found in this beloved world—the traces of which I recovered from an old Mac laptop, a few scattered journals and two boxes of slides—I wrote the following a few years after his death. I leave it with you as my coda to Timm:

TINY GASPS OF WONDER

Brother, I wander here at your
memorial today -- dark and late
as usual, breezes strumming the
fine tendrils of the garden's stalks --
and wonder if the heart's grief
descends in sacred ways,
drossing off the wastes of history
until only the finest memories remain
to root in the finest black loam.

We all love that photo of you
standing at the Lincoln Park Zoo
in Chicago at aged 5, a hand to
your gaping mouth, eyes wide with
wonder at some beast,
recognizing the whole story there,
home at last.

That picture of you is the summa
of all the photographs you'd take
pouring back the healing waters
of the womb you would not forsake
even though you feared it so.

Perhaps we are at last
but epitaphs writ on an
ancient chamber stones
a thousand lives ago,
tiny spiral whorls of a child's pure Yes
repeated in darkness and cold,