Doors

It's been almost three months since Timm died. Except here -- in this small rook of cyberspace -- there isn't much trace of him in the day I live and work and love in. This memorial is visited by some - now down to just a few. Time is what the dead are tided by, carried far underground in us, their absence growing large with an emptiness which weeds over, heals of its sharp woundedness, dulls, dims, forgets: Goes on. The natural course of things, we say ...

Yet the space within me that misses and remembers Timm broods on, not as consciously perhaps, but it's a creative melancholy that keeps working. And strangely, the grave is fertile with both childhood and future. A door.

* * *

Yesterday Dad called to say how moved he was to read "Third Cup" on Timm's memorial blog, experiencing with me the agony and wonder of Timm's hard passage out of his life on the night of April 17. Mom had said as much the day before in an email sent after reading the poem.

She commented that just prior to reading the poem, she had driven home from her grief management group session and been passed by an emergency management vehicle; right then she wondered why we had never gone by Salem Hospital when we were out in Oregon attending to Timm's death, that location being an important part of Timm's final story. At home she fired up her computer, went online and came to Remembering Timm to see a photo of Salem Hospital leading off the "Third Cup" post. Our moving forward is communal; we all seem to need to witness Timm's end. And it's a complicated door; looking back, we somehow see the light ahead.

Dad too spoke of an odd occurrence yesterday; after reading the "Third Door" post he headed out to preamble the Columcille grounds. He had paused in the Saint Oran bell tower as he has almost every day for so many years when he noticed, in one of its rooks, a bird's nest, apparently recently occupied, under which he saw a spider's nest. It was an odd pairing, birth and death so close together, almost fused in a single image.

Timm at the entrance to the St. Oran Bell Tower, April 2007.

Those stories remind me of dreams I've had after Timm's death where the same perplexing mix churns and foliates and crashes blue waves on that shore where I lay. Here is a sampling:

I am on a stage performing music in an auditorium or church sanctuary or our childhood home in Evanston, playing Timm's music, or the music we both loved.

My wife and I move into a Spanish house where renovations are going on, staying in a cramped upstairs quarters much like Dad's childhood home in Cedar Rapids (drowned, we hear, in the recent flood), looking through windows that viewed some wild Pacific shore.

I am in an immense fantastical old castle that draws in its great wings, diminishes, reduces down to a simple oak door that vanishes when I press through it and wake.

I walk with Timm through an old Florida town taking pictures, he posing me next to scenes of squalor and wonder, shooting me so that I'm half in and out of an out-of-focus scene.

I attend a wedding, which was also a funeral where the bride lays pregnant in a coffin.

I listen to Timm sing so magnificently, as I never heard him in life, wondering if I could sound that good too.

I clean out Timm's apartment, wondering what to keep, what to trash, sorting through things sordid and beautiful.

I am rushed to the hospital suffering from a heart attack and pregnant, about to give birth. I wonder out loud who will take care of me if things don't go well.

In the poems I've written to Timm almost daily I've tried to make conscious sense of Timm's dreamlike presence in his absence, trying to catch up with the life we missed together, carrying on a conversation with him-in-me, you know? The part of Timm kept alive in memory and reverie. Verse letters, which are written on the wind through the trees and garden just outside my morning window, which could be Timm's breath, his spirit, what remains of him here after he breathed his last so far away.

Just my way of working through the grief, using my verbal tools to name feelings, which may be as inarticulate and fleeting as dreams and may only tangentially have anything really to do with Timm.

And yet his death pairs with my future life, the way that bird's nest in the Saint Oran bell tower has a spider's web in its undercarriage. Whatever we raise this next day has Timm, like Saint Oran, in the footers, in the dark loam of our aggrieved past. We hear a ghostly resonance which both hearkens back to the life we shared with Timm; it also beckons some sound on the way up ahead we can't quite make out, perhaps that place where Timm is waiting for us, smiling, humming a hymn, laughing that low chuckle which I never was quite sure was heartfelt or ironic or prescient or what. (An unsettling dream, just prior to my heart stress test, was of hearing Timm's whisper "You're next" clear and low and slowly in my ear.) ((My heart tested fine.))

All this prefaces the following set of images, culled from scans of Timm's massive and mostly uncatelogued slide inventory (two big brimming boxes of slides in loose sleeves which my father-in-law Wade Boggs has undertaken gracefully and with great care). The following images evoke for me a sense of that portal or door or space which looks backward and forward at the same time, pregnant with death yet enwombing too; ready, at the far end of their harrows, to give birth to something fresh and invigorating and loving and real.

That is the silver lining of every fully-grieved death, I think: the dead find a living and loving place in our memory, are welcomed and cherished while at the same time offer a sustenance we could not have found any other way.

The images were pulled at random and hardly represent the full focus of Timm's vision. Still, I think Timm had an eye for what lay ahead for him, a prescience that the lens caught maybe more eloquently than he had words for, as dreams can write the far more eloquent and true poem than any hand could write. He knew the signs; was concerned enough about his blood pressure as to track it on a spreadsheet several times last year; took blood pressure medicine; talked to friends about he concern. Yet he was also offhand about it, only somewhat serious in public. Whatever his private thoughts, we'll never know.

The images suggest he was aware of something. And I'm not sure he was as much troubled as comforted by these images, as if he still felt that death was a serene event, much as he had experienced in 1981 in his near-fatal auto accident. Whatever the case, they are comforting to me, writing in color what I have attempted with black ink the sense that past and future combine in a door, which leads to both tomb and womb.