A fading history

That's me and Timm, 1967.

We're coming up on four months since Timm died of a heart attack on a long, lonely night in Salem Hospital, stricken by the very organ he celebrated and searched for most. Like most memorials, the material here -- what remains of the beloved -- begins to thin out. Grief has an indeterminate season, taking whatever time it requires to harrow through a heart; eventually, for all of us, we go on, and the dead fade, like a shadow approaching noon, or the moon's shadow at dawn.

Dad and Timm.

Dad and I talked this morning about how frighteningly fast the present enters the dust of history. We talked about the Chicago years for our family, when we were living in the Evanston house in the 1960s. They were seminal, loud and brash years for the city and the country; growing up in them was like being housed in the middle of a crucible.

I remember watching Kennedy's funeral from a single black and white TV playing in our elementary school auditorium. My older brother Will's first favorite song was the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" (1966), which he would listen to with the sound on his tinny tiny AM radio cranked all the way up, tuned to WLS. When Martin Luther King was assassinated, Dad came and retrieved me from the State Theater where I was watching "The Jungle Book"; driving home, he had me hide under the dash because snipers were said to be on the highway overpasses. We had Northwestern University students living at our house who were involved in the student revolution. We held an election party for Don Rumsfeld the night he won the congressional seat that started his political career. Dad was down in the Republican Watchdog headquarters during the Democratic Convention of 1968, closing the windows against the tear gas rising from Lincoln Park where many of his staff were getting shoved and clubbed by the Chicago Police. One night when Mom and Dad were out, the phone rang with a black man wanted to get bailed out of jail. He died in there that night. We listened to "The Sound of Music" along with Barbara Streisand and The Beatles' White Album on Dad's stereo in the study. I collected Chicago Seed underground newspapers along with scorecards from Cubs games I attended that horrible season when my heart of baseball was broken forever.

All that history is almost now wholly lost. There aren't many survivors now.
Dad talked about friends from that time who played such a big role in so many changes in Chicago during that time, mostly dead, the few remaining struggling to keep the time alive in memory.

Easter, 1967, in front of the house in Evanston.

Fifty thousand American servicemen died in the Vietnam War conflict; I remember a kid down the street who went off to fight and never returned, the father of one of Timm's friends in Winter Haven who had been shot down and captured. (His wife would get drunk and dance by herself to their old songs). Dad's father Pa passed away, dead of a heart attack at age 72. Nana, Dad's mother, died of stomach cancer in the '80s, and so did Dearie, Mom's mother. A friend of mine from my years out West committed suicide; another lined up for a liver replacement, having drunk his own one to destruction. Timm almost died from his injuries in a car accident in 1981; he would have many more accidents and near-scrapes until the big one got him this year.

I have to scratch my head to remember what has flooded under the bridge while Timm was growing up and making his way. We kids all grew up, bounced in and out of relationships, trouble, financial hardship, sobriety, all to a great degree settling down. Molly raised a stepson and three kids of her own. Timm and I both had first marriages where we took up the reins of father. There were career upgrades, house purchases, illnesses. Molly lost her stepson Nicholas last year to an auto accident; he was 23. Our family reunited in 1987, when Molly married; a half year later when I married; in 1994 when Timm married; in 1996 when Will married. We hoped for a family reunion last summer after Nicholas died but we couldn't quite pull it off. Everyone but Dad went out for Timm's memorial service in April. The unity of our family endures now in loss, facing the invevitable reductions of illness and age now.

The four kids together ca. 1967, with family friend Melody ?? joining in ...

... The four kids together again in 1978 for Molly's graduation from Winter Park High School in Florida.

And the pets! We've said goodbye to so many of them ... These I remember: I buried all of my hamsters under the crawl space of the Evanston house; Will has the ashes of Shep and Bosco; Mother's poodle Ginger is buried with the roses in her front yard; the ashes of Dad's border collies Lance and are buried up by the house and under Cnoc Cobhain (there to blend with some of Timm's ashes); our Himalayan Buster's ashes are in a white urn carved with a cross, up on a shelf in the bedroom (Beth wants his ashes interred in her eventual coffin, they go together); Red and Zooey are buried in a spot between two bushes back by the garage. Who will remeeber any of these burials and farewells after we're gone?

Timm with Will in Winter Haven in 1971, with pets Monte and Shep also in the boat.

We're so fortunate to still have Mom and Dad, both in their 80's now. Their history lies increasingly in the hands and minds of their children and grandchildren. I will receive all of Dad's papers, quite a trove of history for anyone who would care to look. Timm's history is tied up in what I've gathered for this memorial, in his photography archives, and some scattered writings. I don't think many will be interested in Timm's history for long. Dad's history, much wider and longer in scope, may be of interest to some historians of a very select slice of Chicago history, the Presbyterian Church in America. He has 40 years of journals; Mom has many years of journals, too, recording her meditations, scripture study and conversations with God. Molly has been a diligent historian of familiy; her daughters are sure to remember much of what she has told them. Will has photos and I have writings: Something resonant of fall of us will remain in the world for a while.

Molly and Timm.

A while. But the interest in our stuff, our thoughts and hopes and creations and dreams, rests primarily within. Only my stuff is as important to the world as I think it is; outside the sphere of my brain, it shrinks rather rapidly. For all of the poems I've written, I doubt there's any true literary legacy; nor do I think anything else I've written has lasting value to anyone else but me.

So too I think does Timm take most of his imnportance into the grave. Only he knows his true accomplishment and gift. He also takes with him so much that's unresolved, so much that was seeking to bury the past and begin. I'm not sure how much of Timm's record I actually possess; curiously, he never saved emails he had sent. He concealed his identity at one point, taking up the old family spelling. So much may never emerge; what is visible quickly fades.

Will and Timm.

Yet there are surprises. Brother Will called yesterday to say that he'd started reading Timm's memorial blog. At first he'd stayed away due to so many conflicted feelings; yet now he says he's drawn to it, finding his own roots in that history, remembering Timm with a mixture of fondness and guilt (he, like me, had grown up largely apart from Timm; we both felt the failure to be much of a brother to him). Amid the sadness and guilt of our memories, there were also laughs. Our family is distant, but our DNA forever makes us kin, for better and worse, part of an ongoing story, now without Timm but strangely closer because of Timm, perhaps reminded of the shortness of time we all have. Also however, remembering Timm has made us remember to pick up the phone and call each other for no real reason, or for more reason than we ever had before.

Will walks with Timm and Molly at a fair at Dewey Elementary in Evanston, 1968.

When we were out in Oregon for Timm's memorial, Will and I were bunkmates in our Best Western motel room, which sat so close to I-5 that the slurring of passing semis making their way on rainy roads constantly sighed into our room. There we were, soon to be 53 and 51, brothers who had experienced great closeness growing up - both in enmity and in play - now decades apart in Pennsylvania and Florida lives, easy together (cushioned, perhaps, by all of those miles, those decades), having breakfast together at the Denny's next door, telling stories about Timm, wondering what he had been about there, worrying about Mom and Dad in the aftermath. History past and this history in the making present in our conversations, laughing, worried, bitching, yearning, making the best of what we could. And Timm there to our left, the ghost of honor, his energies and confusions and gifts just beginning to be revealed to us as we saw with our own eyes who he had become in the fourteen years since we'd last made the trip to Oregon, for Timm's wedding back in '94.

The Cohea Boys ride again, yes, present and lost, together in memory and fact. It was really sweet of Will to call yesterday and give thanks for the memorial. I had thought he'd stayed away for long out of resentment, that Timm was getting so much attention when he'd been gone for so long. Maybe that was true - Will said his feelings were too jumbled to approach it - but in the way of grief, he found a way to come by and find something meaningful to it. I encouraged Will to send more of the pictures he's been taking with Timm's camera. Will says he feels connected to Timm that way, and I can see why. Sharing his photos here are another way of laying flowers at the memorial.

These are meant to be concluding comments - I've been wanting to try to draw both this post and the blog to a resolution - but it doesn't quite feel done yet. Certainly there are more pictures to share. I think there's a post in the making about what I'd like to know about Timm but don't and probably never will. Something which accounts for all that wasn't remembered here. So sorry, folks, gonna have to keep on keeping on, for the near future at least. Who knows how long grieving takes? How large a memorial grows till it fades? How long history stays with us? Perhaps the work of this memorial will conclude when the next memorial begs attention. That seems to be greatly what these times are about.

The Cohea boys, 1967. The photo, taken originally on slide film, fades.