Six months gone

A family outing, possibly to Bell's Apple Orchards where we would go about this time of the year. Mother, David, Will, Timm, Molly, with Dad taking the picture.

Dear Timm,

Sarah is playing Christmas music tonight and it takes me backward and forward.

It has been 6 months since you died. I miss you. You took a large portion of my childhood with you. Memories shared are now stories told.

Thank you for your last gifts to me; the long phone call on my birthday (did I tell you that Kathy moved out that day, Jim was out of town, it was raining and I was feeling low?), your spoken desire to be here for Christmas, and finally the April snowfall in Oregon when we came to say “Good-bye.”

You will not be home for Christmas this year as you said you wanted to be. The Christmas memories come in a jumble the year of the Christmas baby, singing in church on Christmas morning, Dave’s Charlie Brown tree he got the year Mom was trying to cut expenses, the yellow Tonka steam shovel you got in Evanston that you could not use because your sandbox was snowed under, the year you came tromping down in those blasted Batman slippers 3 days before Christmas, your admission many years later that you always knew what you were getting for Christmas (did you know the year I got you a rat? Did you figure that out?).

Last year we got an ornament in memory of Nick. It was a cowboy hat. This year I’ll get an ornament in memory of you. Should I get a camera or perhaps another guitar? I still have your guitar ornament that came on the Oz’s books from Rusty Barefield. I don’t know how I ended up with it, but I’m glad I have it.

I miss you, Timm.

- Molly

Timm and Molly in 2007, on his last visit to Florida.

Dear son Timm,

Our dance goes on in "No Time";
the bondage of linear time is broken
dualism is erased.

In the splendor of the autumn leaves
We glow together
In the fleeting billowy clouds
You fill the sky with a Full Moon Smile

You are fully free to explore the distant stars
Touch Mars and bounce with the pulse of ALL
This day, I rejoice with you
And dance with the heartbeat of eternal knowingness.

May water, wind and sun
Baptize me and thee anew
May moon and stars beam words of love and mystery
As we dance and bounce
In an ever-new creation
Renewed in heart/spirit
Being the Work of the Spirit energy of ALL
And dear one,
our dance goes on in "No-Time".

Love You!

-- Dad

Timm with Dad at Columcille in 1977.

Dad with Timm in 2007, on Timm's last visit to Columcille (for Dad's 80th birthday).

April 18, 2008: The day my life changed forever. It seems both so long ago and yet as though it had just happened. Can it possibly be that Timm has died? Everything in me wants to scream "No!" Yet, I know the truth; yes, he is gone.

Even so, I know he ever lives now in the presence of the God who created him and whom he served with all his heart. He also lives in the hearts and memories of those of us who loved him so dearly. So, although I will never get over his death, I am getting better at it. I am so thankful for all that I have experienced and learned through the pain and grief that turned my world upside down six months ago.

Isn't it through pain that we grow? I believe so. The pain of Timm's death has taught me so much: to love and care for those precious ones that I used to take for granted; to live to love and to reach out to those who are hurting and broken, even as I am both hurting and broken; to know that life isn't all about me, but about Jesus Christ; to reach out for help from others who have walked this path of grief; to recognize God's goodness in all things. These are some of the gifts of God's goodness to me over these past six months.

I still think about all that I heard at Timm's memorial service when so many shared how he had touched their lives. I recall the many notes of thanks that Congresswoman Houley's office sent me, notes hand-written by the many disabled and elderly to whom Timm inspired hope and whom he helped with their long- delayed benefits.

I am so grateful for David's skill and perseverance in putting up this memorial site. I thank God for Dave's unique gifts which have showed us so much that we would not have known about Timm. How Dave's blogs and Timm's photographs have comforted me!

Finally, I know that love never ends and that Timm's love is still reaching out to those he loved and who continue to grieve his loss. I think especially of his beloved Christie, his faithful friend Ken, his Dad, Will, Dave, Molly, Congresswoman Darlen Houley and her staff, as well as the many whose names are known to Timm but not to me.

Timm did not live and die in vain. He accomplished the work that his Heavenly Father entrusted to him. He lived a life of faith and love. He left us an example of a life well lived despite his own pain and struggles.

Thank You, Father, for Your gift to us of Timm, for your unfailing love for him and for us who continue to grieve. To You be the praise for showing us Your goodness, even through the death of the one we love and remember.

Love you,

-- Mom

Timm took this picture in Medford, 2007. His hand, I assume.

Today, as it has been said, is the sixth-month anniversary of Timm's passing. As it has also been said, time is such a strangely poor measurement of loss, perhaps because grief has beginnings and ends which are only known to itself. How deep is the ocean, how far is the moon?

Six months: That's a solid enough block to say that April 18, 2008 was some time ago. Six months tallies for us, like a shore, a wash of one hundred and eighty days, each a wave collapsing the fact of Timm's death at our feet. Six months is long enough to feel harrowed in our loss; to know deeply enough the scour of it. The hallows of grief have a familiar sear and sourness; there is a groove now to it, a gear which we know the falling into of, realizing Timm no longer has a presence in the centers and peripheries of our lives.

Timm seems so far away today; that distance curls the edges and fades the photos of him hiking or walking a shore or holding a flower or apple in his hand. The sound of his voice is fainter in remembered conversations, his are steps lighter next to mine as we caught up on things in our last visits. How could six months erase so much? Is the tide of oblivion so inexonorable?

Half a year: As a unit of heart it's such a poor adducer of grief, a mere blink of oblivion's eye. Half a year spent walking without Timm: whatever distance I've gone there is always a freshness to it, as if setting out anew, my heart breaking all over again, pouring those salted waters onto wounds which surely should have healed by now. When it comes, the pain is just as red and real as it was on April 18 when the final call came from Salem Hospital that Timm had died of his heart attack.

Perhaps because the assault on our senese - the brutal fact that Timm had died - causes memories of that day to remain so vivid as to seem immediate. The way Mom sobbed as I held here when I drove down, so frail, so deeply wounded. That tree across the street from Mom's in such obscenely beautiful, almost-burning yellow bloom - a terrible beauty, its vernal hopefulness almost mocking Timm's death. The way that Friday never quite ended as I flew west to Portland, chasing for four hours a setting sun, holding on to that day for what seemed like forever. The cold rain of Salem, so dark, returned to winter. The strains of "Benedictus" and "Forgiven" on this laptop's iTunes, music which refuses to let Timm go, the slow-dancing, softly meditative, deeply worshipful music which Timm loves as I do in my heart of hearts ... What does time allay of this but to increase what is lost, making it so tidal and majestic, heavy as the sea, beautiful as its dawns and dusks, powerfully moving this mind to sing this way, in broken praise of the beauty which was Timm ...

Six months gone. I put the word out for friends and family to post a message today to the site, and there has been, at this writing, three responses, from Molly Mom and Dad, which are included above. The gulf between Timm's eastern and western lives, as it was before, heals back into distance. Time indeed passes: we grieve our losses and go on, simply because for we, survivors as yet, there is more life to live. We make that choice to live and love or not because our heart beats on. Because it says so. We the living have much work to do, more to love.

And despite the losses we've suffered so far, there is more to grieve. The plate of our family grief, long sparely filled, now grows: Molly's son Nicholas died last year, Timm died this year. Parents age. Doctor visits lead to tests and worry, the endless inconclusiveness of health. What we have seems so precious, so easily taken away. Friends develop cancer; public figures die young of heart attack. Pets get run over or disappear or simply fade and die. The graves grow over with weeds and flowers, grass fills in the scarred turf where the fatal accident belled out one night now long and longer ago.

We recover from Timm's death, each in our own ways. Has he been remembered as much as any loved one should be? As much as we must, knowing that only when a face has been fully viewed can we seal it in its soul-boat and commend it on to God?

As I write the first draft of this is 5:12 a.m. on Friday morning Oct. 17 -- the day on which, six months ago, Timm arose to work the next ding-dong day, taking this laptop with him to the local Starbucks where he sipped an Americana listening to Pat Matheny's "September Fifteenth" on iTunes and planning out his weekend with Christie. He was online - the only history I've saved from his Safari browser was on April 17, where he logged onto his photography site to upload a photo of the Eugene Farmer's Market, checked his email and sent a message and used it to connect to his T-Mobile account, doing business there which is lost. Then he hurried off for a full work day, probably attended an AA meeting along the way and then, as light was fading from the early spring of Salem, went on a run, surely planning his next moves as those size-13 sneakers lumbered through the cool neighborhoods - his last prone motions on this earth.

When he got home the fatal trouble had already begun. Hopefully too the peace which had haunted him during his near-fatal accident in 1981 was slowly surrounding and filling him, lifting him away.

Maybe Timm knew all along it was coming - he'd had heart murmurs as a kid, was taking blood pressure meds ten years before his heart attack, suffered heart-stoppages from sleep apnea, was tracking his blood pressure on his laptop. Perhaps the experience of his near-fatal car attack on Oct. 19, 1981 (which I'll write more about on the anniversary of that day) carried the song in his head ever since, so familiar that he understood the song was slowly calling him home.

And maybe the assault was a surprise, out of the blue, hidden from him by his own denial or the mercy of his God. Yet certainly it came to him, in the course of that terrible night, that it would be fatal. It would be hours still before any of us among the living knew what had happened, far too late by then. It was a breezy, fair, sunny morning here in Florida, our spring well advanced, already intimating the long long summer to come, its beauty somehow terrible with the news of Timm's death.

Today that summer which followed Timm's death, at long last, is too gone: this morning it's in the 60's, yippee, making the full moonlight crisp as an apple. An apple, say, pulled from a near-bursting tree in Bell's Apple Orchards, an hour outside of Chicago, where we as a family would go every year when autumn clarities and chill had settled in for good. Timm was just a toddler then and would be stumbling in the orchard lanes carrying a hue red apple in his hands back to one of the bushels we were all filling. One -- just one, but the all-important one -- from Timm: that was central to Timm's childhood drama and still is, on this night so deep in moonlight that when a jogger goes by outside I can believe it's Timm on the last street, making his way here home, even though I can't write him back, even though his memory and presence fades further and further into the next day he's gone forever from.

Miss you, brother.

-- David

Timm's last visit to Florida, attending his nephew Nick's funeral, 2007. Timm, Dad, Molly, David, Mom. Will was not able to attend but was (and is) with us in spirit.

The shore at Tillamook Oregon, where Timm took all of the seaside pictures in this sequence.