Grief makes the heart apparent

On Saturday my wife and I loaded up both cars with wares leftover from our yard sale (linens, pottery, garden stands, dishes, glassware, a tole chandelier and lighting fixture) and drove into Orlando to set her up next to the French Nest in College Park for a Parisian Flea Market along with a half-dozen or so other vendors. A cloudy, breezy, somewhat cool morning in Florida's November, full of intimations to come of the cooler half of the year with plenty of the summer's traces lingering about like fading dreams, like the dead. Traffic was light at the event, perhaps because there was a craft fair going on further downtown all weekend.



Anyway, after helping Beth get everything set up, I drove down to south Orlando to spend a few hours with my mother, working awhile on her computer and then sitting out on the porch with her for a long lunch. We had a wonderful perambling talk, covering so much -- our health, work, news about family and friends, our pets, the state of the economy, the perils of politics, et cetera. (Mom will work the polls in a black district on Tuesday, a gruelingly long event (6:30 a.m. til 10 p.m.) but a fun one, with a carnival atmosphere. We promised a call to the other on Wednesday to console and congratulate, whichvever the way the vote might go (that is, unless it's a dead heat and we enter the wasteland of surely endless litigation.) Viva our strange and terrible and wonderful democracy, for better and ill.

We talked at greatest length about Timm, about our grief for him, about how it has changed and hasn't over the past six months, ebbing towards oblivion, finding balm in the love of God, in assurances we take that he is with us (Mom says when she worships she believes Timm is in a nearby pew, singing along in his fine baritone). The grief has a coin which we must pay or else, becoming a healthy depth in us or an unassuaged abyss too near our every moment; we are either transformed in its hallows or crabbed by its harrows, like the drunk in the Irish tale who was walking home in the deep of night when a corpse affixed itself to his back, demanding he walk and walk and walk to first light. Grief somehow is truest about the saying of St. Thomas which goes, "If you bring out what is inside you, what you bring out will save you; if you fail to bring out what is inside you, what you fail to bring out will destroy you" - it becomes our greatest ally or worst enemy, depending on our measure of surrender to its depths, its salt-washes of pain.




We talked about those final sort of questions, asking if Timm survived his nurture to thrive in his nature. His death -- that which no nature survives - made us wonder if its causes were volitional (running too hard out of a compulsive need to be better than who he was rather than who he was), and if such volition and compulsion came as a result of the events of his history - especially his car accident at 18 --or the result of some deeper, even genetic malaise that caused him like many of us sharing genes from Mom's side of the family to be too open, too vulnerable, too susceptible to the harsher consequences of events, so much so that Timm's history was became a too-terrible something he must flee from, medicate over, be endlessly in the process of re-starting anew.



Like an acid bath which reveals a scarred topography under the surface of daily events, thinking about Timm's end made us wonder if that sort of susceptibility was in many of us -- in my vulnerabilities which gave me such a thirst for whiskey and has made for such hard going in relationships; in grandmother Dearie's endless self-excoriations (resulting, along the way, in several breakdowns); in Timm's endless self-mutilations using the goad of "accidents" (Lord what a self-beating he administered over the years), in cousin Carol's clamorous needs in childhood which darkened into a shriek as her schizophrenia matured (with its fantasies of impossible liaisons with comics living so far away, even in death), in Mom's over-sensitivity and the sag is has placed always on her spirit, in my niece Kathy -- that "odd duck" as sister Molly calls her -- who at 19 is in some sort of pathological cusp of adulthood where she lives inside herself, far, far away from the practicalities of growing up.

(Such pathologies in growing up may be larger than genetics; as I related some of the above to my wife the next day, she gently reminded me that everyone has difficulty growing up. Perhaps growing up is about spiritual growth and is no respecter of genetics or time or culture. Black or white, male or female, red or blue, we all have to face the ardor and difficulty of letting go immature beliefs so that we can embrace the full world as it is.)

We talked about our healing from those ills, surrendering something essentially dark and selfish and immature in the name of growing up, in getting better, in taking that bitter medicine which becomes the source of so much healing, be it grounding in the church or a relationship, attendance at AA or taking the meds for the delusions. We heal, we grow up, so we can face life full on, become givers rather than takers, volunteers rather than victims, celebrants rather than dark spirals wounding everything we come in contact with.


We talked about how in grief there is this vital need to let go (for Timm truly is gone) in the fullest remembrance of him - such a paradoxical motion, to let go by holding on --; about the healing love of God; about carrying on Timm's legacy, his work my work now, his love of beauty mine - it has always been mine, but now Timm's spirit is joined to it, sublimely, forcefully, mysteriously, abundantly.


It was a long, heartfelt conversation about what death teaches about the lost and ourselves. Death has a way of fixing our gaze on the dead so that they deepen as they fade, or we do. Grief is heavy going, and morbid reflection is part of its leaden equipage; to others it seems excessive, going on and on and on when at some point the living all must decide to throw their lot in with this side and go on with their life. Yet like the sea it is almost impossible to say what is the right measure of grief for each person. For most its bucket work; each day brings a fresh pail of grief to the surface, brimming and cold and silvery with pain and its task of making a meaning of it, a way of summing and saying goodbye. Day after day of that work, week after month; time schools us in grief and at some far end of that work we don't so much graduate as become better students of it, lay teachers in the arts of consolation perhaps.



Timm's end leaves many ends unfinished -- his work, his loves, his art -- as we talked, Mom and I found ourselves trying to sum those things up, wondering if he had found a happy groove for his life at last, whether he would or could ever resolve his difficult and wayward history, if his photography had become a full enough expression for whatever was so big in his heart. Questioning those things, not really deciding - yet or perhaps ever - but the finality of death (in this world, at least) allowed a vantage for speaking of a person as a range of expressions which blossomed, praising the flowers of harvest as a cornocopeia of soul. In turn, we use turn that lens focused by the death of another next on ourselves, asking, have I lived fully? Loved well? Can I make something good of this, lemonade out of lemons, give something gorgeously bittersweet back to the world, like Lyle Mays' "September 15," like Timm's heart-ful silo of beautiful images?


No real answers, but a fine talk, the afternoon breezy and changeful, the busyness of our lives at momentary rest, honoring the dead, celebrating the living. And between us, during our talk, our shared grief, a fullness of heart became apparent to us. Jack Gilbert, who lost his wife Michiko to cancer, speaks of this perfectly in the following poem:

HARM AND BOON IN THE MEETINGS

We think the fire eats the wood.
We are wrong. The wood reaches out
to the flame. The fire licks at
what the wood harbors, and the wood
gives itself away to that intimacy,
the manner in which we and the world
meet each new day. Harm and boon
in the meetings. As heart meets what
is not heart, the way the spirit
encounters the flesh and the mouth meets
the foreignness in another mouth. We stand
looking at the ruin of our garden
in the early dark of November, hearing crows
go over while the first snow shines coldly
everywhere. Grief makes the heart
apparent as much as sudden happiness can.

My mother and father are both 81. Each conversation, every time we spend together bears the tenuousness of what time we have left. But time with them is really an illusion - look who they have survived, Timm, nephew Nicholas - the young have died and the old live on - yet there is always finality, a far shore of our lives, and each time I get to spend with my parents - up at Columcille with Dad in September, or a rare long lunch with Mom - is a sum-up and a celebration, going back over the life, praising what is good and grieving what has been lost. Oddly, Remembering Timm has become a place for us to share that moment, where holding forth the iota of Timm's life and loves and work is itself a place where we can commune with each other, feel intimately connected despite all the ways we're apart. Timm's death becomes a fiercer bond for our lives, asking us to reckon and relate what was best and worst for him as the very balm and bane of our own existence. Singing of Timm, we sing our own songs at the breezy afternoon, the darkening season, the difficult tenor of the day, the eternal sighing of waves on a shore we will all end our days upon and enter the next.

Love ya, Mom -

Then it was on to Beth's parents' house in Oviedo where I was to meet up with Beth and her sister with the wares & fixtures left over from the sale (which, as it turned out, was a lot - the sale was sort of a bust). While over there I picked up the next 500 slide scans finished by Wade, and present the first sampling here in this post.

Saying: See this ample evidence of a full-hearted life that says Yes? How important it is to the world, especially now, with so much death in the wings, so much dying in the culture, so many in need of a smile, a hug, simple words like "we too, have suffered in loss, and say that where there is darkness, there is also great light ... great heart … great love.