Forgiven (3)

A bridal cover photo shot by Timm for some publication.

Up this morning, shot out of sleep really, around 3 a.m., hot, thirsty, uncomfortable in bed, some dream's last fins whooshing by me inchoate and dark, leaving the sprouting tendrils of a migraine crawling up my brainstem: All of that was enough to get me up and downstairs to feed Hugo and Belle, take a Maxalt (a migraine med) and lay back down on the couch a while in the deepest washes of the night, the Christmas tree in the middle of our garden burning brightly, all else stilled, drifting, asleep.

Belle got on my chest and we slept a while too, more dreams coming knocking at the back door of my mind, unraveling tales of strange excursions, like flying to New York with a huge handgun in tow (which had an even bigger bullet, it looked like a big red gourd) which I was supposedly to wreak revenge on someone for a wrong, and instead went calling on an older black woman in a nearby neighborhood, offering help, begging forgiveness ...

I wonder (as I wake now, 4:43 a.m., cup of Cuban coffee to my left, Belle curled in my lap, laptop computer sort of on the right arm of this big chair) what measure of his past Timm had forgiven, whether the choice comes to us at a crossroads where to forgive is to begin to make one's way slowly home, and not to forgive is to travel further on down that long road for which there is no contintent's end, no furthest shore which turns all travelers back.

Timm couldn't have lived much further away from his family in this country, yet one doesn't have to travel to further ports in order to create more distance. Timm's remove from his family was almost complete a decade ago; Dad had joked when we were out in Oregon for Timm's wedding to Mik in '95 that folks were shocked to know Timm even had a family. But since that time, I truly believe, Timm had begun a return trek, making numerous flights back east in his last years, talking to Dad of resettling nearby, mentioning to me that he hoped to set up somewhere between the north and southern branches of the family, perhaps in the mid-Atlantic states ... All very tentative, with work obviously the main question - how to make a living - but enough so to have him looking beyond the hills of Oregon he was so fond of with a gaze of prodigal hope.

Coastal waterfall, by Timm.

It took many years, but Timm, I believe, forgave his past, perhaps most of all forgiving himself of that mess, no longer the wounded, wandering son but a man of his own accomplishment, gifted with a lens, a wounded healer who cared for others as he had as a child, always reaching out, always itchy for a new project with its inner promise of new vistas, his eye always receptive to the beautiful, his talent and craft trained to be patient and careful where he was otherwise hasty and inattentive. To forgive is to feel it all and then give it all away, to live with a heart which keeps filling up and pouring out, even as his own mortal heart weakened and fell.

Forgiven. We all slowly learn to forgive Timm of his death, for so hasty and incomplete an exit from our lives, just when Timm was really showing up again. We must forgive the huge vacancy left there. Forgive the guilt we all feel for short-sheeting Timm along the way. Forgive his photos for not sufficiently rendering Timm back to us. Forgive this brother for too often missing the mark of Timm's memorial, overshooting it with verbal excess (like this) or appropriating measures of Timm he never meant for publication.

This first Christmas season without Timm is hard, raw and sharp with loss, the wound washed with the rough physic of salt tears. He's just not here and that's that; history does not conclude with his death; we go on, for some undetermined further time, for better and for worse. Our Christmas tree burns on through the night, ever faithful, ever alive in hope and faith, ever beautiful. Timm's example tells us that if he could forgive and make something beautiful in the name of that forgiveness, so surely should we. Forgive ourselves and each other; forgive history; and love.




In our family, the boys exchanged cameras over the years. Will took up photography first and he served as wedding photographer at Molly's and my first weddings; I used Will's camera to take photos at his wedding in 1996; Timm brought his camera along to take pictures at several other significant events in the life before losing his own -- dad's 80th birthday in Nicholas' funeral, both in 2007.

In this picture, taken by assistant Wedding Photographer Uncle Frank, brother Will takes photos of my first wedding in January 1988. Left to right, let me see: step-daughter Angela, me talking with Dad who is mostly obscured by Molly and Jim (married ten months - she may be pregnant with Kathy), Will, Dearie, my first wife Trudy talking with a couple either she or I knew, Anita Tims (Jim's mom), Mom (back to the camera), Timm.

Here's my favorite picture from my first wedding, taken by Will -- Trudy and David and Angela, the instant family. Trudy and I had met in the AA program in the summer of 1987 and married some six months later. Angie was nine at the wedding and had never known her father.

Trudy, Angela and me on The Rock in a quarry near Columcille, on our one visit in ca. 1991. Our marriage didn't survive; we divorced in 1994. The rock, which was to be carted somehow to Columcille and stood on its end, didn't survive the blasting which was to carve off enough of a portion so that the biggest earth-moving equipment on the East Coast could pull of the job. Fragments of The Rock were used to fashion The Chamber, the facing of what looks like a burial tumulus tucked into a hill at Columcille. Photos are the only remnants I have of my first marriage, and I keep them, out of faithfulness to my second wife, in a box of older pictures stuffed up on a high shelf of a closet in my study.

Here's Will, caught by another photographer, acting as The Wedding Photographer at Timm's wedding in 2005.

Timm addresses the gathered at his wedding in Canby, Oregon, October 2005. "Divorce is not an option," he vowed. Within a month, Timm records in his journal the difficulties there were already having.

Timm and Mik with their pastor. The two divorced some five or six years later.

The two families assembled for the Mik-Timm wedding picture. Since we kept in touch so little with Timm during this time (the joke was that folks at the wedding were surprised to learn that Timm even had a family - "We thought he was an orphan," was the punchline) that I know none of the names in Mik's family except Autumn and Jake, Mik's kids, standing to the left of Mik in this picture. Timm, like me, married into an automatic family and found the task far more daunting than it appeared. To the married couple's right, the Coheas: Mom (next to Timm), Will (next to Mik), Molly (holding third daughter Sarah, I think), Dad, me. I wore a black jacket to Timm's wedding in 1995 and Timm's own black jacket in 1995 and to his memorial.

For love's sake, a picture of Timm and girlfriend Christie from Timm's archives, taken less than a year ago. If Timm could have, he would have taken pictures at his own second wedding, which seemed in the plans for he and Christie had he not passed away.

Now that I think about it (and look at the photographic record), I took pictures at Will's wedding (using his superior camera) but was not the Wedding Photographer - I provided supplemental photos of the event. Here is the wedding party outside my father's chapel at Columcille in Pennsylvania, where the ceremony was performed in May 1996. As the boys often served as Wedding Photographer, Dad served as Minister at my first wedding and at Will's Bride Sarah's family is to the left, and, in the way of distant relations, I can't name them all. But here's our family: Sarah and Will are seated; above Will, Mom; to her right, Molly and Jim Tims; Mik and Timm; Dad; Beth and myself. Dad's partner Fred isn't in the picture, though he should have been. Beth and I made vows to each other in the chapel while we were up there ....

... and were married that October by a justice of the peace in Winter Park, FL. It was a second marriage for us both and we didn't want to burden everyone with another wedding expense (Timm could hardly have afforded to fly down for yet another wedding in so few months). We spent our wedding money on rings which we had designed and on our newly-purchased old home in Mount Dora and then eloped, having the ceremony performed at Winter Park city hall, spending a night at a hotel in Disney and then spending a couple days at the beach before heading back to Mount Dora to get moved into our house. We don't display the picture because Beth hates her botched-perm hair. I'm wearing a suit we bought for the wedding; I only wore it one other time, to Beth's nephew James' funeral a couple of years later.

A few more pictures from Will's wedding in 1996. Here the newlyweds have a kiss under Thor's Gate, a sure a symbol of duration drawn from an old, old culture, accompanied by bagpipe music supplies by the gentleman to the left. I'd like to say I took the picture but I'm not sure.

Dad and Mom, with (I believe) family friend Barbara Sheri with her back to the camera at the left. This would have been the third time divorced parents would have seen each other since their divorce in 1977; weddings of their children provided them an opportunity to repair enough fences so they could keep in touch. Over the years, they've become friends again.

Aunt Lucille (Dad's sister) with Beth at Will's 1996 wedding. Isn't my wife beautiful? Mom was up in Pennyslvania for this past Thanksgiving, visiting both Will and Sarah and with Dad and Fred; she had a chance to spend some time with Aunt Lucille (who was down with cousin Lily Ann for the Thanksgiving Day meal at Dad's) and remarked how robust Lucille is at 89. The old ones just keep going and going.

Beth with Mary Beth, Molly's second daughter, at a birthday party at Mom's in 1998. Don't they look a lot a like? They say your first wife takes after your mother; does the second take after the sister? Also in the picture, Mom's beloved poodle and devoted lap-doggie Ginger, who passed away a few years ago.

Mary Beth gets more than she bargained for from a neighborhood dog. The photo was taken by Molly, who shows a knack, like her mother for catching her kids at just the right time for a photograph ...

... like this photo, which Mom took of the boys romping with Dad in ca. 1959, prob. in Pittsburgh. Pure unadulterated joy here. And where is Timm? Coming. And where is he now? In Paradise, surely, though what remains of him here lies in waiting for our full forgiveness. For our hearts to fill with him and pour fully out ...

There in the majesty of falls which eventually will carry all of us Over ...