Forgiven (part 2)

Timm and I playing scratch football in the back yard of Uncle Frank and Aunt Flossie’s house in Orlando, Nov. 1981. Hard to believe that Timm here is just two months after his near-fatal car accident near Jackson Hole, Wyoming; he is now deaf in one ear and will suffer mental and emotional aftershocks for years. Hard to believe, too, that I’m so skinny here 100 pounds under my current weight – the result of so much hard drinking. Unable to support my myself, already having overstayed my welcome with my mother (though she would never say such a thing), I turned to the Hellingers to say there for some months. That year it was a full Hellinger-Cohea event, with grandmother Dearie (Mom and Flossie’s mom) and grandma Hellinger in attendance. One of the oaks behind us fell in Hurricane Charley in 2004; Timm would be nowhere to be found on earth this Thanksgiving, 2008.

The inspirations which woke me on Friday with a certain rose-perfume wafting in the washes of a song in my ear which Timm dearly loved made me go into my own photo archives, that complex aural scent of beauty and grief leading me to my personal boneyard, that junkpile of snaps going back three decades or more.

Foraying into my own stash of photos is a daunting task for me. The snaps (snapshots, as opposed to photos, have value not for any artistic merit but for the personal memories they ferry) are generally divided between two ages, my years before my marriage to Beth and before, but after that there is no attempt at organization. I found pictures from Timm’s wedding in ’95 next to pictures I shot in bars in 1982 and photos from my first wedding in 1988 and that of a girlfriend in 1979; in the more current box, there are shots from Christmasses and birthdays at my mother’s from 2007 and 1996 and 2001, Molly’s kids of varying ages, us adults streaming forward in age, too. In that box there are pictures of Columcille --- always beautiful, crying for a good photo which I rarely could capture – and shots of our reception here at this house, where Beth’s nephew James can still be seen, alive. And all those pictures from Christmas eve at Mother’s over the years, and birthdays! And all of the cat pictures, the kids in our childless home, Violet as a kitten playing with Buster who was such a curmudgeon, Pink and Red and Blue when they were kittens, when they were robust cats, when they were alive …

Here we are, all of the Cohea and Hellinger kids together in their back yard, the place where that family has lived since the early 60’s and where Uncle Frank and Aunt Flossie still live. Left to right: me, Mark and Timm in the wagon, Carol, Kitty and Molly seated behind them, Will and Walter to their right, Frank Jr. seated on the patio. Never have I seen such a glum lot – hauled together for this bit of family duty surely from wildly distant nooks of that place. In most of the pix I’ve seen of us with the Hellinger kids has the same glum look of duty, so I’m going to blame the mood on them – their collective distaste of being assembled for picture-taking -- though surely that’s simply inter-family rivalry. As a kid, I wished I had grown up in that family, but today I feel quite different. I’m guessing that Mom took this picture and we’re all looking at Aunt Flossie or Uncle Frank who was also taking pictures of the moment. It’s probably a wonder that we’re all still alive except for Timm some forty years later; four of the lot have kids of their own; most have married; several have suffered hard their histories and are still struggling today.

I treat a number of them here as relics of heart and intimates of its sum – full today, of both sweetness and grief, the heaviness of what we know now superimposed upon the faith explicit in these pictures. Yet without that heaviness, how can forgive history of its massive mistakes, its broken faith, all those smiles erased by what eventually came to pass? And thus learn to smile once again, in the light of the heart’s unerring mysteries, which brought us here in a way we wouldn’t change for the world …

Mom, me and Will at Jacksonville Beach ca. 1959. Molly is a year off from being born (perhaps Mom is pregnant with her), Timm another four years off. That beachside moment is idyllic and mythic for me, for the writer I became; something about sitting on a sunny beach with my mother’s voice over me, blending with the sound of the sea I identify with my singing voice, so much in love with rapturous tides and beauty and rhythm and beautiful sounds, etc. I think I still have my birthmark at the time of this picture, a red heart with an arrow through it, appearing just over my right nipple. It faded when I was about three, though I think it actually collapsed and drifted, for there is a mass of brown down my by right ankle where I think it finally harbored. In the background, Dearie (Mom’s mother) and two of the Hellinger kids, Walter and Carol by then – Flossie was probably pregnant with Frank Jr. For her own reasons, Dearie was closest to the most difficult kids in our family – Will and Carol – bonding with the ones who were the hardest for our moms to raise. Perhaps she identified her own darkness with theirs.

Yesterday was a fair, breezy Saturday, and we got some good work accomplished. Beth strung up lights on the Christmas tree I set up in the middle of the garden in the front yard (set it high, too, atop two pavers and a cement planter, the tree stand secured on top of all that with bungee cords). I had to get on my tippee toes on a two-step stool to get the light-up star on top. She did this as she was talking with our occasional next-door neighbors who were up from Ft. Lauderdale, readying their house with Christmas lights and re-painting their picket fence. Robert has esophageal cancer – he’s 51 – and suffers both from the chemo and a broken collarbone. All of his family will visit the house for Christmas; everyone seems to be treating it like it will be his last. Me, I painted the ceiling of the porch in back with primer, a real literal pain in the neck but part of the plan to screen in that back porch and provide a less-destroyable home for Hugo and Belle. I’m on vacation this week, and it’s good to be putting in some solid work at home.

My first wedding was performed in the back yard of the Hellingers in Jan. 1988. Left to right: Nicholas, Jim and Molly Tims; Dearie and Mom in front with Will, Timm and my stepdaughter Angela behind; me and first wife Trudy; Dad. Dad performed the ceremony and Timm provided music with his guitar. Will took most the photos but Uncle Frank helped out. Molly had been married for less than a year. It was another trip back to Florida for Timm. Dearie had fallen and suffered a strange brain injury where she thought she could converse fine but only muttered gibberish. She was probably already suffering the stomach cancer which killed her, at age 86, the next year.

It’s strange to read these photos with the full knowledge of hindsight. Who would know that Nicholas, the youngest person in that picture, would follow the oldest person in sequence to death, followed, soon after, by the youngest kid in our nuclear Cohea family? That such a happy wedding scene would translate into divorce, six years later? That those parents Mary and Bill, divorced since 1977, would keep coming back together over the years for all of the weddings, becoming better friends than they were when they were husband and wife? I do now; from the moment of that photograph, now twenty years gone, a silo of history has filled. Yet I do not know the ends of that moment, only what has happened so far. Maybe I’ll look upon that picture in ten or twenty years and have much stranger and happier and sadder things yet to say.

First wife Trudy holding Kathy, Molly’s first daughter, at Dearie’s funeral in 1989. Following her head injury, Mom and her sister Flossie helped to sell Dearie’s housee in Jacksonville, and with the money from the sale they had a house built in southern Orlando (near to where Molly and Jim had set up house). Dearie lived in the house for only a year before succumbing to stomach cancer. The funeral was up in Jacksonville in a family cemetery; it was the first reunion of all of the Hellinger and Cohea kids. Strange to see everyone all grown up, with good jobs or deeply into their studies, with kids. After cousin Walter, Molly was the first to have kids with Kathy.

We let the Christmas tree lights burn all night last night as the next cool front ushered its way in. Sitting on the front stoop around 5 a.m. feeding our black stray cat Mamacita, it looked so austere and beautiful burning away in the cool darkness, a symbol of so much hope and love -- and forgiveness. Every year presents the next holiday season, ever bright and merry with the old symbols, always a bit heavier too, freighted with the weight of memory. This year Timm’s absence is heavy for us – as I said before, he was planning to make his way back East for Christmas, the first time he would do so willingly, from his own heart. He won’t make it, and his absence – a normality in our collective family holiday rituals – will yet be stronger and stranger and more burdensome, for we know now he will never make it home for Christmas, ever. For sister Molly, it is another Christmas accommodating another absence, brother joining son in that empty pew. Mom has gotten mileage out of grief counseling yet her stomach is still knotted and trigger-happy from the stress, and days are still sorely difficult.

Timm with Molly in July 2007, seated around that big table at the Hellingers we so often have gathered around over the year. He flew down to Florida for Mom’s 80th birthday celebration, his third trip back East that year (he was down for Molly’s step-son Nicholas’ funeral in Feb. of that year, and was on hand for Dad’s 80th that April). He didn’t tell us of his high blood pressure, or that he was concerned enough about his heart that he had begun monitoring his pulse. Molly doesn’t have a clue here that she would soon be losing a brother as well. Timm was affable and loving, always helpful – a dear. It was so hot that day, as it always is in Florida in summer; a brilliant, sun-washed day with rain surely on the horizon. We are talking as usual at Hellinger events, everyone at once, intent, opinioned, no one combative. Mom always seems to shrink in such gatherings, overwhelmed by the proceedings. Timm has his good ear turned to the conversation.

Well: we go on. There is much still to celebrate, like having Mom and Dad still with us. Much to be thankful for, for our health, that the bills are mostly paid, that there is new life in our kitties Hugo and Belle, that the world is so beautiful today, breezy and cool, night giving way now to dawn in the east, the white red and green lights on the Christmas tree in the front yard as steadfast as the star burning away at its top. We’ll all be home for Christmas, even Timm, even Nicholas, the living affirmed whether near or far, the dead remembered, given place at the table, our glasses of sparkling grape juice held up to them as we forgive history and ourselves, and celebrate the fullness a heart given fully away.

Dearie being escorted by Timm at Molly's wedding in 1988.