Forgiven

The Cohea kids as a complete unit, summer 1964: Will, Timm as an infant, myself (holding one of my many hamsters) and Molly. The moment caught by Mom – the ur-Photographer of our nuclear family -- is perfect, buttery with summer light, each of us with a countenance that would unscroll into our separate fates. Even the pet is fateful, so many of these little fellas buried under the crawl space of our Evanston house, richly a part of our fragile loves. Bringing us together for a picture always seemed like a major labor, hauled in from two separate realms of kid-dom of the house, Will and I perhaps playing – or fighting – together, Molly tending Timm. We could only be held together for the moment of the Photo, and scattered from there.

In the weeks after Timm died, a song that ranked #1 on the iTunes music library found on Timm’s laptop kept playing over and over in my head, Chris Botti’s “Forgiven.” An aching, haunting, deep-hearted, crazy song. In it, a woman’s deep and lush voice sings against a solid bass note and the high-refrained washes of synthesizer and the weaving alto of a French horn:

These are the chances we take
Reasons that we can’t explain
Follow your heart everyday
Pray it’ll be forgiven

Don’t let go
Until all your days are broken …

… And from there it never quite ends in my head, though all of Timm’s days are broken. A bit of a mystery, that song, because beyond its simple beauty there is that dark gong-note of crazy love, the big-night, impossible yearning, the willingness to go to any length to find something forever lost –

Now I’m standing
In the rain and you are gone
I gave up everything

Anyway, the song haunted me for weeks, singing aboard that sad, sad boat of grief in which I floated, following the shadows of Timm in this, all the traces left behind by my lost brother, by histories we were bound to and separated by.

The song eventually faded, as a fixed idée or sound in my soul, with the normal sounds of my day resuming in sufficient volume to signal I had begun to re-occupy the day world of job and marriage and program and the tending of cats. Timm began to fade too, or his memory, though I’ve tried to hold up the scant reservoir of them to this light, pulling in everything I could find of what he left in journals and photo archives and this laptop as a means of seeing him still.

Whatever woke me with such certainty and purpose at 2:30 a.m. to write yesterday’s post about weddings – itself a riff on the previous post about funerals – leads me to this slow-to unfold meditation on the history and mystery of our collective family rituals, caught, like a dipper pulled from a river, in singular photographs.

Seen through the glass of the present, the images are lovely and strange and fateful, images of heart in all its wonder and futility, hope and damage. I present them here with some of the internal commentary that was streaming from that place between heart and head where heart-felt words come to my ear and are relayed onto this digital page.

Here is the family, all grown up, reunited again for sister Molly’s wedding in 1987; the photo was probably taken by our waiter at Lee's Lakeside, a restaraunt overlooking Lake Eola in downtown Orlando. Molly stands with groom-to-be Jim. Seated, left to right: Mom, me, Will, Timm, Dad. Perhaps the rarest photo of all is the one showing the entire family; usually Dad or Mom was taking the picture so it was always incomplete. In fact, the whole family appears only in photos from other weddings – my first in 1988, Timm’s in 1995, Will’s in 1996. As this was the first time they had seen each other since their divorce in 1977, it isn’t surprising that Mom and Dad are at opposite ends of the picture. And doesn’t it look like Timm, the furthest-wandering son, is the focal point of this picture? Not that we weren’t there for the wedding of our sister (who looks, with Jim, pretty weary), but there is a genuine look of celebration in Timm’s face – home with his family, at least for this singular moment.

I do so with “Forgiven” streaming in my ear, as if Timm himself were singing to me,

These are the chances we take
Reasons that we can’t explain
Follow your heart everyday
Pray it’ll be forgiven

Don’t let go
Until all your days are broken …

And so I don’t let go, but remain fierce in my desire to hold up my brother to this light, in the light of our history, of the history of a family as it wound into the present, for better and ill. For nothing can be forgiven -- which I take as surrendered to the grace of God -- which has not been fully felt – anger and desire, hopeless love and helpless sundering, the faith which assembles us at weddings and the acceptance that the heart will take us where it will, to shores we can’t understand although God does, in every ineffable way that keeps the music tiding in our ears.




Take another photo from the middle of the story of the mysteries of my heart – Timm’s too. There he is with me, rehearsing our roles for Molly’s wedding in June 1987. I’m 29, Timm is 22. Molly’s wedding to Jim Tims enacted our first full family reunion in a decade – all of us were there, even Dad and Mom, burying, for the moment, the hatchet of their opposed histories for the sake of this moment with so much promise of future.

Don’t we look like twins, same height, same glasses, same faces, though our styles are separated like the continental ends we lived on – Timm the rural son, me the city boy (of sorts), he in boots (which gave him the height which finally mastered mine, his long-standing goal), me in the high-top-sneakers which were the rock-n-roll fashion of the time. We’re obviously rehearsing – both of us holding up a hand as if to lead our charges (grandma Dearie) and some other relative, me also holding our script. We have name tags on our shirts, for the benefit of the wedding coordinator perhaps, or The Photographer.

How few such pictures of us together survive – but how many are required, as time now floods into a future without Timm? The Photographer caught the moment, scattered family re-formed to celebrate a daughter and sister’s wedding, errant lives raked together for this singular harvest. Who took the picture? Will? The interest was heavy upon him first. I don’t think he took the wedding pictures but his hand seems to be upon this one. Timm and I have a slightly bemused look on our faces, like O Brother – indeed.

The Rogue River in autumn, near Medford, Oregon, taken by Timm a year ago. Only a year ago and the moment has been almost forever lost, the Photographer gone down that river now, the world in autumn … The artistry of the photo though makes the image durable, far more so than snaps of personal history, so rich with meanings invisible to eyes less intimate with that story.

It’s Saturday now, early-ish for the day (4 a.m.); Belle got onto the bed and tried to snuggle up to my face and I woke. Led her downstairs to feed and let Hugo out of the guest bedroom, where he has been staying for the past day or so after a wretched Thursday night of loose bowels getting everywhere and a visit to the vet which revealed he has some sort of virus, contacted usually in pet shelters (ah, the Cat Protection Society, where we picked him and Belle out of a crew of about 600 cats) which attacks the gums, causes halitosis form hell and bowel disorders of the sort he suffers. The vet proscribed more antibiotics, a regimen of Iams cat food (much healthier), shaved his rear and gave him a good cleaning. I let Hugo out of the room this morning, stinky stuff apparently in remission; he’s been a happy camper since, bounding off of everything, playing with Belle (who now sits in my lap as I type, a paw extended and resting on my right arm). It will be warm-ish for another day before the next front comes through, we plan to start painting the back porch (ahead of putting up screens) and hang Christmas lights on the tree we put up in the center of the garden in the front yard, where the birdbath once stood. (We sold it in the last yard sale, hopefully to find a taller one to eventually replace it.) A day of homestead details as the Christmas holiday approaches, with events in the world sour, the economy ever more desperate, the darkness of this time of the year creeping ever deeper, holding the chill in the air …

Yes, well there is always the infant hope of Nativity, the ancient faith in sacred birth beneath the world’s fateful star … bringing truth, and love ... and forgiveness ...