Letter from a sad brother

Hi Timm,

Yesterday the realization that you are gone - for almost a year now -- struck afresh with a strangely deep poignancy, leaving me feeling a deep empty pang.

Maybe it's because the anniversary of your passing is now close and I haven't written you in a while, but I feel compelled to put these words on your site today. They will probably sound - and be - redundant, since grief is a repeated motion, going over and over a wound, washing it afresh with the salt of tears, working the ground which eventually heals over into a scar that will not disappear but leave a ghostly white trace, like ellipses, leading back to your death ...

We mark time with partials of it, like tree-rings, taking measure of our lives with what transpires in its circles, its seasonal rounds. Blame it on the box of time and space human consciousness is cobbled out of.

Wherever you are, I don't think you require such calibrations any more. The wall which bounds the living's earnest, fretful and wearying existence is now behind you - you leapt over or passed through it last April 18. Lifeless freedom is the element in which you now roam, and I think it is wider than the sea and almost as deep as the heart.

It is from your side, I think, that beauty leaks into ours. What is more eternal than the moment of a waterfall, motion stilled to a silvery blur in the lens of your camera? Or a flower caught in mid-stride of its unfurling, petals devoutly wide to the sun, a bee nestling deep to inhale its musk, its embrace fundamental to the transport of pollen to the next flower?


Those observations you made while alive -- with your camera, your eyes, your craft-tutored mind, your voice in the church choir, your lips upon your beloved, and in your deeply loving, awfully wounded heart. Each picture you left behind is important, a fresh vital peek (sometimes banal, sometimes commercial, so many many more times in surrender) at the limitless ocean of beauty where you are now boating for eternity.

Your occupation with such things ended with your death. So did your job with Representative Hooley and your relationship with Christie -- whom you might one day have married. It eneded your service to Alcoholics Anonymous and the tentative reengagement you were making with your family. A last frail heartbeat on a monitor in Salem Hospital around 3 a.m. April 18, 2008, and then you ebbed away on a flatline, never to be seen or heard from again.

You were caught mid-stride-literally--suffering the initial pangs of your fatal heart attack as you were out running. You got back to your apartment in Salem, probably showered and changed, got a bit to eat, called your best friend Ken and chatted (giving no inclination, he said, of anything wrong), lay on the couch watching TV and then called the paramedics. By then you were in the hurricane of dying; there was nothing more you could have said to any of us by way of farewell. At 3 a.m. that night you were gone, and your life at 44 years was permanently suspended there, an arc which fades as we forget you and go on.

Yesterday the thought of you was so clear and present--a sense so physical, precisely your height (like mine), your deep voice resonant in the air, your grey eyes (now helping two others to see) piercing, your face chiseled by much difficult living breaking into a smile which hadn't changed since you were a kid---that image, that visitation was so startling that it awoke me not from sleep but the torpor of slow acceptance, shattering the willing acquiescene I had come to with your fade into oblivion. I felt suddenly so guilty, as if I had let your hand go and released you to the floodwaters of time. What sort of brother would do such a thing?

This from the brother who so inadequately and partially brothered you in life. It wasn't so much your sins that were left unconfessed when you died (you might disagree) but my own: as of April 18, 2008, there was never again a way to make amends to you and work at the relationship I had complicitly allowed to be a shadow and figment of the real thing.

This was true for all of the living, none of us got to make up for the ways we had wronged you. We didn't even get a chance to say goodbye.

A year has passed since your death. I have changed in ways I don't really understand. I wrote verse letters to you almost every day for six weeks after you died, tried to resume my regular work in verse and dried up completely, a decade's worth of poems stilled somehow in your absence. Were our labors in beauty somehow secretly linked, now bonded into your silence? Or must I fully grieve before the spring resurfaces in my mouth? I'm more fretful of the times and yet more involved in the healing of it; I worry about my job in the newspaper industry and love ever more deeply and completely my wife and our home, our nutty cats, the feel of the morning breeze coming in through the opened window at this hour of 4:42 a.m.

I am weaker in the heart--much of the callousness has been rubbed raw-yet somehow that makes me more true, more real down there. Your loss came mid-stream of other losses-sister Molly lost her son Nick just a year before, and since a number of friends and acquaintances and cats have crossed over to your side. We're terrified of the sound of the telephone suddenly ringing while we're asleep. I read the obits in the paper, taking note of people I know or think I know. And the world-well, it is what it is, more troubling, less hopeful, surely less financially secure.

I would say you're better off without having to deal with the sort of times we are in, but that would be immeasurably cruel to you. I wish we could be sending emails again, griping about the lack of jobs out there, joking about our dailiness, making tentative plans for the next visit. I wish you knew how much your mother and girlfriend both still grieve for you, how much you still mean in the incredible depths of a woman's heart.

We've been marking time all during this first year that you passed from this world-your birthday, Mother's then Father's Day, monthly anniversaries, Christmas. Now we come around to the first-year anniversary, completion of the first round. The first year, it's said, is the hardest, its moments all so poignant; the next will be less brutal, less sharp, meaningful or memorable to fewer. You are fading into timelessness along with the legion of other dead. Others are now stepping over or soon will, and they will occupy our attention. But I would like this anniversary to be fully attended. I've sent out word to every one in your circle to send you a message on April 18 and take some pictures of the day and share them with all. Is that a proper bouquet to lay on your metaphorical grave, that place on the wall you faded through?

No one knows the moment of their passing. If anything, your death has made me want to leave fewer loose ends. It will take me years to complete my vow to fully archive your photos and make them available-you didn't do a good job of keeping much order to your work, brother. Neither have I, but I have tried to begin to order some of the mess. Perhaps your greatest kindness was that the ends of your life were relatively uncomplicated--no money trail, no kids, no big bills to pay. Just an apartment packed with a lifelong bachelor's beat-up stuff (chipped glassware and organic fruit in the fridge, a bookshelf, lots of outdoor gear, a pile of photography equipment) and a trove, a silo, a wealth, a motherlode of labored, beautiful images.

A good part of my year has been spent associating myself and the world that still cares to know with your images, linking them to what history I could deduce from your sources (journals, stuff on this laptop, memories and stories from friends and families). I hope I get around to the other vow I made of putting into book form the better part of these posts. To archives the photos, to some formal shape the full arc of your life.

Perhaps then I will be free to move on with my own, but I wonder. Your traces - memories, dreams and visions-- have become a neighbor of my own, perhaps even an occupant. Having spent as much time trying to express the person you were, I'm not sure any more where I begin and you leave off.

Perhaps time will separate those things again, abstracting grief into the bittersweetness of fading memory. But for now your music is in my ear (Chris Botti's "Forgiven" the sad, beautiful, main theme here) and a waterfall's pour of your beautiful images stream cascades from my mind to heart. And you're right there, standing behind that pour, in watery shadow, on a ledge which backs into an eternally dark cavern. You're waving to me sometimes, other times motioining to me to follow; you are 44 years old some times, and other times you're just a kid, dammit, the one who got hurt most by all the accidents of history, and you seem glad to be on your side, far from me and my kind.


As I write these lines, your laptop is skewed in my lap to the right, resting on the right arm of this big chair while Hugo is curled in a nook on my left side, that rum-dum dwarf Maine Coon of a furball kitty. Belle, the other cat we acquired the summer after you died, curls in the chair across from me. We got both cats after the death of Zoey in June of last year, that frail old calico we took in because she was starving on the streets. Zoey was very old and sick but what a fighter she was! When she finally died she was about 4 pounds, wastsed away from her thyroid condition and a host of other ills. How ready she was to go when we finally took her to the vet. We buried Zooey in a spot in the back garden next to Red, who got run over a few years ago. Two weeks later we picked out Hugo and Belle from the Cat Protection Society. Belle is just like Zooey, so alert, really a dog, so loving, so self-possessed; and Hugo looks just like Red, all fur, big fluffy plume of a tail, mile-long whiskers.

Life goes on, brother. Those who love you most will eventually join you. We in turn will be remembered, for a while, but eventually our grave markers will fade in the wind, or our ashes will have long washed back up on shore or settled down to join the rest of the dead at the silted bottom of the abyss. Our spirits will have their own afterlife, according to whatever we believe; and the living will go on, fretful, busy, loving in their own way and manner, hurting and getting hurt, healing, trying to make something good, stopping mid-stride and fading like you behind the waterfall. That's the deal.

But for now, brother, walk with me a while here, somewhere between Salem and this saturnine grief's Pacific shore, out in God's wilderness, a womb of woods and water and moonlight, brooding together this thing, this magnitude, this calibration of heart or soul called beauty. Converse with me a while, Timm, fill me in on the sentence you were finally able to complete when you let the last waterfall go.