Letters to Timm

To my nowhere son of the cosmic creation

Timothy Worden Cohea- O'Cobhthaigh

Here- There- and Everywhere

No Where - in No-time

Leaving photo footprints of beauty and life

Punching out dreams, tears and struggles on your lap top

Hiking off into the misty mountains

Floating with the tossing sea foam of endless movement

Riding with white clouds ever drifting on

Smiling in every flower

Now at peace with the awesome mystery source/energy of all

AT - ONE

Bless you, may dear son!

Dad

Dear Timm,

A lot has happened in this last year that I’ve not been able to share with you. The last time we talked was on my birthday and you were planning on coming here for Christmas. The market bottomed out then gas prices fell. Would you still have been able to come?

Quick news, Kathy still is in the States wanting to go to Japan . I think she may want to write mangas. She still works at Chick-fil-a, as does Mary Beth. Living with Grandma has had its ups and downs (a “messy” living with a “neat freak”) but they are both surviving (I think). Mary Beth has a boyfriend. She went to homecoming with him and will meet up with him at Prom. We are all fumbling our way through this one. It is the first boyfriend/girlfriend for both of them, as well as for his parents and the first one we have had with a child at home. Mary Beth is doing very well, although juggling a boyfriend, job, play, band and school has been a challenge. Sarah is loving high school. She was on the homecoming court, in the fall and spring plays, and is really coming into her own. She got her hair cut, new glasses and no longer looks her age. More than the outward change, she just acts comfortable in her own skin, something uncommon in a 15 year old. She still doesn’t know what to do with her life. Among other things we have heard police officer, Julliard and acting school but God keeps confirming Missionary. Maybe that is His way of keeping her on task! Jim is starting a new project at work. We are praying it provides better advancement and less travel. He is looking forward to a change. Jim is playing the bass a lot and has even gotten an acoustic electric bass. He loves nothing better than to be able to play at home or abroad without having to plug in. As for me, I love my job. Teaching the 2 and 3’s, hearing their wonderful logic and dreams, has been a balm for my soul. I may go back to teaching in a classroom some day, but for now I am where I want to be. Oh, and I started playing the clarinet in December. I don’t squawk too much.

It’s hard to capture life in a nutshell. It branches and twines all around. My questions are just as scattered. Did you really tip cows or was that all a joke? What happened to Dad’s harmonica when I went to college? It was in my dresser drawer. Were you serious about coming east? How would the financial mess have affected you? What was the name of your friend that played violin and what happened to him? I miss you, Timm. I miss talking with you and not trying too hard to think up things to talk about even though we don’t see each other much. I love you. I love your pictures. I miss you.

Love
Molly









Dearest Timm,

Oh how I miss you!!!! How I long to see you! How I weep over the loss of hope that you might soon be living a little closer to us, your family. I regret that I did such a poor job of letting you know how much I loved you and how much I wanted to be with you while you were still with us. How I grieve for those years when all I had of you were our telephone calls. In my ear, I can still hear your voice, saying as you often did when you called, "this is your youngest."

However, Dave has revealed you to us by giving us your beautiful photos and by sharing with us your words and thoughts that he found on your computer. I read your words and try to see into your mind and heart. I look at your photos, trying to see the world through your eyes, trying to see you, I think. But you are not there. I am so grateful to Dave for the gift of his tireless work on your memorial site, helping us to "see" you and to keep your memory ever fresh before us. I have been so blessed by reading his comforting words and by seeing the photos I might never have otherwise seen. But, at the same time, I am forced to deal with the seemingly endless pit of my grief and longing for you.

This year has brought such intensity of pain that there have been times when I have almost despaired of living. There were moments when I could hardly breathe, moments when I didn't think I could make it through another day. It helped me to hear from other women that they had felt this way when their child died. There is a mysterious connection between a mother and her child that is very deep, almost visceral. How else can I understand those horrible nightmares I had for three nights prior to your fight for life? I knew without knowing that something terrible was happening; I never imagined it was happening to you.

Keeping busy with the daily routine has been a helpful escape from the pain. At times it has been lessened by knowing that you are more truly alive than you ever were in life. The struggles, disappointments, rejections, and hurts of your forty-four years have been replaced by a quality of Life that we can only dimly imagine. I understand that at death life does not end; it continues in one of two directions. You chose to make Jesus Christ central in your life. According to what the Scriptures tell, you are now living in His near Presence, where the there is "fulness of joy." I rejoice that your journey through this dark place is over. You are now free!!! You have left us a legacy of a life well lived in grace and love to the glory of God and for the blessing of others, all this despite your own brokenness.

Your leaving has bequeated me many gifts, not the usual kind that come in a box or a bottle. Your belief that "beauty heals" has become like a mantra for me. How many times has a view of the full moon at night, or the sight of the golden blossoms of the tababoulia tree, or a glimpse of a lake shimmering with dancing light, or the beauty in someone's face have brought a healing balm to my tearful heart! During this year, I, like all of us who have loved you deeply, have been profoundly changed. Life will never be the same again. Such is the fruit of love. Knowing how brief and fragile life can be, I deeply cherish family and friends, wanting to make the most of the time to let them know how greatly I love them. Life is no longer superficial but very intentional. I want to make each day count, not for my own purposes, but to honor God; to be about His business of loving, to love others into loving Him Who created us to share His Life and His love.

As I write this "letter," it is the evening of Easter, the joyous celebration of the risen Jesus Christ Who defeated death that, through Him, we might share His Life and truly live forever. He assured us that, as He rose to Life from death, so would we who have known, loved and served Him as Lord. I am comforted by this promise, and I rejoice knowing that you, too, share with Him in His risen Life. Through the "communion of the saints," I know that our love transcends the limits of life as we know it. In a way I cannot rationally understand, I have experienced a love shared with you that defies explanation.

Acceptance of your death has come slowly, but with it has come a
growing sense of peace. I know that this life isn't all there is, the best is yet to be.... or Easter is a myth and a meaningless exercise of faith. But, Easter is real; Jesus Christ is Real and alive, and so are you, my dear Timm! Alleluia!

So continue in peace with your new life, dear Timm. Please know that our heart yearn to be with you, to see you, to hold you. Living as you are beyond the constraints of time and space, I know that it won't be long before we will be together again. Meanwhile, my son, my love crosses the divide between us. Love never ends. Neither do you!

With much love, Mom













Dear Timm,

Thank you for bringing photography back into my life. It is hard for me to express my feelings in words, so I will try to express my love and joy and reconnect with you in my pictures. Every time that I pick up the camera which was yours and is now with me, the joy that I feel using this medium is very deep and personal for me. I wish we had more time to go for hikes with our cameras and laugh and talk and share, like when we were children. I miss you. I keep your picture near my desk where I can think of you every time I see it. I think of you every time I hike and every time I look through the viewfinder. I_m putting together, with the help of David, a photo book using pictures I have taken with your camera.

Love,
Will





































message from Paula Mabry of Mt. Angel Publishing, for whom Timm did a lot of freelance photography:

We think of Timm every day. A photo crosses my desk, an assignment comes up, and we discuss how it was handled in years past; a conversation leads us to a memory.

His work continues to present itself as a gift. He's gone and not gone; part of what we do everyday, but his frame no longer fills the doorway. He no longer pops in with a new idea or emails his project updates.

I believe we hold him in our hearts and his presence there reassures us.

How fortunate we were to have Timm as part of our adventure.




Hi Timm,

I'm posting this last in the series today because, well, you probably know what I'm going to say already, and for those who are reading this blog will know that the longest-winded is to follow. Bail out now if you wish.

I'm listening to "September 15" by the Pat Matheny Group on the stereo as I sit here writing on your laptop this anniversary message. NASCAR Sprint Cup practice on TV (muted) and Belle curled up on a pile of papers I've been working from, assembling the 2009 Orlando Heart Ball program for the local American Heart Association chapter. A volunteer job which I've taken a vacation day to knock out. How strange, how oddly fit it is that I'm working today for an angency that exists because of the sort of day you had a year ago today.

It's 4 in the afternoon as I write, the afternoon breezy, fair, somewhat warm but not too, alternating sun and cloud. For some reason it makes me think of Salem on April 17 of last year, and you out running in it - still running in it, somehow, running the breeze, the softness of the air, the sense of spirit in movement and play. A lonely presence - you here only in that wind, yet the wind is everywhere today.

The song is part of a collection of tunes that I slectedfrom your iTunes to play at the memorial site you now have a place in, next to the bench dedicated to your nephew Nicholas. Mom had a tababoulia tree planted behind the bench in your honor, and a stone with your name carved on it ("O'Cobhthaigh" made it a tight fit!) The music is bittersweet -- sad and beautiful - and makes me heavy with memory and happy that you existed on this earth for your while.

Timm and I in 1981.

It will be great to join Molly and Mom - the southern remnants of your family - and remember you together. As you know, I've been remembering you a lot, or trying to, for this past year. Was it just that I'm a writing, reminiscing, assaying, blogging kind of guy who found the challenge of unearthing a lost brother both daunting and exciting? Surely I wouldn't have done this otherwise.

Maybe that work has been amends from a brother who abandoned you so long ago, amends which I can't ever pay up in a way that would be satisfactory to you since you are not permitted to say what it would take to earn your forgiveness. I have to supply in that blank, and it never quite seems done.

But a haunted energy has pervaded this work - the sense that in losing a brother I have discovered a twin separated by eight years of birth dates. Its probably very foolish, but it has kept me digging and sorting and examining the traces of your life, trying to present as complete a picture of your life and death as possible. In the past year much of my own creative endeavors have been shadowed and enervated and re-directed by yours. It's that strange feeling that I can't quite separate where you end and I begin; our loves and labors - especially in the service of the beautiful image and word and song - seem so similar that in some ways it feels your work is my work, my work is yours.

Now that you've been dead a year now, even your absence is a presence, a grace note to my day. When I'm feeling anxious over overwrought or off-balance, I think of you, hear one of your songs - like Tim Story's "Caranna," also on the CD I burned - and a gentle, drifting, sad-sweet mood calms me, which I identify as the world you and I share, once so unconsciously, now conscious and dead. I remember who I am - who we are - and feel centered again.

Quite a year since you died, in my personal life as well as the world's. While my routines have remained iron-clad, something of their nature have changed.

- My the early a.m. studies and writing, which have strangely dessicated, not writing poetry any more, little interest in pursuing new studies in mythology or archaeology - pursuits which were a daily constant for a decade. I get up and sit here, sometimes working on a post for your site or trying to finish up old writings (after seeing how many loose ends can be left by a sudden death, I've resolved to clean some of my messes up). Sometimes I just sit here watching Belle curled in my lap and listen to the night heave and sigh in the garden.

- The world has gone in strange directions. Your man Obama won the White House and inherited a dark, damaged, frightening economy, where every day new losses and scary declines hit the news. So much unemployment these days. I sure hope you would have found another job before all this hit, because it would have been so much more difficult.

- The waywardness of the times seems to have affected the health of so many. We've seen cancer strike down people our age, so much younger than it should. Lots of folks in AA have lost their jobs and work at transforming their calamities into a helpful serenity, but it's difficult. I know two guys in AA who committed suicide in the past months, one of them a sponsee. It happens, I know - it's an overwhelmingly fatal disease - but insecurity and fear seem more corrosive than ever.

- I still have my job - thank God - though my newspaper industry is sinking fast. I've been tooling about for other gigs - remember us talking about our methods for job-searching in the weeks before you died? - with no success. The Heart Association volunteer gig is partially an attempt to shore up the resume. (Whether it will or not, at least it serves you, too.) Beth is still struggling to get her custom linens job off the ground - she recently got her sister involved, who has MS and can't otherwise work. It's good employment for them both but shops around the country are struggling to survive and aren't buying much. Beth will probably have to look for part time work in another month or so. We stay positive but financial encroachments are a steady corrosive.

- Whenever I work out - I try to go to the high school gym at least a couple a days of week - I think of you. I'm beefy these days, up to the weight you despised so, and can't seem to exercise it down. (Eating too much of my wife's good food, I guess.) I do my cardio hard and always wonder if I too will be stricken, like you, after exercise. I've had my ticker checked and it's fine, and my cardio fitness is really good, so I shouldn't worry, but your death after exercising haunts me. When my pulse gets really high in the midst of exercise I wonder if there's a threshold where you wait on the other side.

- The family is closer. We call each other more frequently. Mom and Dad both visit your memorial site regularly, as if its virtual garden really did make more present. We know much more clearly to treasure the moment, to not wait too long to get together.

And so forth. Amid the busyness of my own life - we do go on, you know -- I've tried to keep room for this grief and its bucket-work, this near-daily remembering until there doesn't seem much more I can assemble. But new leads arrive -- like the email from your friend in the "Hello Dolly!" cast, who sent the link to all of those cast photos. What a revelation to see you goofing about on the other side of the lens!

There's so much more I need to do with your photo archives to get them properly settled. It was a godsend to have my father-in-law Wade scan so many of your slides - about 2/3 of them - at least the digital record is in pretty good shape. Yet still I need to order and catelogue and somehow try to make them better available to who would like prints of them. I want to do a book of sorts which mixes Remembering Timm posts with large prints from your collection - a coffee-table book, perhaps.

But there never seems enough time. I'm grateful I've had a year to grieve your death before other deaths encroach - our parents seem hale enough, but they are 81 - and there are always tragedies. Cats get run over. Some kid attacked an elderly couple as they were coming out of the Tavares Target, killing the man with two butcher knives. Unemployment is over 10 percent in Florida. Twisters rip through the area. Your Denver Broncos didn't fare so well last seaon. Strange aches and symptoms unfurl their noxious blooms. We know the telephone will ring again in the night. Your death must step to the rear of the next one, as the next must then do the same to the next.

Surely you know how this works. I'm grateful to feel you still so present, yet I wonder how things will go after this first anniversary. Most of your Western friends have ceased communicating with us. Maybe they are respecting wishes of yours you never expressed to your own family. Maybe this has all been a bother to you. Maybe you were always ready to be let go, waiting for our grief to subside sufficiently to allow your fade into the shadows of starlight.

I'm willing to accept that. But if you are still there in the garden, dancing in your big-lug sort of way, loving the music and beauty of this world even in death, then it seems to me I still have much work to do. I am who I am - much like you if not ever quite you. I have you to thank for the mantra that "beauty heals," but I already knew that. We all did, but your reminder seems permanent.

Enough - time to start my living day and get this post up. 5:50 A.M. - the local anniversary of your death - passed as all moments do, quietly, streaming with all of the world's other moments. But I marked it. Somehow where yesterday was sad with thoughts of your dying, today it's peaceful. Beautiful. A day to celebrate all you were and are.

Love you bro, more than ever --

David

Unseen beauty

Timm O'Cobhthaigh

A sea of color stretches
Between two majestic mountain peaks
Delicate blooms whose short life
Are brought forth by the summer's warmth
In awe I gaze, perhaps the only to behold
Since the trail I take is rarely trod
Mixed with the sight my vision
Is tinted with sadness - a note of futility
Such a sight perhaps only I
Will ever get to see
It seems a waste of such mammoth proportions
And to God I cry - why?

Wind sweeps down from a snowy pass
As a cloud shadows my path
I strain to hear perhaps a voice
But only joy do I perceive
Joy? Snort I in disgust
Why would there be such a sense
From my masters heart?
Doesn't He know of this incredible waste
That has somehow escaped his plan
Now laid out in this alpine realm?
But only joy do I sense.

Butterflies flutter in their feeding dance
As they ride the streams of wind
A gentle buzz seems to emanate
From everywhere the flowers nod
On the verge of tears I succumb
To the joy that only I will ever know
I drink deeply from the well before me
Filling my soul with that beauty that heals
I forget my complaints and mortal's thoughts
I am there and nowhere else.

When eventually I wandered out
As the sun began to set
The thoughts returned to my mind
But not with the same pain
Somehow I realized that it was not
A waste as I had protested
Humbled I realize the gift shared not by one
But by two - the master and I
His joy was in my delight
as a parent with his beloved child
And in a way, I saw as He did
The master and His creation
I was a part of the greater canvas
And his joy was in beholding us all.