Amid the summer thresh, more pictures by Timm

Has it been a month now since I last posted a memorial of Timm to this site? That thought causes a rush of anguish, having been neglectful for so long of the memory of my lost brother. It’s survivor’s guilt, for going on, for forgetting, for existing without Timm … Yet such is the nature of grief’s journey, the living developing an existence “A” which becomes ever more distant from the last day “B” of the departed, the transit between the “A” to “B” of two brothers no longer a conversation but a fact of passing time, where remembering becomes the act of looking back upon a shrinking point on the horizon behind.

I run out of new things to say about this, and so repeat the themes of my repeating meditations. So maybe I should just let today’s pictures do their own work, and allow you your own …

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Still, this: We’re now in the midst of the second full summer since Timm’s passing, days here in central Flolrida of brilliant sunlight and torrid heat and afternoon storms of great ferocity. Nights are in that soak, crickets leaping and diving in the waters that we sleep in, Timm in his solitary boat out there, rowing on in the fullness of God we are separated from by the fact of our living inside these mortal coils where ego and soul content.

There are moments in these summer days when thoughts of Timm return, far more scattered, though when they arise they flood with sharp clarity. The other day at work, pressing hard to finish some production, I suddenly remembered Timm and I sitting at dinner in Portland in September 2002, eating oysters and seafood on my company’s dime, talking about his work in photography at a weekly paper in Silverton, sports photos mostly though he said his love was nature photography. We walked down by the river at sunset, the scene of river and hills and the roseate ghost of Mount Hood in the distance, eerily aflush from the setting sun. Timm and I the same height and weight, walking with the same gait, talking with similar voices, twins separated by eight years of birth and 20 years of existence on opposite sides of the continent, rejoined, together, if only for this one night, surprised how easy it is, how much we reflect and refract each other. A simple, passing knowledge as we hugged and said goodbye … A distant rumble of thunder and I was back again in front of my computer at work, finishing a layout, the trees outside sighing in the wind, receiving the first slight whispers of rain, and Timm nowhere to be found in this world.

Memories like that return in the day, more scattered now, yet still making me miss Timm so, an ache which defines the present with the silvery blue shadow of sadness, adding to the texture and fiber of a heart which grows as much from loss as from happiness.

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I picked up another 500 or so slide scans from my father-in-law Wade Boggs at my wife’s 50th birthday celebration late last month. Took me a while to go through them (another sign of the distance – fading attention) and select out the best, but there are really some astonishing shots here, essential Timm O’Cobhthaigh. Today a dozen or so of them with more to follow.

Anyway … I hope you savor the pix as much as I do … and remember Timm …