Timmy Boy

Hi Timm,

Well, here we are, three days from the autumn equinox of 2009 - roughly on the other side of the vernal equinox which occurred a month before your death in 2008: The seventeen-month anniversary of your passing. Today is far less noticeable or auspicious as death-anniversaries go, the remaining fanfare (musterings of human salvo against oblivion's sure tide) saved for the fifth- and tenth-year anniversaries I suppose, bell-tollings which are there to remind us, in wonder, how long ago it was when you were last seen walking on this earth ...

Still, there is a music to play over your absence today, a beautiful, bittersweet song which makes your memory almost a living presence and your absence a wound fresh-salted with these tears, cleansed by the womb-like sea-water you now swim freely in . The song? "September 15" by the Pat Matheny Group. or "Pavanne for a Dead Princess" by Ravel, "Forgiven" by Chris Botti or "Bendictus" sung by Hayley Westerna (two of your favorites'),or the aria "J'ai Perdu mon Eurydice" ("Lament for Eurydice") from the opera "Orpheus and Euyrdice" by Gluck, a tune which my wife selected to play as a recessional at her nephew's funeral eleven years ago.

Or mostly simply that Irish song "Danny Boy," popular at funerals for Irish-Americans for which your surely count, the O'Cobhthaigh who traveled to the far-westernmost shore of the America, the Land Beyond the Wave:

Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side
The summer's gone, and all the roses falling
'Tis you, 'tis you must go and I must bide.

But come ye back when summer's in the meadow
Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow
'Tis I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow
Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.

Beautiful songs all, guaranteed to break our heart when we remember what a complex purity we lost when you breathed your last on earth ...




Grief tears strange holes in the space-time continuum which rules our human day. Was it yesterday that I sent you that last email, commiserating about looking for work, or was it forever ago? (It was February 2008.) Grief and dreams must occupy some adjacent row-house in our psyches. In a dream the other night you and brother Will and Dad and I were celebrating New Years Eve together in some apartment or hotel I was staying in, all of us drinking Scotch and smoking cigars - something we never did together -- and it's been a long time since you or I even drank distilled booze, much less sucked on a stogie ... The dream celebrated a solidarity between the men we became-a communion we celebrated maybe one or twice over all our years. There is one picture of the Cohea boys and Dad from the early years - you remember, that fishing expedition you were too young to go on? And there's one of us all together as men, back before sister Molly's wedding in 1987, almost a joke picture - it was after a meal together as a family (our first reunion as a family in the decade after our parents' divorce andthe first of four reunions, all for weddings - my first in 1988, your's in 1995 and Will's in 1996). Yet in the dream we were there, celebrating the New Year's advent - end of one cycle, beginning of the next - year or age or aeon, you know dream. All of us were happy in each other's company, celebrating each other, what we'd each become, lifting our glasses and singing songs and telling stories which made us laugh hard we cried ... And then it was day, all of you were gone and I was in a strange city in the middle of winter, a fiercely bright and cold day in January, with the sound of workmen hammering away in a ruined cathedral beneath me, many floors down from my room.

Two pictures of the four Cohea boys -- dad sons -- taken some 20 or so years apart -- is about all there is in the photographic record. A dream, really --

Presence and absence, you here then gone: consciously it's one thing to me but subconsciously it just hasn't happened, or both truths exist side by side, as if we were walking together on a shore neither of us have made it to. Inside and outside truths skewed from each other yet both part of of our truth, our family history winding us one way, our family love winding us another. Little brother whom I never took the time to be much of a brother to when we were kids, and faulty at best as an adult (lots of years neither one of us sent the other birthday greetings), I get to the task too late, but get to it anyway ...

As I said, grief's winding-sheet creates a strange confusions of the mind, befuddling, like the dream, all sense of time and space. In Spring 2007 you photographed the St. Columba chapel on your last visit to Dad at Columcille; eighteen months later, in Fall 2008, a portion of your ashes were in its floor, and I was sitting on a pew there talking to them, autumn afternoon sunlight filtering through the yellow and green stained-glass windows of the chapel, unaware that in six months, on the first anniversary of your death in April 2009, that I would stand with Mom and Molly to celebrate the first anniversary of your passing in the memorial garden of a public cemetery in Orlando, a smaller part of your ashes buried under a small stone bearing your name, the day so gloriously into Spring, blue skies, everything green.

Timm's picture of the chapel in late April 2007.

Timm with Dad at his 80th birthday, April 26, 2007.

Timm's crypt in the St. Columba chapel, taken when I was last up there, September 2008.

Mom next to the tababoulia tree she had planted in the memorial garden for Timm, April 18, 2008.

Me and Molly by Timm's memorial in Orlando, April 18, 2009.

Your marker was set in front of a tababoulia tree Mom had planted whose first yellow blooms would not arrive until Spring 2010 - yellow blooms which are wildly iridescent, almost ghastly so, or so they seemed on the tababoulia tree across from Mom's house on April 18, 2008, that morning I sat on the couch in shock with Mom and Molly when we got the news of your death.Yellow blossoms so obscenely bright and happy knowing you were dead, which will yet seem beautiful and serene on the tree next to your ashes in that memorial garden when the first bloom next Spring.

The music of "September Fifteenth" by the Pat Matheny group is playing in my ear, the music which so made a different grief I was experiencing in 1981 seem somehow holy and meant, in the same season you almost died in your car crash outside Jackson Hole Wyoming ... I learned later that the song was keyboardist Lyle Mays' lament for the death of jazz pianist Bill Evans, who knew about beauty the same way you did and made a chapel of joy out of it the same way you did. I found out after you died how you came to love that song; the evidence was on your laptop --- the one I write upon this day - there was a file that had the guitar ligature for the song, and your iTunes had the song along with the rest of the album it appears on. I found out from this laptop that you were listening to "September Fifteenth" the day you died, it was one of the last tunes you listened to around 6:45 a.m. before heading off into last day on earth. Perhaps it was playing in your ear as your passed away on that cold table in the cath lab of Salem Hospital at 3 a.m. Friday, April 18,now seventeen months ago ... Calling you home ... You greeting me whenever I now hear that song (I played it several times this past September 15, wondering what anniversary it truly meant. So much water under the bridge, so much vagueness ahead ...)

See how grief winds time's sheet around us so gossamer and blue, making presence a poetry and absence a song?

* * *

Your brother Will has just finished a fine book of photos he's taken with your camera titled A Stillness Within A Frame: An ongoing body of work, study and growth dedicated to the memory of my brother Timm O'Cobhthaigh (5/4/64 - 4/18/08), Volume 1 (2009). He sent copies to all of the family. Though the images come from the same camera, the images are quite different from yours - darker and more introspective, brooding on the shapes of trees, of turgid skies, of a river rushing past and abandoned building ... some interesting portraits of people, workers in the rain, Dad sitting on a bench with some other guy, laughing, talking ...

I asked Will if it was OK to include a couple of pictures from the book for this post and he graciously complied, sending two of my favorites.







Will's introduction to the book begins with this simple statement:

A single frame, a snaphot frozen in time. It's quiet and placid nature conceals something passionate underneath.

It's a statement which is wholly Will's -- his truth about photography. And yet you too tried to put the mute power of photography into words when you wrote about a beautiful image: "It quiets. It excites. It heals. It touches something deep within."

Will also shares in his introduction some of the pain of his history, a pain which slowly found healing as he met and married his wife Sarah and took up massage therapy (the wounded healer.) He came back from Timm's memorial with Timm's camera. "My brother's death brought about the rebirth of the artist in me. His camera became my camera,, and through this shared link I started back to work with photography."

"For years after our childhood time together," he writes, "we lost touch. We rarely saw or spoke with each other for many years. After Timm's death, time seemed to fly backwards to the life we had shared. Many memories came to the surface. I became again the older brother trying to help the youngest one, laughing about our early-morning fishing trips and talks we had while the sun rose over Lake Michigan, feeling joy hiking in the mountains and cycling, sharing the things we both loved deeply. Whenever I think of those things, I think of him."

Will at 15 (left), Timm at 7 (far right), flashing a "V" for victory, as in, "I finally get to ride in Will's boat." An excursion out onto a lake near our house in Winter Haven, FL, 1971.

"Timm and I also shared a love of photography," Will continues. "We inherited this love from our mother Mary. (Thank you, Mom!) Mom took thousands of pictures of family life as we were growing up smiling from the other side of the camera as she waited for the picture she desired to appear through the viewfinder. There would be a click -- and a moment of time would be captured forever."

(If you're interested in ordering a copy of A Stillnesss Within a Frame, email Will at exstill@epix.net)

Entering the viewfinder like the nave of a cathedral, outside world banished, inner trove of wonder and joy revealed: surely that was not your every conscious thought as you took your pictures, Timm - I know how many shots you reeled off to get the single prize - and yet was the expectation always there, as it is now with your brother Will, that by so scooping out one ladle, one frame, from the flowing river of time that water's source would be caught entire? No wonder you loved to take photos of waterfalls and rivers. Perhaps you were sighting your eventual homecoming, not so far over the horizon.

Brother Will takes pictures with your camera, as I write these words on your laptop - the interface is mechanical - just a device for expression - yet camera and laptop are like walls of a heart, maintaining a common organ or origin, so that the varied expression have a root, reaching deep into history. The images come from Mother - she taught us all about photography; the words come from Dad and all of the bards going far down the O'Cobhthaigh line. Sister Molly was the one who was holding your hand in almost all of your childhood pictures.

We share those memories, with words, with images, with music: grief brings us together: it makes us celebrate who you were, and remember you by celebrating the beauty which is in all things. Even a family, bent and dinged up as we are ... A beauty which cannot die ...

* * *

Tending your memorial today I place, in lieu of flowers, more beauties from your archive of photos, a bit autumnal in recognition of the season (though here in Florida we get it in the least perceptible of ways, sunrise coming later, sunset earlier, a degree or two of difference early and late to make it feel less like torrid summer) . The light of autumn is saturated with a wan, transforming light, turning leaves a reddish gold, loosing them on the breeze to slowly spiral down and cover the ground you lay in.

When is life most beautiful but when it has been lost, the heart slapped awake from its manias and torpors to see God's glory in the moment, in the sweet simple softness of your smile, your blue eyes, turning to walk forever out the door?

When is loss most precious and meaningful than when we remember, and savor, and hold that memory in our cupped hands like a water from a rushing spring, quenching our thirst in a life's full blue flow?

That's our boy, all dressed up for medical duty on his Bolivia trip in 2003. Just had to throw this one into the mix.

... And when you come, and all the flowers are dying
If I am dead, as dead I well may be
You'll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an "Ave" there for me.

And I shall hear, tho' soft you tread above me
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be
For you will bend and tell me that you love me
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.

- "Danny Boy"