Notes to Timm on the second anniversary of his passing

 

Dear Timm:

So much has happened since we spoke last. To bring you up to speed I've had a new job for a little over a year now working in the Government Affairs Department for the generic drug manufacturers. The industry is fascinating and I really enjoy working for such a great cause and being surrounded by fantastic people. I'm sure over the past year you followed the Health Care Reform debate from afar. Whether for it or against it, I think everyone in DC is glad that it's over.

This October I proposed to my girlfriend Jackie in front of the French café on Capitol Hill we first had lunch at in May of 2007. We have set a date for next summer, June 4th, 2011. My friends and family are very excited, as are we. I always remember talking to you about this long distance lady friend I had, unsure what the next steps were going to be, how I would ever move to be closer to her, how I would ever get a job in DC, if she would wait around for me, and how her and I would ever be possible? So many questions I had for you, but you just listened and advised me to be patient. I am happy to say that it all worked out! I really wish you were able to have met her, she is truly amazing.

I really miss you Timm and I know you've been right here with me this whole time watching, laughing, and enjoying the ride. I won't ever forget the guidance you offered and the lessons you taught. I hope you are doing well friend.

Until we meet again  ...

Cheers,

Ted Piper

Ted and his fiancée Jackie. Timm’s advice to Ted to be patient had a big eventual payoff.

* * *

Dear Timm,

I celebrated my 50th birthday recently. It was a time of introspection. I thought about my worst/best birthday. Two years ago was a really stressful time. On my birthday we held our first service in our new sanctuary. Because of all that was going on, my friends and colleagues forgot my birthday. It rained that day, Jim was out of town and my daughter Kathy had moved out.

Then all of my family called. We didn't always get a chance to talk, but that day, you and I talked for at least a half hour. It was a great, upbeat call. You mentioned that you were thinking of flying down for Christmas.

That was the last time I talked with you. Those calls from my family turned my day around. Your call in particular has been very special to me.

I love you, little bro. We were just starting to touch base more, to talk more, you were willing to venture into our lives more. There will always be a hole in my life where you belong. I miss you and I always will. 

Your "big" sis,

Molly 



  

* * *

Timothy Worden Cohea O'Cobhthaigh,

When you decided to take on our old Irish name (for whatever reason).

You embraced "Not by providence, but in victory".

Providence- who's in charge?

Victory - being here and now, with potential and capacity.

   

'Tis a challenge,

A tough dance for each of us in our entrance, existence and exit.

In this dance we write our story - seeking to answer these questions:

Where did I come from?

Why am I here?

What am I to do - be?

What will be death?

Then we are placed in a family, culture, country and have to deal with these questions?

Who's in charge, anyway?

Who's God or faith, anyway?

Who's history, anyway?

Who's world and reality is it - Anyway?

You came into this world in 1963, in Evanston/Chicago.

The 60's were a very disruptive time of turmoil.

Dysfunctional institutions and scattered paradigms.

As your father, I still deal with that today in 2010 and am still dancing with the questions.

You are a story - woven into the history of mythic voyagers.

Your brother David shares your photos and his personal story in words poured outin love.

Your brother Will picked up your camera and continues to capture the awe and wonder of the dance.

I feel your presence on the land of Columcille as I view the beauty of each new blossom on the fruit trees.

In amazing oneness, I celebrate your gift of being.

Your mythic story and struggle, to be Timm is woven into many lives  

And into the beauty and wonder of creation's spring, resurrection in it's ever new blooming.

Thank you, dear son. In oneness I share this communion with you.

"In the endlessness of what we call time, we live and die dancing with the questions."

-- Dad


P. S. It sure makes planning hard.

P.P.S. The title of my book of memories is From The Beginning To The Beginning: Dancing With The .

* * *

Outside my bedroom window, a beautiful tabebuia tree has been spreading its glorious daffodil-like blossoms like a great cloud of sunshine. Beneath the tree, a golden carpet of blossoms has fallen reflecting the bright splendor above.

This annual display of breath-taking beauty always reminds me of that day two years ago when we received the shocking news that Timm had died. At this time last year, the blossoms were a painful reminder of his death.

However, this year, I can truly rejoice as I admire these lovely blossoms. During these two years, I have poured out my grief and sadness, just as many of us have done. I have diligently worked to resolve the pain and agony of losing him.

Then, one morning recently, I awakened to find the deep grief had been replaced by an even deeper sense of joy. Timm is more alive and happier now than you ever was on earth! For Timm is in the presence of the Lord Jesus, whom he dearly loved and served faithfully.

In Timm's Bible, I found these words highlighted: "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; in the future there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day; and not only to me, but also to all who have loved His appearing."

Good work, Timm! You were God's gift to us and never our own. You have returned to your Heavenly Father who gave you to us for a season. Now you have entered into your Joy, and I rejoice with and for you!

- Mom 
 

* * *

Hi Timm,

Heartfelt and ever-bittersweet greetings today on this eve of the second anniversary of your passing from your brother David.

I write to you this Saturday from this house in Mount Dora, Florida, where my wife Beth and I have lived in for the past 15 years.

Spring is richly, deeply and abundantly in evidence in Central Florida. The orange blossoms have been in full riot for the past couple of weeks.

Do you remember that smell from your high school days in Winter Park, or from those several years we lived in Winter Haven--you would have been around seven years old--in that house which was built in the middle of what to be an orange grove? Come spring, the scent of orange blossoms are an intoxicating mix of sweetness and musk, ravishing warm breezy afternoons with an ambrosial indolence.

Now the jasmine is coming into bloom, and they bring their own sweetness, not as heavy as orange blossoms, more like clean rainwater or fresh-cut basil: a perky freshness which lifts the spirit with airiness. In addition to the vine which climbs the chimney outside the window open behind me, our neighbor has planted a row of jasmine vines along a fence he put up between our properties. We are enveloped in jasmine; I breathe in and feel myself lift toward the heights you once climbed to, feel myself standing with you overlooking the Rogue River, feeling life flow in a tumbling flow right through the middle of me like those rivers you loved to photograph.

Now, I know you're gone--so when I address you I'm not trying to talk with a ghost; and yet address to you seems appropriate, since your presence is within me and close to that inner cathedral where my God is found, a greatness and magnitude which you are a part of now. Perhaps this note to you is a prayer, a conversation with God. Though speaking to you is different than praying to God in another way, since my God is a living presence (who doesn't really need an update from me, already knowing everything on my mind and in my heart), while you are a permanent absence in the world without and within. Speaking to you in this first person means I carry on the relationship after the person has gone, a relationship which grows or fades as I think of you or forget you. Maybe my relationship with you (with it's first-person address) is as complex and various as mine with God, compared to anyone else's relationship with you or God; we stumble over meanings of the words but the feeling is genuine. 

And for some reason, writing you the news is important. In the mythical accounts (like Homer's Odyssey), when a hero descends into the underworld, the dead are as thirsty for news of the living as we are for water.  Whatever each of us believes about such accounts, there is some sort of psychological truth about our need to send on the news in a tiny paper boat, a letter dispatched to the Beyond. Where you are. For whose benefit? I don't have answers, just the need to do so. It may just be an illusion, but it seems appropriate to think that your presence inside me needs to know about the world as it has become since the mortal Timm became an abiding absence within me.


And so, news of what's happened in that place inside me that I share with you. I write this note to you today a different person than I was two years ago this day when you died. Many of us -- family and perhaps friends (we don't hear from your Oregon crew anymore) still miss you powerfully. You just can't be gone, but you just are.

There is so much that we wish you were still here to experience and share. Your niece Kathy plans to fly to Japan this fall to study art (she's an aspiring comic-book/manga creator). Mary Beth, your second neice, is a lovely young woman, soon to graduate from high school, dressing up for prom and looking stunning. And Sarah, your third niece, is quite the thesbian now, walking around with the poised coolness of a Sarah Bernhart or Meryl Streep who is always ready to deliver her lines. Your other brother Will is delving deeply in to photography with your camera -- he's become quite the studio photographer. Dad and Mom are busy and engaged despite all of the physical challenges of life in their '80s.

I look about for a new career (sound familiar?) and Beth continues to create gorgeous bedding while working a few days in a local antique shop for the $. I know you weren't much of a cat person but you'd be impressed with Hugo and Belle, the cats we got as kittens a few years ago, the dumbest and smartest cats we've ever had. They're quite a pair.

But the news of the moment is mostly of spring, its vibrant, wild re-awakening, cusping somehow right at the moment of your death. Mom mentioned "a beautiful tabebuia tree" in her yard which "has been spreading its glorious daffodil-like blossoms like a great cloud of sunshine." I couldn't put it into better words; these trees I see everywhere, and every time I see them I think of the one in full bloom across the street from Mom's house which I watched late morning on Friday, April 18, 2008, as I sat stunned on Mom's couch after hearing the news of your death. Obscenely beautiful then -- how could anything live on so vibrantly with you gone--and yet, over time, those spring-flowering trees have become a symbol of you and your enduring presence, something which flowers for so short a time yet even in oblivion is brilliant, like "a cloud of sunshine" in the mind.

In our various ways, we still deeply grieve you; you are still powerfully missed, brother, two years after you were gone. For me, the shock and disbelief that struck on April 18 , 2008 has cast a powerful pall over life since; the blunt force of it has ebbed in some ways, but the deeper ramifications of it have grown.

Much of what has changed in my life is a result of the relationship with you that has grown in my heart, what I call my art, and how I live and love.

Since you died I made knowing and remembering and thinking of you a central activity of my inner life, carried over into to a variety of expressions on this memorial website. I understand that my work has been faulty as my knowledge of you is at turns fanciful or incomplete or even wrong. The fact is that we our relationship as brothers was weak for much of our lives, something tended with growing tenderness and interest in later years but never something strong and vital in our lives.

Oblivion doesn't just claim the dead, it also seals back the wounds in the heart, which in turn empty the memory. Guilt has driven me to attempt amends by becoming responsible for managing your photographic estate and doing what I can to magnify your presence, slowing the fade of your image from our minds.

A lot of that work seems finished. I don't know how many more contributions will appear at this website. Like a roadside memorial which slowly disappears, this online memorial slows toward silence. My father-in-law Wade Boggs, who scanned so many of your slides, has moved on to other projects; a good thousand or so slides remain to be scanned, but I'm not sure when that task will be attended to. All of your archives -- slides and prints, photo CDs and journals - are in plastic tubs up in the upstairs closet -- all together and in one place, accessible as I promised. But there isn't much new to sift through and bring to light. (I still wait for Christie to send me the last of your journal.)

What's changed mostly for me is that I'm a different writer now. For six weeks after you died, I did nothing but write verse letters to you, pouring out every note of connection-missed or faulty or fanciful or rudimentary, for sure, but accounted for nonetheless. After that torrent of verse, my writing of poetry-for a decade a daily enthusiasm-slowed and then distanced and now has become an extremely occasional event. Perhaps its because I never had much ambition for publication; who cares? Almost all of the verse I've written in the past year and half, when I have written verse at all, has been to or for you; my poetry has become yours. 

In its stead, I've become more of a prose writer, writing a lot about you for your memorial site but also perusing the worlds of present and past, history and mystery, passionately accounting for something which may have no sum. A different mode of writing, to be sure; it's like I've moved to another country of expression.

As I've tried to pull all of your work together into an accessible archive, I've also attempted to complete and store my own writings in similar fashion. There's a folder on this laptop I inherited from you titled "Complete Works," and I've tried to put there .pdf versions of the writings I deem worthy of saving. If I should go suddenly as you, I want it just to be there so no one feels the need to do the job of assembling. I've tried to make sense of your work and intentions as best as I can -- avoiding my own judgements -- but I know that's impossible.

If you were still alive you might disagree or even be upset with some of the arrangements and conclusions I've made about you. You were a private person; what would you think of all the publication of you I've attempted, allowing a way for intimacies which didn't exist in life? Did I ever have the right to do so? It just felt criminal to allow you disappear so fast from view, without some attempt to show your loved ones what a beautiful person you were.

I've fancied myself some sort of twin of yours, separated by 8 years of birth, because I see so many similarities between us. But the younger brother who had been shunned by one of his older brothers, who went his own way, formed his own way in he world, might feel justifiably upset that the same older brother did so much to overwrite his life with prose of his own. An inappropriate appropriation. If there is any real communication between our spirits, I hope that you have guided me the way water underground calls to a dowser's wand; my desire to know and explicate you attuned to the person you really were, guided by whatever deep affinities we might have had in blood relation and temperamental inclination.

But (I have conlcuded), whatever conclusions I have drawn here are fanciful at best. As a writer of sorts, I know that's the best words can ever achieve: approximations of the heart, a semblance which shows all of its bare threads and splotchy ink and failure to truly name something-you--which lived so far away for so long, who had a life of his own and has been gone now for two years. Words have brought me this far, and the insufficiency of that reach has made me less of a believer in writing. Though, like Tony Soprano would say, "whaddayagonnado?" You knew you would never reach the sort of stage your heroes (like Pat Metheny) had reached, but still you played on. So I keep on tap tap tapping away, confident only that this next draft is exactly that-the next room of a dream.

What hasn't changed is that, as usual, I go on for too long. (And this, after excising a major passage remembering a visit of your's to this house in 2003.) Beth's stirring upstairs -- it's 6 a.m. -- and the cats are feisty, running around the room. Lots of yardwork to do today (I now mow two neighbors' lawns along with our own). It will be in the low 80s today and sunny, fragrant with blooming jasmine and everything somehow turned that sort of virginal green of first growth.

There's a yellow tabebouia tree in bloom down the street today, a small tree almost weighted down with the freight of all those heavy blossoms so yellow and bright they seem to burn like private suns, even in the dark of this hour of 6 a.m. Many of the blossoms have fallen now. Mom says that the tabebouia tree she planted with a stone bearing your name in memorial garden of a local public cemetery bloomed briefly for its first full spring. By now, she says, the blooms will all have fallen. Molly and Mom and I will be there on Sunday to remember you together. Dad will spend time in his forest chapel at Columcille where some of your ashes are buried.

Two years gone. If feels like yesterday, and it feels like forever. The grief feels overwhelming at odd moments -- like every time I see a tabebouia tree, or hear "Forgiven" by Chris Botti on the iTunes library on this laptop. And then at other moments its gone, almost frighteningly and I find myself feeling guilty for allowing myself to forget about remembering you.

So it goes, two years after your death. Will the cycle of remembrance cease its calibration in days and months, and begin to lapse into the longer cycles of years? Perhaps. But my faitfulness to you remains strong: as the poet Jack Gilbert once wrote, “grief makes the heart apparent as sudden happiness can.” Thinking of you today, Timm, I wonder if I am just beginning to learn how deeply heart goes. Like the roots of a tabebuia tree forever in bloom where you left us. 

Well, that's the news from all who cared or could or would share. We remember you, Timm so potently on this anniversary of your passing. How can we not, when the blossom and fragrance of awakening spring is so upon us?

Love you, brother -

David