Happy 47th birthday, Timm!

Molly and Timm.

Dad and Timm.

Mom and Timm.

Will and Timm.

David, Timm and Molly.

You died a few weeks shy

of your 45th birthday.

Spring’s awakening and bloom

bookend your life’s ends,

ever pausing us in the 

freshest, most sweetly fragrant

hours to pass on earth.



A few weeks ago your mother

and sister and I honored

your death-date at the

memorial garden of the public

cemetery in Orlando.

The tabebuia tree

Mom had planted for you had

already spent its first year’s blossoms,

those exquisite smiles of sunlight

which shy the last of winter away.



Just a few limp seed pods. Mom

said she’d seen the blooms a few

weeks before and we knew they’d

be back next year in greater number

as the tree grew over a spot

marked by a stone with your name.

The day was overcast and raining

so faintly as to go almost unnoticed,

just a distant weeping, no cause

for umbrellas, not enough to

keep us from lingering a good while

on the stone benches erected near the

tree for Molly’s stepson Nicholas

and his girlfriend Jamie, dead a year

longer than you.



Larger older tabebuia trees across

the grounds were still in bloom,

a third of their papery flowers still 

in the boughs

and the rest scattered beneath,

reminding us that even spring

has its fall though it tumbles

us into warmer and ever more

fragrant days as we head to summer.



We walked a while through the

park next to the cemetery, slow and

easy, taking in the sweet smell of

clover and the scud of green on

the water which flowed through

the park’s center, around which

the walk meandered. The last time

you were in Orlando you walked

with Mom and Molly in that park

so we were retracing your steps,

holding on to the memory of you

among us as simple as we on

your death-anniversary were still

among the living, for this spring at least.

Mom checks out the seed pods on the tabebuia tree planted last year in Timm's memory.

David and Mom.

The park next to Timm's memorial garden on April 18, 2010.

Mom and Molly walking the park.

Timm and Molly walking the same park three years earlier, on his last visit to Florida.

You had your camera with you that

day but I’ve found no corresponding

pictures anywhere in your archives—

maybe they’ll show up some day

or maybe you erased them

for reasons we can only guess

and I won’t, not today on

this 46th anniversary of your birth.



For when I think of spring on

your birthday all that comes to mind

is the flush and promise of life,

you in your cradle and crib

with blue eyes taking in the wide world

with a wonder and hunger

which truly were trademarks

of a heart’s need for abundance

and wilderness and beauty. May 4

is a day so ennobled of spring

it leaps into summer

with no reservations or fears,

become a blue-sky warm breeze

over our old house in Winnetka,

whispering so gently to

the world that you’d been born.



I don’t want to repeat all

that’s been said here before,

but birthdays are for such

repetitions as we replay the

day in your honor. Fourth of

the siblings, you arrived

on the fourth of the Spring’s

most durable month, swaddled

and pink with eyes so misty,

almost astonished to be with us,

our house big enough for you,

our yard ample enough for your

games and gambols and wandering

as you nursed on childhood

and became its greatest lover.



The other day Mom sent me

an email saying she’d come across

something by a Mary Jane Worden

stating something that could have

come from your own mouth:



I am convinced that God has built

into all of us an appreciation of beauty

and has even allowed us to participate

in the creation of beautiful things and places.

It may be one way God brings healing

to our brokenness, and a way that we

can contribute toward bringing

wholeness to our fallen world.



“Beauty heals” was your motto, or

part of it, the album into which

most of your photos and songs

fit most perfectly into. Mom

wondered if family connections

married your line to hers,

for the Worden line travels

down the distaff thread of

our family weave, Mom’s great-

great-grandmother on her mother's

side named Katherine Worden. 


The lines by Mary Jane Worden come

from her book Early Widow,

written after her husband had

been killed by a drunk driver

and was published in 1989.

(The loss apparently came

quite early in their marriage).



Odd how your affirmation of

life was exactly another's consolation

for death. Both make 

a spring day like today’s--

your birthday—

such a complete summation,

as if only in brokenness

and with God’s healing power

of beauty does the moment

become full, like a heart

which can fully say Yes

as we say Yes to the brother

and son and friend you

were and are, born 47 years

ago today, gone only a moment

ago and living on in our memories.



You were a beautiful baby and

a son of wonder, an

adventurer with eyes wide

of the beauty of what’s

in the next moment, loving

that more than any brokenness

and hurt that come with life’s deal.



So happy birthday, brother Timm.

Thanks for the smile in memory

which makes this day

such a rising and rousing hymn.