2010 Christmas Greetings, Timm!

Saturday, Dec. 11

Hi Timm,

Here in Florida we alternate between cold blasts and wan recoveries into more appropriate climes for winter in the South. This past week we've had temps down near 30 at night with afternoons barely clearing 50-but tonight it's in the upper 40s and promises to head up past 70, a pattern which will hold for the weekend and then get whipped away on the winds of the next front. It makes the Christmas lights shine bright at night when night stars burn coldly white.

You always had more of a mind-and heart-for more robust seasons than Florida's hot-cool two-step. Oregon offered you more of that, though snow at Christmas was still rare rare. As you wrote in a Christmas letter from 2001, "Greetings from the wet and green Pacific Northwest where visions of a white Christmas are feverishly supplanted with prayers for a break in the rain for one day!"

(I just checked the Salem forecast, and see what you mean - nothing but showers and temps which don't range much from 45 by day and 35 by night. Every-crying skies: who wouldn't pray for delivery from such grevious weather?)

Christmas letters were something you took up later in your life - the only of our family to do so (though Mom has been known to pen some lengthy notes in cards). Perhaps it was because you felt the distance from us most keenly and it was your attempt to insert some part of yourself into the Christmas stockings hanging from our mantles.

There are some revelations I got about you after recently digging up one of those letters from a file I keep of correspondence (mostly birthday cards featuring cats, plus all manner of Father's Day and anniversary and Valentine's day cards from the cats). In that same 2001 letter you wrote about deciding to pursue full-time work as a photographer. "... Occupationally," you write, "I have shown once again that I have lost all sight of reality and branched out into the exiting world of self-employment. I age my two-weeks' notice in June at the newspaper with the intent of pursuing my photography business."

"This has also been a year, you write, "of professional firsts that included a poster, calendar, art gallery showing, studio, book, and most importantly to me I have for the first time a life that I have only dreamt of."

Interestingly, you say that taking that jump not only served your creative needs, but gave you a much fuller opportunity to immerse you in the outside world you so loved. You write,

I have always had the need to create and the photography has fulfilled this niche nicely, but I needed more than creating. I also needed to be a part of the wilderness around me. When I resigned in June it was with the express purpose of having the time to get out and explore, spending several days each month on the road traveling the Northwest. Even though it wasn't until late August that this could actually happen, I have tried to take advantage of my schedule every chance I could. The photo card I attached ((I couldn't find it)) was part of this - a self-portrait I took on a beach in Northern California while exploring the giant redwoods. Over the past few months I have had the opportunity to watch the salmon as they fought their way up numerous streams, watched the elk rut, wandered the woods as the trees shed their summer greenery replacing it with Autumn brilliance, butt the one event that haunts me the most happened just four weeks ago near the Columbia River Gorge in Southern Washington.

You continue,

I was on a shoot for Washington State Parks when on a whim I decided to find a higher vantage point to watch the sunset. I ended up on the 4200-foot peak of Lookout Mountain, a bare unknown place with a commanding view of the gems of the Northwest. I had a panoramic view that included Mt. Hood and Mt. Jefferson (Oregon) to the south, Mt. Adams to the east, Mt. Ranier and the concave face of Mt. St. Helen's to the north. To the west clouds filled the valley lapping up against foothills mimicking a mystical inland sea. While I did attempt to take pictures I was almost incapable of functioning due to the incredible beauty that assailed me. This experience just further ingrained the heart-felt desire that has become a personal credo-not to miss a moment of life that surrounds me.

Several of the poems found on your laptop delved into these notions, notably "Unseen Beauty", "Go Out", and the following poem found on your laptop dated Nov. 2005 (you may have started on it earlier) titled, "How Can I Not Dream":



How can I not but dream,
     when it is my very nature
I can't not think of a new road
    And to visualize exploring new lands
To climb mountains I have visited
     So many times in the twilight hours
To swim in foreign seas
     Diving deep to touch the reefs
Running with the steeds who
      Call the steeps their home
Sitting in the temples built
    To worship a foreign God
To ask me not to
    Would be like
Asking the hunter not to hunt,
    The salmon not to swim,
        Or the cheetah not to run.


How can I not be true
    To the creation God created
What greater sacrilege is there
    Than to reject my own unique design
But that a great price is exacted
    When we choose to live from the heart.
When the masses have settled for resignation
    Rather than suffering through.
Yes there are times I've cried to be released
    From the burden of who I was created to be.
For how easily the dreams get crushed
    And how tragically they finally die
Leaving me shedding tears of sadness
    mixed with bitter rage
Of losing a lover whom I had never truly had
    Like sand she slipped through my fingers
        Like a vapor she faded away.


But how can I not but dream?


Am I insane for wanting--no
    Choosing--to carry on
Do I like the pain that
    The crushing defeats do bring?
I am no masochist -- this I am truly know
Nor a gambler who keeps playing
    Waiting for their big score to come
It is not the excitement
    Or thrill of the dream I seek
But those few precious moments of when
    Finally they come in to being


And I stand--
   Living out the dream.

"Not to miss a moment of life that surrounds me" proved, for you, to be a hard, albeit thrilling challenge, bringing to fullness your own "unique design" - something to call your own. )I wonder if many last-born children find themselves struggling to carve a niche between the earlier paths of their siblings.) Your attempt at full-time self-employment failed and you incessantly trolled for jobs that afforded you enough time to keep up with the photography on the side. (The most numerous document on your laptop was a cover letter to go with a resume.)

You also learned how to make money as a photographer--albeit, never enough to be self-supporting--but slowly working in that direction, panning for work successfully with Oregon Gardens and various state agencies, as well as numerous gigs for Mount Angel Publishing, which created many city guides for which you were tapped for photography. In our last exchange of emails in early Spring 2008, you mentioned looking for the ideal job of being a photographer for an ad agency. But there are so many good photographers out there in a medium flooded with tools for making one look professional (using cheaper but powerful digital point-and-shoot cameras and then using tools in Photoshop to gussy up the images) that work -- real work -- in the field remained elusive.

That work was elusive as love -- as you mention in the poem -- was for you, but the chase was becoming less difficult. The success of your last years is that you managed to 1) hold down a good job, 2) pick up more and more freelance photo work 3) get out routinely into the wilderness while holding down the same apartment and location, 4) embark on some much longer trips, notably to Bolivia in 2003 and Khazakstan in 2004 and 5) find a measure of happiness in relationship.

As difficult as you found staying put and focused and consistently at a life and a love, you were living the dream. And still you found much time to give fully of yourself to others, as so many attested to at your memorial service.

So in a real way, beauty -- the manifestation of God's loving smile on earth - helped heal you and made you a free man. Even though living from the heart meant dying from a rupture of the same organ.

Sunday, December 12

And so I've gone back into your photo archives, searching for images to back up your words, offering those to to you in this Christmas letter, first through what I've kept on this laptop and then to the external hard drive where I moved most of the digital images (your folder there is some 170 gigs).

It's like entering the Northwestern wilderness with you as my guide, seeing with your eyes what you so yearned to behold. So beautiful and heart-re-breaking to behold, this magnitude, this most substantial residue of your vital spirit now gone.

You wandered those wilds mostly alone (though in the last few years of your life Christie was with you on weekend forays); and yet, they were home to you the way the beach is Mom's home, and Columcille's meanders through forest and stone are home to Dad, and Will's has made such a beautiful and inviting and purposeful home in East Bangor, and Molly has raised a happy family in her home in South Orlando, and as I have made been in this home now for 14 years with Beth, each morning up before any insomniac rooster to wander these wilds of the word ... Our homes are so various yet we each have one, having made it out of a devotion we all share, something we each were a part of before we went our separate ways.

Which brings my thoughts back to Christmas at the Evanston house in the late 1960's, a span of years which ended when that home broke apart. Perhaps I wonder so much about your last years because your death (when your heart broke apart) is somehow feels like the factual end and of that home, a time which began a hard hurting passage. But as my grief for you has healed, that healing also feels like the way we each have healed into replicas of that home, each in our own "unique design" ...

One stream, many courses.

I won't repeat the reverie of a Christmas from that time which I posted on this site back in 2008 here, then here, and finally here. I wrote that back in 1987, sending every family member a copy; and posted a digital version of it two decades later. Two years after that, I don't want to repeat myself with old news-every writer's bane. But memorials are cyclical, as the year has its stations, routing memory back to the same source. 

I guess the news -- what's new, the purpose of this next post -- is to delve more into what has become of that memory, how it has been tended and savored and become more of a sanctuary to still feel close to you in, even as you fade more fully into oblivion. This memorial is the home we all still share with you.

Some of us. It's been a long time since I've heard from any of your friends; oddly, your Washington DC buddy Ted has kept the most in touch, and Darlene Hooley wrote me an email note last summer after hearing nothing from her for several years. I hope that Christy will one day ship back the rest of your journals, but that part of you may never be known by your family. My father-in-law Wade is beginning to scan the last batch of your slides -- some thousand or so -- so we'll have some fresh news there. The narrative of those slides -- your intentions, the framing story -- I have few sources to aid in attempting, so all I can say in reference to them now is, "Beauty Heals."

* * *

When I look at this picture, the emotions are mixed, but the satisfaction is deep and unalloyed. What a fun house to grow up in, old, enormous, a character to every room, from the yellow parlor with the antique furniture to the study with its walls of books and sliding ladder to the dining room with gas fixtures and a table which could seat a family of six comfortably. Two fireplaces with six rooms (not including two full and two half bathrooms) on all four floors from basement to attic: in such sprawl we could spread out and still remain a family, each to their own room, gathering by our first color TV in the living room to have one of the two allotted sodas we were allowed every week and watching "Star Trek" and "The Smothers Brothers Show" and "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." You could truly ride the massive banister from the top of the staircase down to the first floor, curving as the stairs descended, with just enough friction in the wax to make the bump at the huge finial not ungentle, and there were two iron hitching-posts at the street cast to look like horse's heads. Remember?

And then there was that big yard outside, scene of so much kid frolic, camping in the back yard or playing touch football in the summertime, sledding down the side yard's hill in winter. Those were the days when we stayed outside for as long as possible - what else was there to do but play outside, without the computers and video games and mp3 players and or cell phones to shroud us in digital white noise? We were out there as much as time permitted, until moms started calling kids in for dinner all over the block and then again to come in for the night. One last toss of the basketball, one last ride down the hill, and then we all trudged wearily home to our homes.

I see in that picture the mythology of an age defined by my childhood -- one of play, sibling bickery, games, school, hours and hours of reading, Mom's cool hand on my forehead as she sat on my bed before saying Good Night, meals, school, strange news on TV of war and riot and hippie happenings, the pending world of adulthood heavy in the air, like a impending blizzard while we got our last rides in down the hill.

Do our mythologies correspond? You were there, you saw it all too, from your much younger vantage but with every kinetic burst intact. Our family trails crisscrossed each day like tracks in the snow, you in a cowboy outfit chasing bad guys with one your buddies, Molly up in her room reading or downstairs Dancing For Daddy in the parlor, Will and I shooting baskets or fighting or playing hide-and-seek with the entire block, Mom brewing up her black-market flavored yoghurt, Dad smoking his pipe and reading the Chicago Tribune in his study.

Molly dances for Daddy.

The mystery of selfhood is that we assume others feel the way we do; and are so surprised to feel the chill of difference when we get so different a report of the same events from another. That Evanston house may have six different versions, its faces hued differently. I was so surprised to hear Molly once characterize Will as the hero and me as the clown, herself as Timm's protector and you as the lost child. All true enough--especially you as the Lost Child--but me the clown??? My image is more tragic than that, you know, noble and vastly wronged and even more vastly smart. But just the foggy lens of vanity and narcissism of self-centeredness. Molly is right; I was making my own myth, one I've had to recover from and then re-found. Anyway -- 

Living in Florida these past 30 years, it's hard to remember just how much we had to button up to play outside in winter: sweater and jacket, mittens and cap and rubber boots, we lumbered about like heifers, freighted with all that insulation: Yet the exuberance to be Outside after a blizzard was incredible, playing in a winter wonderland of snow, snow, snow. Sure, there were sidewalks to shovel, Will getting the Church Street hill and me the Davis Street stretch: but after the chore there was always the abandonment to play, building snow-forts, staging epic battles with snowballs and sledding, sledding, sledding, a motion so repeated I can still feel the heave of my legs getting a good running start, the sudden burst of air in my lungs as my body hit the sled, the jangle of packed snow against the sled's runners, the exhilaration of going downhill fast, a feeling so intense that coming to the end of the jaunt near the bushes at the west end of the house was a sadness, all that motion suddenly just cold afternoon with only so much more time left to it, only so many more rides. I close my eyes and feel myself getting up, dusting off the snow, aware suddenly of how cold it is - wiping snot from my red nose with a gloved hand - then trudging back up that hill slow and wearily, my steps growing stronger and surer at the top as I thought about next ride down the hill.

Sledding was one of those few activities the four of us kids would do together, unhesitating and unceasing, all bickerings set aside for the common joy of the ride: we were no longer cogs at odds with each other in a grinding family wheel but equal participants, fellow exuberants as we flung our sleds and saucers down the hill for as long as we possibly could, til the last hue of daylight ebbed from the west, often obscured behind the oyster-grey roof of a snow-promising cloudbank.

You were four to seven years old over that span of winters, the midget of the group, stocking cap akew on your head, your nose red and snotty too, cheeks red, blue eyes the color of the sky when winter afternoons are sunny and clear, dragging that saucer up the hill, like a spring coiled for the next launch: Little brother, your excitement for the fullness of the world, this life, was perhaps greater than the rest of us. You depended on one of us to give you a good push -- of course, Will applied the most muscle, sending you hurling down the hill. Your eyes were wide then, searching beyond the horizon of sled-hill for More, a gaze which took you to the distant reaches of this continent in search of the next wonder, the next wild ride. Your eyes were always looking beyond, in expectation and wonder and surprise ....

And you were still looking ahead in that way on April 18, 2008, at age 44, running round Salem on early Thursday evening, planning your next weekend's wilderness foray with Christie, eyes wide as saucers, taking in the world as if you were still hurling downhill in the middle of a happy childhood's winter, when your heart relinquished that quest. Such a great paradox, that heart of yours, here yet there, searching and inwarding, seeking and savoring, making a life then breaking it in two.

But there were no such paradoxes back when childhood could be happiest in mid-winter in the 1960s at our house at corner of Church and Davis in Evanston, Illinois, a communal assent to fast-and-faster descents down the sled-hill in our back yard on days so cold your nose felt like it would break off. And we were all there, you, Molly, Will, me, Mom was there and Dad too, somewhere inside, in a unity we did not need to believe in because we knew it; belief came much later, after long passages alone in the lonely windings of our personal wounds. We came to believe once again in that house, or the home it provided: and came to make peace with the past and each find our way home.

The paradoxes came later as you came to articulate that childhood joy into an adult life, and they were necessary, paradoxes of love and brokenness, addiction and faith, prodigality and homecoming, inner and outer intimacies, the world and wilderness. You experienced all of those, yet in the name of childhood they were bearable, then important, then defining for you. I guess that's why we have two eyes, two halves of brain, two chambers of heart: our dual equipage allows us to handle the dualities of our bliss.

* * *

Monday, December 13

Blowing fiercely outside and cold, the dogs of winter unleashed in this current mash of boreal elements. It's much harder up north: the roof of the Metrodome in Minneapolis was too freighted with snow to allow the Minnesota Vikings and New York Giants to play on Sunday. Good thing they postponed the game, because the roof then collapsed. Temps are below zero in many frigid cities of the upper Midwest, and even Melbourne, Florida, had a forecast wind chill of 10 overnight.

Cold cold cold. At this hour it's 36, comparatively balmy though with the wind blowing as hard as it is outside right now, the wind chill is somewhere in the 20's. I was surprised to find both Mamacita and Tiffany Joe huddled near the door when I got up at 3:30 AM; I would have thought those stray cats would stay huddled in their respective nooks for the night, but there they were, perhaps instinctively aware how much colder its supposed to get by tomorrow morning (still temps in the mid-20's, the coldest temperatures here in Florida since the late 1980s'). So I spooned extra food into their bowls and sat outside with them (I usually sit with Mamacita when she eats, and especially do when I have to keep those two cats separated, Tiffany Joe getting aggressive on all the food dishes when s/he's out there alone).

Sitting out there huddled with a heavy hoodie sweatshirt on, hood on, hands in its pockets, feeling the full force of a blowing winter's night in the elements, tree limbs whipping about, wind rising to gusty roars off the eaves of houses, the sky still clouded with the passing front -- how much colder it will get when it finally clears and turns still (it's hard to imagine those cats faring and surviving as they do in such elements, but this is Florida, Imagine wilderness survival in the subzero North):

It reminded me first of how grief for your absence loosed similar inner dogs of winter, tearing and wolving many nights after you died and still now and then two and half years later. It's a boreal blast, feeling the brutal wind of the Reaper's scythe as it passed so close to us, the viciousness of that blade which cut you down so fast, so early, the youngest of our family first to go-and the howling rage in us at that finality, a rage which returns as the blades of grief mow us from within.

Last night Mom lit a candle for you as part of the Compassionate Friends Worldwide Candle Lighting. Occasioned on the second Sunday of December, parents who have lost children light a candle of remembrance in unison on that night. )Beth lit a candle last night too, in remembrance of James, son of Beth's sister, who died at age 19 back in 1998). Like stars burning on a cold winter night, the tenacity of those frail flickers of remembrance is most poignant on nights like this, when the sad solitary world without you rolls in the squalls of its grief, like a ship in a storm on wintry seas. It gets that way.

But also, those candles are burning inside windows of homes which have continued on after their losses, some wing or room permanently damaged by the loss. For years, my sister-in-law kept her son's room exactly as it was the day he died; you had long left the homes of your parents, but in each there was a space for you in painful memorial, a picture of you put in some central spot -- on a coffee table, central on a wall of photos - a place to remember, and grieve and carry on from, never quite the same again. It's said that there is no grief like that of a parent losing a child; God had to go through it to, when He lost his only begotten Son ...

Those homes continued on, halved or stoved in or besieged for an unbearable season by loss, and then for years after vulnerable to the wound of loss breaking open afresh. But those homes keep on keepin' on, or try to. Survival demands it. (It isn't unusual, though, that couples who have lost children separate, unable to continue down grief's road together.)

Perhaps what allows a home to continue after a loss like yours lies in the delicate balance between cherishing a memory and re-breaking a wound, between laboring to keep the beloved from disappearing altogether into oblivion while fighting the desire to leap into grave, rejoined at last with that beloved.

Home becomes something different as it is tempered in the fires of this work, stronger I believe and more durable. We don't have kids, but we've had many cats, and strangely the most memorable was the one we adopted off the street, a gangly thin wastrel of a calico we named Zooey (for zoe, which means "life" or "life-force" in Greek) whom we thought to be barely out of kittenhood but turned out to be between 14 and 17 years old, according to the vet who checked her out. Zooey was old and suffering from a variety of illnesses including a thyroid disorder which left her perpetually hungry and thin; bowel and bladder disorders; failing sight. Yet she was adamant for her food and wedged her way into our love because she was such a fighter, because she had so many need, because she was found so abandoned. We gave her home and shelter for what proved to be a short time - she was dead within a year -- but we believe we gave her a good home to finish her life in, and strangely it is Zooey, our most fleeting charge and companion, who makes this house most a home.

Zooey. She loved to cuddle on Beth's slippers.

Winter nights like this makes me so glad we took her in, and I pray there is comfort and shelter enough for every wild beast out there in this night, a place warm enough, out of the wind enough, close enough to food to survive the worst of winter. Many won't - maybe that's not so much of problem here in Florida, but certainly where subzero temps and snow blanket a region for weeks. Nothing to do about that except do what we can for three indoor and two outdoor cats -- provide shelter and comfort -- and when time runs out for one then another of them, we somehow receive the augment which arises from those loss. No home sustains which doesn't put a welcome mat out to love and the potential of loss which comes with it.

Because home is where the heart is ... Your manifesto became to live from the heart, which meant making life your home, indoors and out, with others and with God, with your work and your art. The measure of how well you homesteaded here was evidenced in the witness of your community who turned out in droves to grieve your loss ...

Which brings me back, briefly, to the Evanston house, and an address to Mom and Dad: Thanks for all you did to make that place a home for us kids, despite all the difficulties you fought. I don't know if it was healthy to keep all evidence of conflict out of sight until the very end - it was an abrupt one - yet in hindsight, I'm very, very grateful for the lengths you went to provide that image of security in that huge house, which no blast of Chicago winter could ever penetrate.

But moreso, the rich image of that house as a safe place from a difficult, quickly changing world outside gave us kids an island of security which we took with us on our various paths. This home I live in is an extension of that Evanston home, not for any feature it shares but rather the inward warmth and security it provides (rickety as that may truly be in these times; but have times ever been secure in this world?).

For that priceless gift which could  never be rescinded, Mom, Dad: Thanks.

Wednesday, December 15

Bitterly cold again here this morning, the lower heat pump which heats the first floor struggling to keep up -- we gotta replace that thing before next winter -- Mamacita crying in the guest room (I've managed to get her in for these past two so-cold night, though Tiffany Joe, who is the relative newcomer stray, has had to fare on h/her own), Belle firmly ensconsed on my lap as well as Hugo, their heads leaning against each other, paws interlaced like littermates though they're not - they only came into this house together from the same shelter, Belle a bit older - she'd already had a litter of kittens - Hugo just a tiny ball of kitten trouble, first seen by Beth at the shelter playing with another kitten in the litter box of a cage. Violet, our Siamese, is curled up next to Beth's belly in bed; cold nights she'll crawl under the covers to roost there, older cat cherishing kittenish memories I suppose. So it goes at Chez Cohea, Mount Dora style.

I do mean to finish this post! But first, some latter business about home, especially your home:

Timm, your sense of home was perhaps the most fragile, being the youngest; and the damage to the sense of it went the deepest in you since you weren't more than seven when the family began its split and long diaspora from Evanston. No doubt the sense of a broken home went deepest into you, and your eventual history was a long westward trail of homelessness and rootlessness which finally healed into a small apartment in Salem, Oregon in which you declared yourself home. And made it one.

To your friends -- never out loud to any of your family -- you complained you always made the rounds back to your family's far-Eastern and -Southern homes, but we never (or rarely) came to visit your home. We all made it out to your wedding to Mik in 1995; memorable, but as it turned out, not one you cared to; Mom flew out to spend time with you; you and I had dinner in Portland one night when I was in town for a convention; that's all.

I never saw the intimate space you called home til the Saturday after you died, a cold and rainy Northwestern kind of spring day which effectively erased the brilliant warm and statistically impossibly sunshine of the weekend before you captured with such savor on your camera (those shots were still on your Nikon).

As Will and Mom and Molly were in transit -- they would get to Salem later that day -- I met Christie that morning at your apartment, driving a rental car through town, an attractive place where tulips were already in hot bloom in front of well-tended houses, and people drove about their Saturday morning business blithe to the occasion which had put me on a plane in Florida the day before and brought me three thousand miles, to begin the dreary work of finishing the details of a dead brother's life.

Your silver SUV was parked in the parking lot with your mountain bike on its rack, wet from all the rain, tears from your partner the skies, grieving that you would no longer adventure out beneath them ... Several plants struggling to bloom in front of your apartment - you wanted to become more of a gardener, symbolic perhaps of your growing rootedness to a place. Christie at the door smiled and hugged me, crying, letting me in. She said she'd done what she could to clean thing up earlier - so the evidence of what squalor you bachelored in (a trait you and I share) was already gone. And your apartment was dim and somewhat gloomy - not much of a place, squeezed among five or six others in a complex -- a living room and kitchen and bathroom and bedroom crammed with stuff you'd been carrying for many years. A lot of you in there, everything but you.

I remember the Bolivian tapestry on the wall which Christie said you'd brought back from your adventure there five years before -- saying too that only recently you'd finally got around to hanging it; a big black TV, blank, silent (what did you watch??); a stereo, stacks of music CDs, many of which you'd burned from collections of music on your laptop's iTunes (which I imported to my computer at work and listen to, mixed with music I've downloaded). A coffee table strewn with guitar picks and photo CDs and a candle half-burned down. The couch you laid on waiting for the paramedics to arrive while your heart flailed and leapt and flickered in its dying throes; your sandals there next the couch, sized for big big feet (much to your dismay, you weren't the tallest of our family, but you had the biggest feet for that job). A rucksack to the side with your camera and laptop. Completing the living room a side chair and a lamp stand with a stack of Photoshop books and several binders of collected photos (Christie must still have one of them, though we thought we brought all of them back).

In the kitchen, loads of spices in the cupboard amid a motley crew of assorted dishware, a fridge containing more evidence of vegetarian lifestyle -- bananas and apples and lettuce. Piles of boxes containing framed pictures to be hung, stacks of old bills, carpentry tools and appliances there was no room for in the apartment. On one rack of kitchen shelves, an astonishing array of first aid supplies (not so astonishing, knowing of your habit of breakage) and binders of pictures.

Next the bathroom, a small bookcase jammed with journals and books, next to it, guitar in its case. I'm guessing that Christie really cleaned your bathroom because it was actually tidy, no ring on the tub, the medicine cabinet stuffed with a middleaged man's array of deodorant and shaving cream and toothpaste, a toothbrush which looked harried, sinus powders and more medicines (we found so many bottles of Ritalin ...). A hall closet stuffed with clothes and a vacuum, snowshoes and a tennis racket.

And in your bedroom, well, everything else, a big bed, piles of photography equipment and a big plastic bin crammed with sleeves of slides, a file cabinet stuffed with whatever, two computers, a desk crammed with more papers, a dresser crammed with underwear and sox and t-shirts and sweaters, a side table crammed with an detritus of activity and memory (books, guitar strings, photos, coins), and finally a closet crammed with everything else - more clothes, snow boots, shoes, rubbers, cowboy boots, an old stereo, tubes of tennis balls and several pair of ski-poles:

That was your final home the way I witnessed it, after you had died and after a stunned and grieving Christie had come in and tidied it up, smoothing the evidence of your rougher, messier edges before the rest of the family who came out witnessed it. And after me, Will and Molly and Mom each spent time rummaging through your place, as if attempting the same inventory of grief, looking for evidence of a brother who'd been gone a long time away, looking for missing pieces perhaps - none of which adding much to the puzzle you were, not even the photo archives I brought back, five thousand slides and another thousand digital images which you cared to add to the pile crammed in every corner of the place you called home ...).

Mom and I in Timm's apartment on April 20, working with Will and Molly on things for Timm's memorial service and then turning our attention to closing out, as best we could, the remnants of Timm's affairs.

And after that last look at the pristine scene of your death, we then proceeded to ransack it in the name of last business, looking for outstanding bills, official records and papers, names of doctors who insufficiently attended to you (though I suspect your own omissions of fact kept the real enough care at bay), dealing with your wallet and cellphone and ring of keys, wringing from all of them what a family can do in one or two days to finish a son and brother's fag-ends of a life, collecting his ashes, meeting with great bewilderment and surprise and interest strangers who meant so much to him (paired by their bewilderment and surprise and interest in us, that distant family who played so little role in his latter life, certainly not in Salem, Oregon).

A stunned, wearying, gritty labor of a family and friends. Within a couple of days we were gone from Salem, flown back to Pennyslvania and Florida; Christie would finish the work of closing out your apartment, giving some of your things to shelters, keeping a good measure for some while (perhaps still), not willing to let what was left of you go. (She may still have that portion of your ashes we left with her to spread in one of your favorite outdoor places.)

And then we were back at our homes, picking up the straps of the burden of daily existence and resuming a trudge made much heavier by your loss. I don't know about Will or Mom or Molly, but I looked at certain tasks differently when I got back. Like my written work: since you died I've attempted to put it into order, going back over ten years of daily poetry and trying to finish poems up, get them into collects, create files more readable from other computers than Quark XPress, the program they were created in.

I've also taken up this work of memorial -- more of a devotion than a work, I guess, but a new occupation amid all the others of the day. From those boxes of heaped slides and external drive of images ordered by you for purposes now lost, I've tried to put into a semblance of order too, an archive, if you will, so that there is a physical perpetuity to you. This memorial remains as a place where memory of you is tended.

Others have worked at tending that memory too: Dad has buried some of your ashes under the Cnoc Cobhain tumulus and in the floor of the St. Columba chapel; Mom has put some of your ashes under a small stone with your name set at the foot of a tabebuia tree planted in the memorial garden of a public cemetery in Orlando; Will says he connects with you every time he takes a picture-and as his photography has taken on new depth and force, perhaps the taproot comes from a place you share. I don't know, but loss of you has become a presence in all of our lives which is perhaps greater than your presence was. Though I'm sure all of us would trade all that away to have you back.

Timm was always the last to wake up on Christmas Day, and the rest of us, grrrrr, just had to wait until he stumbled out of bed to begin the festivities.

Thursday, Dec. 17

Time to be done with this post! Apologies again to all of you readers for my embarrassing lack of brevity. Probably why I make for a lousy poet ... readers find Emily Dickenson's verse compressions of Heaven far easier on the eye than the over-inked Silliads of my ilk ...

Cold again this morning though not so much as the past two -- down into the low 30s -- but the warming back to seasonal subtropic norms begins at sunup, with temps headed up to around 70 for the next few days. Lucky us; a tropical sort of low sweeps the shoes of the country where we live while the Midwest and East is blanketed in snow and ice. Doesn't look like it will get much above freezing for Will and Dad through Christmas. In Salem, weather.com says it looks like the sun will peek round the edges of the cloud cover for a few upper-40s afternoon before the thick pall of rain resumes down to the holiday.

So nyah nyah nyah. (Though Molly for sure would love to see a white Christmas.) I've the next couple of days off so I'll be doing some projects around here getting ready for our Christmas Eve brunch for Mom and Molly's family, hopefully some readin' and writin', too, that old soak in the Word which provides such deep contentment for me. You were a reader, too--your bookshelf of titles filled with the classics attested to that. One of your friends remarked he was always amazed at the stuff you were into. There is a God-filled wilderness in the texts, don't you agree? A trackless path we each make as we journey and quest and imagine and dream or way through our thought-life. You may have wished so to live from the heart because the mental territory was so much more familiar. You probably found, too, that each has its own thicket of difficulty and problematics ...

Well, reading is just another sandbox, and all of us kids enjoy sandboxes, having sported in one in the back yard of the Evanston house.

Still, I wish we could have time to talk about our reading. It's something we never brought up with each other. Just like there's a Doppler image of Will taking a picture with a faint one of you superimposed, so there is a side by side picture of the two of us reading in our separate, far-away reading chairs. Molly was always a great reader, so are Dad and Mom. And all of us thrill to music, with you and I and Molly all having a stint on guitar. Mom writes well, as does Molly, and you did, and I try; we're all talkers, too, taking our lead perhaps from Dad's homiletics.

Maybe all that's just the nature of genetics, reaching far back down the bloodlines. Or maybe there is a lot to be said for the nurture of that house in Evanston, where we all were immersed in communal parts of a culture long enough to become lifelong expressions of it, for better and worse though I think mostly for the better.

So I'll finish this post back where I started and we began, on a cold winter's night where I sat in a home I harvested from the memory of a much older one, my rituals and leanings and habits all grown from a childhood which has become much happier as I've gotten older, its wrongs and sins forgiven or forgotten, its goodness unalloyed, pure as singing Christmas songs with Will and Molly and Timm just before heading to bed on Christmas Eve. The riches of this season come from a birth which we interpret variously yet celebrate all the same, that birth having so much to do with our own beginnings and ends. As of this writing, you are the only one on Heaven's side, yet time's scythe is inevitable for all of us. Wanderer, adventurer, you left first to scout out the territory ahead, eager as you always were for the next unseen beauty.

For us, we remain here in the deep darkness of winter and cold, finding cheer and comfort and warmth in houses heated with love and remembrance. It hurts that you can't be with us for Christmas -- now not ever -- yet there will always be a stocking hung for you, an image superimposed over all the images of Christmas we hold dear. 

I would be greatly amiss not to add this penultimate graph of this Christmas letter to you with my sympathies to the world at large. As the Iraq war ground on through some of its most terrible months, you wrote in your 2004 Christmas letter,

Looking ahead to the coming year I find that there is but one prayer that is foremost in my mind and this is for peace. That the insanity that has gripped so many this past year would pass and that compassion and love would somehow find a small parcel of ground to grow and bring forth the prized fruit of peace.

Aunt Flossie added a similar penultimate flourish to her 2010 Christmas letter –as she always does –- with this:  

The election has left us asking why do the poor continue to suffer and the affluent feel no pain. Where is justice and compassion for the least of our society? Let’s ponder this: Am I a Witt (“We’re In This Together”) or a Yo-Yo (“You’re On Your Own”)?

I’ll blend both of those statements with my own next-to-last statement, in the form of the rejoinder from Dickens’ Tiny Tim at the end of his Carol--who is also Timm in our tale--: “God bless us, every one!”  Go Witts!

Merry Christmas, Timm, and to all who came to stay at this memorial for this while. May our cheer for you keep us all warm through the night--and to all, a good night!

Merry Christmas from Chez (Mount Dora) Cohea!