A Christmas Letter From Timm

This year I thought to prepare a Christmas card from Timm, putting one of his songs to a slide show of winter images from his archives (as well as a few from his youth at Christmastime).  If you’ll recall, some months after Timm died, Mom found a cassette tape in a drawer that had recordings of three songs Timm performed on guitar.

The song I chose has a winter's day tenderness to it, warm despite the cold outside. It makes me think now of the carefully-carved wooden figures we’d assemble every year in the Advent crèche on the mantle of the fireplace, their wood slowly darkening with time, absorbing the oils of our fingers.  One by one the pieces would be unwrapped from their crepe paper, each of us taking turns, our minds silently trying to guess which figure we had drawn (or been handed) from the suggestion of shape the paper masked: Joseph or Mary or Shepherd or Lamb?

And of course there was the prize of the Christ child laying on a bed of straw; somehow all of Christmas came true as that delicate tiny figure emerged from its swaddle of paper; and to the one who drew it, special designation was conferred, at least imagined; it was like getting the certainty that what you wanted most would be wrapped and waiting for you under the Christmas tree when we all came into the parlor to open our presents.

At least it seemed that way to me, and with the rest of the kids as well – we shared a conspiratorial, unspoken expectation about some things, like our communal wait for the green light to open presents, or the giggling silence while one of us caught hell from Dad for our sins.  You could see a light go on in the lucky kid who unwrapped the Christ child on a given year; even Timm, so young during those years in Evanston where the Advent manger ritual began, seemed to get his, his big steely blue eyes in a sort of rapture to see the figure that year revealed and held in his tiny hands. Too small to reach the mantle on his own, one of us would lift him up to he could clumsily place the figure in the manger (always corrected later by one of us).

That sort of delicacy and wonder in this song, which with the images I’ll call “A Christmas Letter from Timm.”

Here’s to a happy Christmas to you all. May the wonder Timm found in the world with music and images be conveyed here as proof of a heart that was convinced of the healing power of beauty.

Merry Christmas, all!

Timm's Flowers (a re-post from 2008)

 

I'm posting this again because Timm's flowers speak so durably.

Cool and windy this morning,
deep into late-of-year dark,  
a harrow which hollows the bones
of the oaks knocking in the breeze.




How is it that my brother’s
flowers burn on here,
flickering at the crown
of their halcyon tapers,
writing papery fragrances
like love poems to the dark?





Luxurious, lurid, dreamy, wild,
their wide-eyed astonishments
fix his gaze right here
where the usual unfolds,
one cat curled in my lap, 
the other sleeping on a blanket on the couch,
the hour rowing toward dawn





and me singing loud and happy
of him because of the flowers
he found and framed like
a window onto the dancing world
pirouetting in stillness,




petalling forever a smile
which is his and mine now,
the cats’ and the morning’s too,
the world’s long rapture
unfurling him again
full-blossomed back to God.

Remembering Joy

Death always catches us by surprise; we who are gifted (some might say freighted) with the knowledge that it comes, are yet always stunned when a loved one is here and then gone—-just like that—-leaving an absence made hollowest by what was yesterday so alive and vibrant and essential in our day.

We’ve had our share of startling losses of family members – Nicholas at age 23 in 2007, Timm at age 44 in 2008. They were smiling in our rooms or some adjacent one and then they were simply gone, hauled out of sight by that sudden dark tide that is inescapable conclusion of every life. very essence of living.

Know what the leading cause of death is? Birth. Nothing else even comes close. Arrival and departure are so paired. Perhaps it is the memory of older losses that makes us so anxious about the possibility of later ones; it is our pain we remember most, our grief, our slow and difficult return to a normal pulse of days.

When Dad called in the middle of the night of April 18, 2008, informing us that Timm had had a heart attack and was in the hospital, Beth and I couldn’t believe it; we couldn’t take it in; sleep was still heavy on us, as was our denial. Settling back to sleep I said to her, Wow, Timm's going to have to take it easy for a while.

Then Dad called again to tell us the chaplain had dialed him back to say that Timm’s condition was dire and that we all should pray. What? we wondered, still unbelieving.

Finally around dawn, Dad called a third time, his voice heavy and gray, informing us that Timm was dead. The sun was just coming up and it was early spring, a beautiful day on tap, all of it suddenly looking obscene, a betrayal of the great loss we had just suffered. It just didn’t add up.

Down at Mom’s an hour later, Mom and Molly and I sat together and cried in shock and desolation. Timm--who seemed like he would always be there on the fringes of our collective life, slowly rowing his way back home--was gone, simply and utterly and unbelievably gone. Spring was in full sweet riot outside, but the moment was denied us because our brother and son was no more.

On Timm’s camera I found these pictures, taken the weekend before he died. It was unbelievably sunny and fair for Oregon in the springtime, and Timm had gone to a park to take pictures of kids playing and people walking their dogs.

I write all this today because, as you all know, Mom’s recently suffered a sudden loss. Mid-last week she was out walking her poodle Joy when a big, unleashed dog approached. Joy reacted in fear and attacked; the big dog fell on Joy and wounded her terribly.

Fortunately the other dog’s owner came out and immediately helped (a nurse, she was able to swaddle Joy’s wounds) and accompanied Mom to the emergency clinic. They spent hours there (joined by Molly) waiting to hear the news.

Initially, the news was guardedly hopeful—blood work not too bad, internal injuries not as serious as feared.

The following morning Mom and the woman picked Joy up from the emergency clinic and spent an hour waiting for Mom’s regular vet to open. (I talked with Mom on the phone then; Joy was in much pain but heavily sedated and sleeping in her lap.) Once her vet opened, they got to work on Joy immediately. The vet there was wonderful, taking over the care, willing to take Joy home with him at night as she slowly recuperated.

But later Friday Mom got the call that Joy had suffered a heart attack and died, the trauma of the mauling just too great for her. Joy was 13 years old, Mom believes. (No one knows for sure.)

The hardest part, Mom says, is not the loss itself but the trauma of watching it happen so violently. We are fortunate, I guess, that Molly didn’t have to try to identify Nicholas’ remains after the horrific auto accident on the rain-slickened turnpike that killed he and his two best friends. We are also fortunate, I guess, that none of us were at the hospital watching Timm die, receiving 14 applications of the shock-paddles, the spasms where he seemed to be trying to swim back up to the surface of his life, of his slow fade to stillness in angioplasty lab. All that was just reportage from the hospital records I requested. We can only imagine how Nick and Timm died; Mom saw the worst of Joy’s passing right before her eyes.

It’s hard to write about these things; part of me wonders what is the point, making old wounds fresh to the reader’s eye. Yet as birth is paired with death, so death is paired with birth: we who have survived such deaths -– both of beloved humans and pets -– have had to find our way out from grief and back into the land of the living. We carry our dead with us in all the living memories we cherish. 

Fortunately, Mom is right now deeply involved in the care of a friend dying of stage 4 cancer who lives across the street. It helps keep her mind from from its darkest zones. Emptiness dogs us for a time, especially with pets, our houses and routines that once were so occupied with cats and dogs suddenly voided. The mind can’t quite track reality; surely a door will open and the lost one will come bounding back, eager for a treat, a pet, a walk. After death, their wounds become our own; the dead don’t suffer but we do. Grief is essentially a selfish thing, a rite of passage which we indulge for a time but know we have to go on, for our own survival’s sake and for the sake of our other, still-living beloved ones.

It helps to take an emptied heart and fill it again with love. “Beauty heals” was Timm's adage, and that beauty I think is an expression of the love one chooses, deciding to love, to live, to give back. Beauty in a sense magnifies in loss: I look at Joy’s picture and see only pleasure and happiness: all of the rough tough stuff is out of the picture, gone. Only the beautiful image remains. 

Timm, gerbil and Shep.

I look at Timm as child playing with our family dog Shep (dead some 30 years now) and both are permanently fixed there, forever alive and young and happy: the image tells me that life is difficult but it is also infinitely good. It is good to say yes to life, to live from the heart, to express our joy and wonder as a form of praise of God: by doing so we create life again out of what was lost.

To Mom I say, we’re with you. All of us have suffered the loss of pets. Many of us have gone through many pet-deaths. We have all gone through the loss of our human loved ones. Other losses seem closer as age and illness crowds closer. But there are also surprises: we know that we don’t know when the next terrible hour will come. So what do we do? We remember the joy, the fullness of the heart, the small intimacies of ritual throughout the day that helped to fill a house.

We remember Joy, difficult and challenged as she was by what was surely a very hard beginning, come to love her life and place in Mom’s house, giving back what Mom poured out so freely and what she says she chooses to continue to pour out. “What else is a heart for?” she put it to me on the phone the other day. (I paraphrase.)

Timm was a lot like Joy – hard beginnings, eventual good life. Both were taken by the same organ, that instrument that says Yes to life until its time to say No.

We remember Joy and Timm; we remember Nick; we remember grandmothers/mothers Nana and Dearie; we remember other dogs we've lost – Mom's Ginger, Dad's Launcelot and Duke; Will Bosco and Cormac; and our cats too, Buster and Red and Blue and Pink and Zooey. We remember our oldest pets too, Ravel and Monte and Tippy and Shep; we remember all the gerbils and guinea pigs and goldfish and birds to have populated our living menageries.

To all our lost loved ones we say we love you and miss you and are happy you had a full life that you were and are very much loved, and we are greater somehow even in our loss, for our hearts are full, and we know they will fill again and again as long as we say Yes. 

Timm with Tippy, Molly with Monte, and Mom, ca. 1977.  After Timm left home, Mom looked after Tippy til she passed away.

Will with Cormac who passed away a couple of years ago.

My wife's cat Buster, who died in 2001.

Timm with Ravel, the first of a long line of poodles in our family.

Mom with her poodle Ginger and Beth at a Christmas Eve gathering. Ginger's home was Mom's lap.

Dad with Loch when he was a puppy a couple of years ago. Loch, a border collie, succeeds Duke and Launcelot, former collie lords of Columcille.

Photo by Timm. Like the heart, the stream overflows in autumn.

He Searched For The Perfect Shot (I think he got it)

The cover photo from Timm's 2002 "Silver Country" calendar. 

As I said in my last post, I’m running the 18th of the month an article on Timm written by an editor of The Silverton Appeal, where Timm worked as a reporter and photographer before signing up as a staffer to Congresswoman Darlene Hooley. The story goes into some background on his calendar project and  how he hoped that proceeds from it would help fund another humanitarian trip to South America with Project Helping Hands. There are a couple of adventures relayed by Timm in the article both show to what lengths he was willing to get a great picture – and how constitutionally unfit our accident-prone brother and son was for hazardous duty. It also shows how important his passion for photography was for his inner health. ("Beauty heals," indeed.) The photo that ran with the article is uncredited, but since Timm has his camera in the picture with him, I’m guessing it was taken by someone else. 

Also, I recently worked some on a poem for Timm I posted back in September 2008 that I’m reposting today.

Miss you more and more as time passes, brother …

In Search Of The Perfect Shot

Appeal photographer uses art to fund Third World mission trips

by Brenna Wiegand

The Silverton Appeal, Nov. 27, 2002

He took all the pictures for his new calendar within a 30-mile radius of Silverton. Now he’s hoping those photos will transport him into another world – the Third World.

Local photographer Timm O’Cobhthaigh’s Silver Country calendar showcases the beauty of the North Willamette Valley. The calendar is one of the ways O’Cobhthaigh (pronounced OH-kuh-vay) plans on continuing his work with the Keizer-based humanitarian aid organization, Project Helping Hands (PHH).

After a PHH trip to Boliva in August, O’Cobhthaigh vowed he wouldn’t let so much time elapse before his next trip. He’d done similar work before.

“I’ve never seen such poverty,” he said of his August adventure. Besides assisting the medical team, he documented the trip through his photographs, helping to publicize and gain support for the work.

O’Cobhthaigh got involved in photography during his school years, but after graduating with a degree in social work he got caught up in an all-consuming career in alcohol and drug counseling and prevention, he let go. 

It wasn’t until about four years ago, during a particularly stressful period, that O’Cobhthaigh again reached for a camera – this time almost as a lifeline. 

“I needed an outlet,” he said. “But instead of doing it casually I had to do it obsessively like everything else in my life.”

With each click of the shutter, O’Cobhthaigh realized that he was burned out on social work. Encouraged by the modest but regular sales of some photo greeting cards he’d placed in several locations around Salem, he said goodbye to his state job – and financial security – and looked to create a new pattern for his life. 

“There’s a lot of need, more than you can meet, and a lot of pain that you can be overwhelmed by,” he said of counseling work. 

He got a part-time job putting together the sports scores page for the Statesman Journal and started doing correspondent work for The Stayton Mail. In April 2000 he took a full-time reporter’s position at the Appeal Tribune. Eventually he landed photography contracts with The Oregon Garden, Oregon and Washington state parks and other groups and agencies.

Trying to develop his freelance photography business, O’Cobhthaigh now works part-time for the Appeal and The Stayton Mail. 

“I don’t like starving,” he said.

His passion for getting that special spot lands him in some strange spots …

“I hang out in weird places, often hoping not to get shot at or arrested,” he said. “I’ve fallen off mountains, like when trying to photograph eagles on Vancouver Island – I learned the importance of safety,”

A misstep sent him sliding down a rock face, barely coming to rest on a lip of rock overlooking the roiling Inland Passage below. 

“I looked over and there was the eagle just looking up at me, not more than 20 yards away,” he said. “I hadn’t been able to get that close to him all day.”

Of course he lives for sunrises and sunsets, and likes getting “quirky” shots of people and photographing hunter-jumper horse shows.

He’s bringing some of the social work back into his life, melding it with his passion for photography. A newfound balance is resulting. 

“I don’t want to play therapist or anything like that, but I enjoy this type of work,” he said. “The calendar is a way of enabling me to do more of it.”

He says time alone – waiting for the sun to come up or down – proves a good counterpoint to the more hectic aspects of his life. He hopes that solitude and serenity also comes through in the suitable-for-framing calendar shots that include a serene moon over Mt. Hood, an aerially-inspiring view of South Falls and Butte Creek Falls.

“I’m inspired by Winnie the Pooh and Pigliet and their ‘Thinking Spot,’” O’Cobhthaigh said.

He also has learned not to plan too closely when on photography trips.

“I’ve learned to let go of what I think I need to do today and take what comes,” he said. “Otherwise I might miss that great shot.”

He says he’s also realizing that it takes time to find a market. He hopes the calendar, funded through the initial investment of three friends, will become an annual publication, perhaps along with calendars of other areas or on other topics.

“I love the art; I love being out and traveling, and I’d love to have it underwrite my work with Project Helping Hands,” he said.

Founded in 1993, PHH takes groups into Bolivia, Costa Rica, Haiti, the Caribbean and the Dominican Republic, providing medical care and facilitating badly needed projects, such as providing water purification systems and basic shelter needs.

An image from a file of shots Timm apparently intended for a later calendar or book of photos.

SEPTEMBER FIFTEENTH, SEPTEMBER FIFTEENTH

Sept. 18, 2008

Lost brother, this morning the moon
is full and leans heavily toward your west,
spreading pale whiteness across my yard

and garden like a pall or spell. Or both:
A bittersweet thrall of light which holds
you and I together in its membrane,

in this silver womb we forever share.
Great loss has this silver lining, we know,
raining evanescent grace over us

exactly where we’re hurt the worst.
Serenely it plays that lonely guitar
you and I both loved and yearned for

in a Pat Matheny song we first heard
in the autumn of 1981 and both loved since,
a music now almost three decades

out there on the radio waves which sail
our dreams among the stars.
This moonlight’s on your mountain

where you stood surveying your past
wondering where you might go next;
this moonlight’s on the chapel

where your final footprints are dust,
weakly lamping the stone which
covers your face forever with

the three signs of passage --
a singing dolphin, a cross and
a stone gate, harrows all of heart.

Moonlight glows on stones everywhere
tonight with a lucent ache
which to us is utterly serene,

a greeting, perhaps, from the heart
we are forever seeking when we love,
when we pray, when we play that song.

You are so inside that music now
you may no longer know the ache I feel,
brother, the burden of the moon,

heavy with grief and so in love
with the beauty of the world you loved.
The fact of that ache is lost to you

now, brother, the augment of
history’s pain: but the peace
no longer haunts you like moonlight

silvering a dark garden
but is the element you are free in,
the heavenly third sea

we always dreamt of swimming  in,
the final trope of all poetry,
the kiss we always yearned for.

On this Sept. 15 I remember our song
and say that we compose its harmony
with our lives and complete it

only when we let go, singing
and sighing like that blue guitar
in that old Lyle Mays song,

becoming moons ourselves,
mirrors naked of all but that pure longing
in which our God now fullest glows,

sighting that dark shore ahead
we row toward together in a silent boat.
It’s a land no one sees or names or knows

except perhaps toward the end of songs,
the last strains like its approaching
silver surf. “September Fifteenth” is ending

in my ears like you, lost brother,
a steeple’s cross out there in the mere,
the moon that waxes when it disappears.

Lyle Mays, Bill Evans, Timm, me.

Summer Sleeps In Moonlight (We Will Meet Again)

Most pictures by Timm.

Hi Timm,

Greetings from the swampy-hot thick of Florida’s August, our days here overbright and superheated as is much of the country—Oklahoma’s withered and Texas cracked from a relentless assault of 100-degree days, many cities across the country recording their hottest Junes and Julys ever, working on summers of unparalleled heat. It’s just hot, and there isn’t much relief in sight. You surely would take to cycling or hiking or canoing up in mountain wilds, slaking your thirst on vistas of pounding waterfalls, your face wet from the thunderous mist, baptized in forever by the pictures you took there.

But we are not without consolations. Around 4 a.m. today, as usual, I sat outside on the front stoop of our house feeding Mamacita, our black stray cat. She’s still vital and strong and almost-feral after nearly a decade of these twice-daily outdoor rituals, me sitting with her as she eats as a form of consolation: she knows she’ll get a peaceful meal when I’m there with her, safe from the coons and possum and Tiffany Joe, the other stray we feed, a truly feral tuxedo alley cat whose baleful glare reflects every alpha-male encounter he’s had with the alpha male night. All that stays a good distance away while I’m out there, and she nestles in close while she eats, her only domestic consolation.

While she ate I sat watching a high moon just past full, casting a pall of silver over all, that blue-white augment to darkness I love so. How lush the garden seemed right then, tall stalks of Mexican petunias weaving in a soft, so-distant breeze (does a tropical storm approach? I haven’t yet checked the news), a half-dozen hummingbirds whirring in and out of the petunias, glazing their tiny bills with purple nectar. Carrying the news of this night, I imagine, to you. It was such a simple, soft, halcyon moment that I thought to offer it to you by way of celebration of the next monthly anniversary of your death now 40 months ago. 

You loved moony nights, too—at least, your photo archives give that impression, amply stocked with moon-rises. The silent majesty of a full-mooned night is a good metaphor for the silent presence you still have in me, in all of your family, greater now perhaps because of your loss. How easily you could have walked up the street this morning beneath that moonlights, hiking in your wilderness and yet here on my street, stopping by to say hello, or simply waving as you pass, our far worlds greeting in a moment of moonlight in deep summer, beheld and cherished here, then gone ….

* * * 

Dad and Timm in 2007. 

Dad almost joined you on wilder wilderness venture; a few weeks ago he went under the knife to clear out badly clotted carotids but his heart failed as the operation begain, beating down to zero and remaining there until the docs abandoned their work, opting instead to fit him with a pacemaker and address the blockage with medication. Not the optimal solution but the one he lives today on, back at Columcille and getting re-acquainted with the rest of his life.

As you would guess from previous experience, he said many farewells; most of us don’t think he expected (or even wanted) to survive. His first words upon waking in the recovery room: “Shit, I’m still here” -- the mantra he’s been saying upon waking every day for some time now. He broods a lot on the insides of the event but hasn’t talked a lot about it yet. (He was the same way when he had his quadruple-bypass surgery ten years ago when they had to remove his heart to fit it with a pig’s valve.)

What is it that he’s reaching for in words that haven’t come yet? Surely he was somewhere close in those moments of near-death to where you were in September 1982 when you almost died of injuries from that car accident: for both of you, the experience was quite between, the transitionary space you were both in so close to death you felt its presence with a milky womblike prescience. And why not, the both of you almost free of life, more dead than alive, coming close to the first lights of what is to follow as if in a birth-chamber … You lived on for twenty-five years, “haunted by peace,” as you would write about it – the Presence of your Maker.

You wrote,

I lived. But something was different. Eventually I pieced together what had happened, even the last-second screeching of brakes, but what I remembered most was the peace. 

I have taken time alone with God every morning since I was in my mid teens, praying and reading my Bible. It was my way of preparing for the day – getting my head and heart in line with God. It was a few weeks after the accident when I was finally able to do this ritual and then it was there again. The peace. No where near as strong as the night of the accident, but it was the same. I remembered that night and that incredible peace. I wasn’t completely sure what it was all about, I just knew that I never wanted to be separated from it. I was beyond hurting when I was there, enveloped in His presence and here it was again. 

My morning devotions took on a whole new meaning as I realized the more I cultivated an intimate relationship with God the more I sensed His present peace. Before long I noticed it in other places also. Walking in the woods I would be surrounded by it; worshiping, whether in church or alone it was there, and any time I would stop long enough to reconnect with God, there it would be. 

It’s a wonderful gift, available to everyone. Often appearing as a phantom – unable to physically grasp or manipulate, but when I let go it is there. 

He is there. 

He is here. 

His memory haunts me. 

Timm in 1981 near Jackson Hole, Wyoming, some months after his near-fatal car accident there.

Dad’s language is a little different, but I think the feeling is much the same, a sort of halving presence, where part of him is here and about some daily task, and another is elsewhere and may not ever return. He’s lived with that for ten years after the heart operation, and like he’s gotten a booster shot from the recent experience, the strange prescience of walking in two worlds is fresh again in his mind. We’ll all hear more about it from him when he feels ready – surely it was years before you could put adequate words on the experience to paper: Yet the words he won’t form are exactly like the one’s you couldn’t when you died of heart failure in 2008. Your last thoughts are lost to us, buried deep within the surface flurry of motions that was your last day, motions I’ve reassembled from talking to your friends and reading hospital reports.

What a difference writing here to day with Dad still with us, with these words not needing also to account for his great disappearance … for now … tenor this post with you still as its prime and only actuary, as the one we refer to as the risk and cost of love in a fleeting life, challenging all we think we know with all we can’t, or won’t.

I keep hoping I’ll come across a new cache of you somewhere – communications again with your friends, your remaining journals sent back by your girlfriend, some little door on this laptop opening to a library of writings and images and creations: … But such finds have not come: the record may be as complete as it gets: this memorial’s silo of you and our remembrance may be full except a few feet toward the top for rehashes and reiterations.

* * * 

Events now bring me back to you. I wonder how the battle against methamphetamines that you championed is going in Oregon, in the West and Midwest, across the country. How that scourge changes a country’s spirit, undermining it perhaps in the same proportion that the economy and draught are both ravaging what’s left of a way of life. We’re in a new presidential election cycle, approaching in six months or so the same place things were in when you died, with so many big events going on obscured by the bluster of campaign rhetoric and awaiting the assault of those attack ads which keep the broadcast media in business and do so much to undermine civility and dialogue.

So many desperate and wild things going on at once – Japan recovering from a catastrophic tsunami-earthquake, the Middle East still in unbroken turmoil with democratic movements in Egypt and Libya and Syria combating establishment power and cruelty, the European Euro-zone in danger of shatter, the U.S. economy deepening down from recession to depression, millions starving in Somalia and Eastern Africa due to the politics of famine, Arctic polar cap melted, polar bears drowning, cyberterrorists threatening to bring the whole grid down --- all these things make me think of how you would fare these days, who you would be reaching out to, as you instinctually would, how you yourself would fare in such blaring and speeding rupture in the weal. I think you got out in time … 

A shot of Crater Lake in Southern Oregon that Timm took in the summer of 2007.

… And then, I think how much we need you now … Who will carry the message that Beauty Heals into the centers of wound, like the cellist during the seige of Sarajevo in the latter 1990’s who, after half of his orchestra mates had been killed and the symphony disbanded, would rise every day and go out and find a bomb-crater freshly smoking from the previous night’s bombardment and settle there to play, filling the hole with Bach? Who will bring bouquets of flowers and waterfalls and serene fields with mountains in the distance, and lay them in the hundred places the times now bleeds? 

I wonder how your AA sponsees are now doing, how they are carrying the message you carried because others carried the message to you. I upload this post with some of your beautiful images because they were meant to be offered as hope to a bleeding world, the same way you brought words of hope to suffering alcoholics and addicts, showing through the transformation of your own history that it is possible to come home, first and foremost to the home inside, to be alive and moving forward and grounded in the heart. 

I hope your pastor is faring better with his depression, that your best friend’s wife survives her cancer, your girlfriend has found love again, your work is remembered with your peers at places like Mount Angel Publishing and the Statesman-Appeal newspaper.

But I know you become more and more a cipher as what’s left of you in this life – our memory, your small archive of images and words – pushes further back into the mist as we go on. These things must recede, yet always there is the work of memorial. I see obits in the paper for young men and women who have been dead for ten or even twenty years, their families resolute in their remembering, honoring their dead, stronger perhaps than they would have been by just letting things go. By just going on. 

I know the subtractions increase as we live on – we have no idea how long we’ll have Mom or Dad, and of course there are always surprises from the rear (no one, no one could have guessed that you would be the first of our nuclear family to die); but our moments of quiet and reflection -- out walking the land or the dogs, or studying the Bible, or sitting outside in moonlight feeding a black stray cat who is still, miraculously, still with us though every kitten from her litter has been dead at least seven years – our moments of stillness have your moonlight over them, present in absence, near yet o so far, an ache deep inside which finds such consolation in a flower’s blooming, or the nuzzle of a beloved dog or cat, or the beauty of another coming day.

April 18, 2008 was such a beautiful spring day in Florida, so much suddenly in bloom, withering heat still months away, the breeze almost obscenely halcyon as it also bore to us the news of your death far, far away. A good day to die. A terrible day to die. A day that in my memory is both, most beautiful and terrible, life and death winding round the image of you walking somewhere in the deepest, sweetest woods of all, your blue blue eyes in rapture of what you saw even as shadows crept over you and fell, leaving only a camera and a laptop and a hundred mouths saying your name. 

Enough – I have to get on with things: gather images for this post, get it uploaded, get on with my dingdong day of work work work in salt mines of insufficient avail while the world’s noise and shadow increases all around. Gotta go, bro. We’ll walk together again in some future yet unfolded—eventually we’ll all be reunited in some place between all the places we believe is Beyond, if only for a single walk together, each of us exactly as we were when we had daily suppers together, each of us become the music of what followed until we were no more. Bill Evans, the jazz pianist who was so beloved by Lyle Mays (of the Pat Matheny Group) that he wrote the song “September 15” to celebrate the life of the former great – a song you listened to on your laptop iTunes on the day you died – Evans’ final album was titled “We Will Meet Again,” in reference to his own brother who had died in 1979. 

The tide of remembrance goes on and on , brother: so do the times, perhaps in measure to all that once radiated, like you playing with friends in the yard of our big house in Evanston in 1965. or grinning gap-toothed in our swimming pool in the Winter Haven house in 1971; or you and I walking on Cocoa Beach together in 1980, or you wandering the West for all those years to follow finding a ground for your heart to take root in, or walking and talking with Dad on his 80th birthday in 2007. The times go on without you but also because of you, at least for those of us who still remember the sweet and complicated gift you were and are. 

The garden in moonlight this morning, pale and soft and weaving to the slightest relieving breeze, with stars faintly crowning the sky, sends a message in the medium of your images, all that remains of you here: 

We will meet again ...

This picture of Timm  appeared in a Silverton Appeal article on him

Mom had in her clippings file. I'll reprint the entire article in an upcoming post.