Three years gone today

Timm in Idaho in 1995.

Hi Timm,

By this third anniversary of your death, the time I remember you alive has moved deeper into the background while subsequent events pour without cessation. That’s life, I guess -- and that’s death.

I confess I don’t know how to memorialize the moment this time around. I’ve been stumped for a week now. I just don’t know what to say.

I don’t have much new about you to bring to this table – a few pictures that haven’t made their way onto the blog, a poem I don’t think I ever posted, a poem of yours which I think bears repeated by way of celebration of the life you had and the legacy of celebration of God's beauty in the world that you left us with.

Recapping your history would be repetitive. Early history, middle history, endgame –- I’ve posted as much as I could here, right down to your final moments at 2:50 AM on April 18 2008 in Salem Hospital. Maybe that’s all a memorial can be: an oasis of repetition, all you days held together like flowers in a vase.

Just doesn’t feel right going into it, this time around … third anniversaries are strange, far enough from their shore to seem fleeting, close enough to feel dutiful. For wedding anniversaries, the traditional gift is leather, symbolizing the awareness of the durability of the relationship. Perhaps something of the same for third-year death-anniversaries, where we acknowledge the permanence of your death in our background, shoe-leather for whatever steps forward remain for us ...

The disorder of your end is by now an order, the scatter of events memorialized into a known we’ve thrown to waves which have been so long stilled, your half-smile-mid-stride wave to us the farewell none of us expected, not even you.

And, of course, it’s what we remember of that day that we most account: the phone calls in the night, the shock of the final news, what we did to try to tie up the ends of your life, seeing much of it for the first time when most of us flew out to Salem. There was all the new news gathered from your photo archives and journals, from emails with your friends. Your picture didn’t come into sharper focus for most of us until well after you were gone.

Your friends in Salem would differ with this opinion, having had the better part of you for so many years: but they have gone back to their own lives, keeping their parts of you apart from us.

Many of your truths you took with you to the grave – so the picture I hold here is partial. But it’s all we have, so that is what I give here.

What counts most, of course, is that you are still greatly missed by your loved ones. Time has passed with different meaning. We’re much more conscious of how fragile life is. Grief’s bittersweeness is a flavor which is still in the day – faded somewhat, not so sharp, more like molasses, rich and deep.

And your adage “Beauty Heals” we have come to see as the truth which belongs to beauty but does not in itself mean healing, at least not in any final enough way. But this: beauty heals, even when it can’t, as it couldn’t in your case but still sustains and furthers your memory long after you are gone.

Three years gone. We miss you, brother, son, friend, traveler, singer, git-fiddler, photographer extraordinaire, lover, servant, child of God.

Miss you more than ever.

-- David 

First, some pictures from family archives:

Molly and Timm, around 1970 (Winter Haven).

Timm and Dad: Two Confederates ya'll better take care around ya hear? (This was hanging in Timm's apartment bound in leather and wood.)

Timm offers me some basketball tips, ca. 1975.

All of us kids turned out for Molly's high school graduation in 1978.

Timm, still in high school, helping to celebrate Mom's birthday in 1980.

Timm around 1984, age 20.

Timm in town to celebrate Molly's wedding in 1987.

Mom, Timm,  Dad and Will on hand to celebrate my first marriage in 1988.

Mik, Timm, Summer and Jake in 1996 or so.

Timm on hand for a celebration at Mom's, 2003?

Timm, Dad, Molly, myself and Mom together after Molly's son Nick died in 2007.

Will, Dad and Timm at Dad's 80th birthday in 2007.

Dad walks by Cnoc Cobhain at Columcille earlier this year. Some of Timm's ashes are buried at the back of the dolmen.

Mom and Molly next to the tabebuia and memorial marker set to Timm in 2009.

Next, this poem I wrote just after your death, attempting to make apparent again its moment :

WALKING THE HILLS OUTSIDE SALEM

Sunday, April 20, 2008 

Rain slow and cold and old

in the night outside the lobby

of the Best Western hotel

where I sip a cup of coffee,

traffic on the interstate

slushing wearily both ways.

On TV a cable news station

replays Hillary Clinton offering

a die-hard winner's smile.

Her victory margin of ten points

decides nothing—-not enough

to convince anyone she should

fight on, nor that Obama can

consider her done.

A heavy solicitude walks

in all that cold rain that I

think of as your spirit,

keepin’ on to keep on. Gas up

to $3.75 a gallon in Portland

and the airline I will later

fly home on reports a ten-billion-

dollars loss for the quarter.

Out beyond the last houses

in this dead-asleep town,

there in the fields scrolling

like waves toward the mountains,

I think of you motioning to me,

a half smile holding a finger

to your lips. We walk,

our shoes muddying in wet mess.

Up in the mountains

the view is picture-perfect

but not the way I imagine.

A motleyed dawn, the huge-

wings of Pacific storm sweeping

in across the land in tight formation,

regular as your wax and ebb

all through this poem,

a beacon of silvery darkness

that is hardly right or moral

or true or even poetic yet

is heavy with the way I see

you standing there atop it all,

in silhouette now forever,

hands on your hips, having

just washed out of this life

to stand there in the half-waking

wet light of the next, no longer

with us but still close

as long as we hold on to

your memories, your images,

whatever we let go of you

so long ago which never

quite left us.

The way this poem moves on,

Orphic, twice-lost, emerging into

the day worried about the

cost of everything and

the news of Pennsylvania

so moot yet essential,

with so much of this

farewelling trip yet ahead

with only traces of you waving

from the rain-soaked, distant hills. 

And to finish in celebration, this poem from your 2003 journal: 

GO OUT

Timm O’Cobhthaigh 

Go out and gaze upon the night sky:

Let the awe fill your soul.

Spend a few days in the Utah desert sitting on a mesa

and allow the vastness to invade your thoughts.

Stand upon the Pacific shore when a storm is raging hard:

let it tussle your hair and sting your face.

Let the rawness sink deep into your brain

blowing off the stagnant cobwebs

that have accumulated from the mundane days of your life.

Find a forest glen early in summer;

walk slowly among the nodding flowers.

Let the warm sun seduce you like a lover.

Let the beautiful transform your heart.

And when you’re done, walk through the woods

ever so slowly. Feel its rhythm

and listen for the music.

You’ll hear it in the wind that grazes the treetops,

from the sound of the winged ones sharing their story.

It’s in the the scents and musty undercarriage,

the roughness of the bark like a Braille text

waiting to be read

and the sunshine filtering through the boughs

energizes as it dances.

It is time to be reborn from the mindless monotony

that we have accepted as life.

To allow all the awe and wonder

and joy and beauty

that so overwhelmed us when we were small.

To cast its spell once again

and return the joy that can be found

in each and every way,

each and every day.