Remembering Timm O'Cobhthaigh: 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 ...