Remembering Timm O'Cobhthaigh: 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.