Leonard Cohen passed away this past weekWikiCommons

Leonard Cohen came to me in my dad’s small black car about 10 years ago. The car in which my sister had written her first name and the first initial of our surname (in the crabby handwriting of an eight-year-old) in the grey felt above the door on the inside.

My parents were freshly divorced and we were doing the sad every-other-weekend-and-Wednesday-night thing. This involved a lot of driving to and from school from what had been home to a house called Home Farm, which was very cold and had bare, exposed walls. The only things in it were my dad’s things.

This time in the car meant CDs and we ended up with The Best of Simon and Garfunkel, The Best of Leonard Cohen, Rubber Soul, and a CD which had about 20 songs from different Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. We loved this too and held it in the same estimation as the other three.  

My memories of this period are hazy, which is unsurprising given both that I was young and also because this period was made jagged around the edges by pain. So I haven’t revisited it often during the last decade.

The feeling of wrongness that the immediate aftermath of a divorce inflicts is, I think, universally felt by the children of the divorce. The confusion as to what is going on; the sudden need to understand complicated adult grievances and irrationalities; the realisation that suddenly you need to safeguard their feelings instead of the other way around; the need to show my sister that everything was actually much the same and alright while supressing the feeling that everything is actually new and much worse than what we had before.

Parents, I came to quickly understand, are not only capable of being hurt, but also of hurting you in difficult and new ways that they don’t even know about. I remember all this, and long walks over uneven frost-hardened fields to the River Severn. Sheep in the garden, losing over and over to my sister at Monopoly, pulling a book out of the bookshelf in my dad’s room (Filth by Irvine Welsh, as I found out much later) and being so scared of the pig face on the front that I burst into tears. The sudden uneasy luxury of £2 every other weekend to spend on sweets – an amount that seemed so wrong to me that after some weeks I asked my dad to give us less. Hours in the car, listening to music.

Leonard Cohen was the background for all of this. While I was being lurched forward into the adult world it was his music that took me in and showed it to me more gently. Pointing out the places where things were different and strange and richer. ‘Suzanne’ was the song I remember really listening to first and finding so much in – the strange intersections of love and desire and the peculiar fluidity of both of those things, the way in which the brown river falls behind the movement of the players in the song like a stage set, the Canadian ‘o’ rising and falling in the word “oranges” in a way I’d never heard before. Then other songs – I remember the gentle thrill of ‘Chelsea Hotel No. 2’ and its way of just saying what it means:

“I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel/You were talking so brave and so sweet/Giving me head on the unmade bed/While the limousines wait in the street”.

Sex, the song was saying, is something that can be given, gently, by those who love each other – or at least, by those who love something in the other person. When I got older and found out it was about Janis Joplin, who died young, it became a eulogy not only for the shared moments of youth and fame in the same hotel, but for someone who never got old enough to look back as the song does. And then this controlled look back at love and specialness ends with a sort of heartbroken lie:

“I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel/That’s all, I don’t even think of you that often”.

I am no Leonard Cohen purist. I am not familiar with his whole oeuvre and I don’t own a book of his poetry. But I have been thinking about and anticipating his death for some time.

When I woke up to the news I cried not only because the world has lost a beautiful poet but because I felt I had lost someone I knew. This was someone who had sat next to me in the car that smelt of home and not-home, speaking poems to me that I didn’t know were poems and making me feel that the world is alright.

You’ve had its rules wrong, up to now, but the new rules aren’t hard to learn. And there are things adults can do that are deserving of poetry – being in love, having sex, a glass of wine, a city made up of people you don’t know, getting older and knowing more and more. It is frightening, but it is lovely.

In his letter to Marianne Ihlen on her deathbed, his muse for the song ‘So Long, Marianne’, Cohen tells her to “know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.” From accounts given by her friends and family, she did know, and it is a feeling I find familiar. I never knew him and he was never mine, but for a while there was a sad and frightened 10-year-old in a car, in rural Shropshire, feeling the presence and comfort of the hand of a 70-year-old Canadian man, through poetry and music and a scratched CD from Oxfam.

Rest in peace, Leonard Cohen. Thank you for being there with us. To end with his own words, which are much better than mine: “Endless love. See you down the road”