Closing Time: For Leonard Cohen

I’ve never been one of those people who gets worked up about the deaths of their favourite rock stars. You know the drill: you put on a playlist of their songs, you get yourself a bottle of wine, you sit there crying and singing your heart out until the wee hours.

But yesterday, at the age of 82, Leonard Cohen died.

I don’t know quite how to articulate how I feel about that. I mean, on the one hand Leonard has been singing about how he’s going to kick the bucket any minute now for years. He started before I began listening to his music when I was a teenager. He was already gettin’ ready for them to move him to the tower down the track, gettin’ in one last squeeze before closing time. So on some level I’ve been expecting this to be imminent for as long as I’ve been in love with Leonard Cohen’s music.

And love, I think, is the right word. Last night, when I was lying in bed, I started running some of his songs through my head. For the first time, it occurred to me that I know more Leonard Cohen songs by heart than any other artist. Not by a small margin either, the runner up is probably Pink Floyd and they’re trailing by a long shot.

It’s not just knowing the songs though. So many of Leonard’s works are connected to deeply held memories. I remember sitting by the campfire when Chris and I were living in the woods, and the only forms of entertainment that we had were books (which we read to one another), games (which we made ourselves), and a small tape recorder with a couple of mix tapes. I remember sitting under the stars, stirring a pot of nettle soup, listening to “Waiting for the Miracle.”

“Suzanne” takes me back to evenings in one of my oldest friends’ basement, smoking thin menthol cigarettes, talking philosophy, being young and pretending that we were wise. I recall times when I was a young mother, struggling with poverty and the demands of a new baby, when the only thing that kept me sane was walking over to the courtyard of the Anglican church next door and singing “If It Be Your Will.” And those moments in my life when the only prayer I’ve been capable of offering were a few verses from Leonard’s cold and broken “Halleluija.”

Most recently, just a little over a week ago, my best friend and I were hanging out down in the guest house, singing along to old favourites. My husband had fallen asleep, I had to go up to put the kids to bed, my friend wanted to sing one final song: “Last Year’s Man.”

Leonard has, in a very important sense, provided the playlist for my life.

He’s been with me when I’ve been in despair, he’s laughed with me at the vicissitudes of life, he’s been a sympathetic drinking buddy, a wise counselor, a wild prophet, a fellow Canadian, a beautiful loser.

Through his music, Leonard showed me how to make sense of the drama of being human. In the Lives of the Saints, people always start out as sinners and then one day they convert and from that day forward they are Saints, always. But I don’t know anyone whose life actually looks like that. Certainly not mine.

Leonard Cohen shared his own spiritual journey through his songs and he showed what the spiritual life mostly looks like: the sinner and the saint both living together in the same breast, God endlessly hunting and haunting our lawless hearts. Cohen’s poetry admits no place for self-made holiness. It is, in a sense, very Augustinian. More accurately, it is very Jewish.

So tonight, I’m going to put on Leonard’s new album. I’m going to pour myself a glass of wine and drink a toast to the awful truth. And I’m going to cry.

Image credit: “Leonard Cohen 2015” by Rama, Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 France
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