Death of a Ladies’ Man

We went to Leonard Cohen’s grave on Thursday. It wasn’t yet a year since he had passed, but I don’t think he would have minded that we didn’t come on the exact one year anniversary.

She read out one of his poems, and then left it behind a painting of a bird on a wire to shield it from the elements (question: who collects all his gifts?). The mist shrouding the cemetery left no scar on the green and orange mountain, but it might have scarred us. The mist enveloped us, the orange trees, and the bodies in the cold ground. It protected us from the harshness of the sun.

Their time in Montreal overlapped in a way that mine and his did not; I was only really discovering the city when he left it.

Leonard died the night before the US election, but the news only came out the day after. Even though we, in Montreal, were separated from the electoral shock by the 45th parallel, it hit pretty hard. Cohen’s death hit the city even harder.

For days, maybe even weeks, the steps of his small house in the Plateau were covered in candles, song lyrics, paintings, quilts, letters. By people standing, sitting, singing, talking, laughing, mourning.

The street on the other side of the park in front of his house is called Marie-Anne. On the corner nearest his house, there are makeshift additions to the street sign. It reads “So long Marie-Anne and Leonard.”

I listened to Leonard’s music growing up and read some of his books of poetry as an angsty teen. His death prompted me to revisit his work, and for a month or so, I read and listened to Leonard Cohen almost exclusively. I went to Toronto the weekend after he died, and I spent the six-hour bus ride staring out at the greying sky listening to Cohen’s raspy voice.

On Thursday night, he and I sat in the kitchen, listening to his “Songs of Leonard Cohen.” We drank cider. We talked. We sang along. We stopped and listened.

Since Cohen died, I read The Favourite Game and reread The Book of Longing. As I was getting ready to leave Montreal over the summer, I felt that he captured the city I had fallen in love with. To listen to his work again, after knowing him in a different way, marked me. I’m not sure how, yet.

Montreal is full of art, music, and life. But the uniqueness of the city—the particular mild messiness, the specific freedoms—is rarely communicated on a larger scale. Cohen did that. His lyrics are infused with Montreal. Montreal is a character in and of itself in his prose. Montreal is the object of his gaze and attention, as it is the object of mine.

Saturday night, as I flew back to London, I was finishing Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. The book is about the liminal spaces between identities, and it’s about India and Kashmir. Somehow, Cohen manages to sneak his way in. I read the opening lines of “Winter Lady” as the plane was leaving the gate, and had to close the book to process it.

I then watched the plane fly over Montreal. I saw the orange lights delineate the city into a black grid; I watched the mountain(s) jut out: one housing Université de Montréal, one housing St. Joseph’s Oratory, and one housing the cellphone tower I sat by the previous Sunday while it, too, was covered in fog; I saw downtown emerge out of sets of much smaller buildings.

And then the plane tilted. All I could see was the black sky and some wisps of cloud.

Editor’s Note: this piece was published in print 7 November 2017.