Leonard Cohen did prepare us for this. In the title track on his final album, You Want It Darker, out last month, he sang, “Hineni, hineni, I’m ready, my Lord.” He told the New Yorker‘s David Remnick, “I don’t think I’ll be able to finish those songs. Maybe, who knows? And maybe I’ll get a second wind, I don’t know. . . . I am ready to die. I hope it’s not too uncomfortable.”
So no, I wasn’t shocked when the news broke last night that Leonard Cohen had died on Monday, November 7. Yes, I was sad. But I was prepared. It was not a surprise like other events this week. This made it easier to mourn. Also, “admiration is much easier on the soul than disgust,” Mike Miner, another Cohen fan, wrote to me in a Slack chat. As he is with so many other things, he is right about this.
