To Ease the Passing of Time

I have just finished watching an interview that Leonard Cohen gave only two months before he died in 2016. During the break that they had to take during the interview, Cohen said to the interviewer that he still heard the voice of God. After the break was over, the interviewer asked him what God was telling him. He said: “Sometimes, I hear him say ‘Ignore me. Just get on with the things you have to do.’ It’s very compassionate at this stage, more than any time in my life.” In another interview that he gave a month later, the last one, he added: “Spiritual things have fallen into place, for which I am very grateful.” Leonard Cohen was 82 years old when he died.

At the age of 74, in an interview, Leonard Cohen quoted Tennessee Williams, the famous Amerian playwright, who wrote: “Life is a fairly well-written play except for the third act." Cohen was 67 when he came across that quote. He was two years younger than I am now. In a little more than a week, I’ll be three years older than he was then. I remember when my friend Noureddine told me that’s it’s only when you reach 70 that you really become an old man.

For Leonard Cohen, the third act is over; for me, it’s only starting. I don’t know what my third act has in store for me; I only know that it will be the last, and that it will most likely be painful. Am I anxious and afraid? Of course, I am. Who wouldn’t be? Nobody wants to suffer, and deteriorate physically and mentally. Nobody wants to end up in her dying bed, alone in a hospital, like my aunt a few years ago; or like my mom who had lost her health and memory, but not her smile, when she passed away at the beginning of this year.

What is the purpose of this third act, providing that there is any? Could there be a better way to end the play? Is there anything else to learn that I don’t already know? Are there important things that I need to experience in order to achieve my destiny? I don’t know.

During the interview that I mentioned at the beginning of this article, Cohen elaborated a little more about what God was telling him. He said that sometimes God was telling him simple things life: “You’re losing too much weight, Leonard. Force yourself to have a sandwich or something.” That really sounds like my mother, probably a lot like yours too. Maybe what we need to rediscover before we die is that connection between us and God, and between God and the rest of the universe...just like we were connected to our mother during the first few years of our lives.

This is one of my favorire songs by Leonard Cohen. It talks about death, and It starts with the image of an old woman who sees life only through a broken window, like my aunt and my mom who were looking at life through the window of a hospital room at the end of the third and final act of their lives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVeEmsAGHvw