Remembering Advocate David Cohen
Eulogy from 12/1/15
It’s only been five years since so many of us gathered here to remember my mother. On that day, as we celebrated my mother’s extraordinary life in this room full of friends, family and admirers I found myself speaking to one person — my father. He deeply loved my mother, but equally important but less appreciated was how important it was to him to celebrate a life. Dad called these bnai mitzvah, graduations, weddings, anniversaries and funerals “life cycle moments.” We have arrived at his final life cycle moment and it’s happening way too soon.
In the past month we had begun planning his 80th birthday tour. Sadly, this will now take the form of a memorial service. When we gather to honor him, he will not be with us to hear it. I look around the room at Gerry, Cindy, Betsy, Helen, Beryl, Carol, Sy and Liz, Bob and Carol, Michael and Bonnie, Kathleen and Art, Davina, Sally Beth, and Louise and the dozens of you could have and would have shared a David Cohen moment so that he would have known how you felt. I’m crushed by this. Yet, I want to let you in on a David Cohen secret.
Dad thought a lot about this gathering today. He frequently pondered what people would say about him when he was gone. We talked about this with greater frequency after my mother died, but the truth is Dad taught Eve and I at an early age to value the obituary page.
40 years ago I can close our eyes and see my dad in his tennis whites. His shirt dotted with rorschach shaped coffee stains and a panoply of assorted crumbs floating upon his chest. He sits at our dining room table on Holly Street and has returned from his Saturday morning tennis. My mother is making us round 7 of her famous french toast. Dad has the morning papers — the Post and Times. It’s a weekend so there’s no Wall Street Journal, but fear not. He had a standing rule that no newspaper could be thrown out before it had fully ripened. At any given time, Dad had a 9 month backlog of op-eds and obituaries too read. Among my first entrepreneurial ideas was to open a recycling factory in our basement. I figured the family could vertically integrate and create a circle of life for my father’s ocean of newsprint. Then I remembered that we didn’t own a toolkit. Never once in my 48 years did I see my father with a hammer or screwdriver in his hands. His tools were his curiosity and capacity to share and one of the things he shared most were obituaries.
You see, These were the lives of people who mattered. People who counted. And, as you can see from the people who are here now and the people who will gather this week and in the future, my father mattered.
My father’s rabbis have eloquently captured so much of what made him special in a place where he spent a great deal of his life. I calculate that Dad spent 4000 hours in this sanctuary. Shabbats, high holidays, but also helping Eve and I prepare for our bar and bat mitzvah, eulogizing his father, giving talks about politics or trips to Israel, kibitzing with his community, and — here I may be disclosing a bit of a family secret, devouring a good book during the less interesting parts of a service. Dad would want you to know he had a strict rule that I learned the hard way when I was prevented from bringing a sports novel into this sanctuary — — the books had to be and always were Jewish. Few know that the vast Judaica section at Politics and Prose was created to bolster my father’s options for the hundreds of services to come.
Dad the advocate, Dad the convener, Dad the jew, Dad seeker of justice. I want to talk to you about Dad the Dad. Where once I stood up here talking to my father about my mother, now I want to talk to my children about Dad the father and OV the grandfather.
It’s the summer of of 1975 and my father and I are locked in an epic battle on the shores of Gloucester, MA. The game is beach tennis. The court is made using your foot to draw lines in the sand. the racquets are your hands and the ball is made from the finest bouncy plastic. A year later we were on Holly street playing step ball (which dad had adopted from a game called stoop ball). Periodically he would be the PQ (permanent quarterback) of 2 on 2 touch between the telephone poles. It’s one thing to like sports, it’s another thing to play games, and it’s another thing to play games with the kids in the neighborhood. No other dads did it and we loved it. Dad played. A whole generation of Ry’s friends got to know him as OV who played tennis with them in Martha’s Vineyard and would do color commentary with me in the bleachers at Greenwich Village Little League.
It’s October 10th 1973 and Dad races into our living room twirls my mother around the room. He has turned 37 and it is on this day that he gets an early professional triumph. Spiro Agnew has resigned. Dad was involved. He’s ecstatic and I am 6. I don’t know who Spiro Agnew is. I do know that Dad went to work and work made him happy. Oh so going to work = happiness. Made sense to me.
40 years later, Dad and I are walking the streets of NYC. Well he’s shuffling and I’m having to walk backwards to make sure I don’t leave him 2 blocks behind. Proudly he tells me he’s gearing up for his final battle. He believes there’s a chance to strike a grand bargain with Iran and begin to create a more lasting peace in the middle east. My father was the opposite of Sisyphus. He was a professional optimist who died believing that ours was a species that would solve climate change and to learn to live peacefully with each other. His resilience was extraordinary. Having spent a lifetime working on campaign finance reform, my father’s final years included enduring the Citizens’ United case. When I called to console him about the “landmark decision” he said it was a “setback” but that the Internet was also enabling small donations. Professional Optimist
So while Dad is gearing up for his Iran fight, I remind him that he’s retired. He agrees and explains he will still visit because he has a laptop and a new iphone that works in the car! Work makes him happy.
Work. Work. Work…. play. When Nina and I had children, his priorities evolved. Mom and Dad joined us on family vacations and Dad and I began to play the games of my childhood with his grandchildren. He was renamed OV. It stood for Old Veteran. He and I agreed that it was a fitting name for it was how he referred to himself during all those times we played as father and children. He was the Old Veteran and I was the Young Lad (Eve was a lass). My entire childhood was narrated by my father’s commentary. Lad, great job clearing the dishwasher. Intriguing choice to take East West Highway to school. Nice execution on taking out the trash.
Today, Ry, Georgia and their friends beg me to do commentary. That’s a tradition we owe to the Old Veteran. Dad liked to think of himself as an old guy even when he was a young guy. And the Old Veteran mentored. OV the grandfather was not one to spoil, or even to dote. He never had candy and his presents were far from over the top. But he would take a granddaughter to a broadway musical or crunch the numbers on a grandson’s On-Base percentage. He would invest in making their interests his interests. For Ry, this meant weekly or daily newspaper clips about climate change. This past weekend he sat next to Georgia to get a texting lesson, but made her promise that nobody could know he was doing it. He was willing to text as OV, but would not do so as David. And now will never have those texts. He found great joy in being OV. He could see in Ry and Georgia that his spirit would continue.
Eve and I are crushed. Nina and Richard are crushed. My mother’s siblings actually they had become my father’s brothers and sisters mourn his loss. This ,I think, is heartache. And our hearts hurt. The loss is physically profound.
You honor my father by feeling that loss. You honor him by abiding by his traditions, sharing the story of his life and retelling it to others. But these jewish traditions and customs are a sprint and my father was much more of a long distance runner. Metaphorically I mean. It’s unclear that my father ever jogged even one mile. In the aggregate.
My father was a saint. A jewish cousin of the word would be Tzadik. He was righteous without being self-righteous. Where my mother wanted you to read, my father wanted you to do. He touched thousands of doers all over the world and his spirit lives on in them. Let it live on in you. Spend the next few days, weeks, and years asking yourself What would David do? What would Dad do? What would OV do? Nothing would make him happier than to know that the world will be a better place because he touched you. Let his spirit stay with you. The Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids saves thousands of lives every day, Politics and Prose thrives under extraordinary new ownership, and Tifereth Israel soars at a time when urban synagogues are in peril. This is his legacy.
And so are you Ry and Georgia. Here he is writing his close companion Louise Weiner the day before he died, “ Lovely giving thanks around the table at Thanksgiving in what has become a family ritual that I love. The children eagerly participated and kept coming back with more things to say each relevant I was particularly proud of how they both mixed personal with societal.”
This was why Dad was loved by so many of you. While he worked for the public interest he cared about the private individual. And you knew it. This is what it is to leave cynicism at the door, to never be disingenuous, and to not have a mean bone in your body. His sudden and swift departure gains meaning if we all pause and remember who he was. If we can absorb a tiny piece Dad t into our lives and learn to be a bit kinder, a shade more thoughtful.
David Cohen, Dad, OV — may his spirit stay with you forever. Our families, community and the world in which we live are a better place because of his 79 years.
