Remembering this curious and unrelenting force of nature is not particularly hard to do, especially on the day of his departure for new molecular adventures.  But since I’m migrating two memorial Facebook posts into one for posterity and merging them into one here, please join me in celebrating my father-in-law, Ira Jay Cohen.  Seven years ago today he shrugged off his mortal coil, and two weeks prior we took this last photograph together.

It was another beautiful autumn day on Wolf Lake… we were celebrating my birthday.  Over the summer we made arrangements to buy his Harley, since his plans were to sell it on Craigslist.  I couldn’t imagine simply giving that beautiful piece of art, of himself, to a total stranger.  This shot was taken just before I drove it home for the first time, unregistered, up into the still-rustic Route 209 with Joe and Lisa Pallone and through the sublimely painted 9W corridor, with Heather and the boys up ahead in our man-van.  I had never ridden on a 660-lb touring bike in my life until that day, and the carb was leaking gas.

For several years running he was not really in good enough health to ride any bike, much less Bertha, and while it probably gave him comfort that some schmuck part-timer from Narrowsburg wasn’t riding it off into the proverbial sunset, it must have been so hard for him to part with something that so uniquely captured who he was both inside and out.  For he was a warrior, a survivor, a student, a Silverback.  And his bike was all about that for a guy who almost lost his leg in a horrific motorcycle accident in the early 70’s… one that perhaps changed his perspective on life in ways that probably even he didn’t fully recognize, despite his jaw-dropping intellect.

I also suspect letting go was easier for him because he knew his frail and aging body – which fought a brilliant strategic war, carried forward for ages longer than most mere mortals toward the end by daily acts of sheer defiance – would shortly be unable to responsibly host his ever-whirling, ever-searching, indefatigable life force. You can see it in his eyes here… he wasn’t one to always smile for a camera but this was a man, while still beautiful, was fighting off vast amounts of physical pain every hour of the day.  And he was tired.  So tired.  I didn’t anticipate missing the smell of his clothes or massive attack of his beard when kissing him goodbye (once able to pluck Heather from the house, which usually took like 2.5 hours).  But I do.  I really do.

You know, I resisted having another father.  I just didn’t have smarts or the stomach for it.  It terrified me.  But anyone reading this who knew the man also knows that I would not be let off so easy.  In fact, I would not be let off at all.  He was a hard person to deny, and he would influence me and guide me in spite of my tendency to avoid calls to adulthood, authorship and accountability.  And in addition to spite, perhaps even love.

Here are just a few of the “Ten Commandments” he left me:

I – Read every contract.

II – Be your own advocate.

III – Let music fill the rooms.

IV – Collect beautiful things.

V – The weirder you dress, the better you have to be.

VI – If you can, spend other people’s money first.

VII – Sometimes, drive recklessly, then blame others.

VIII – Learn how to use a chainsaw.

IX – Learn how to NOT use a chainsaw.

X – Apologize.

There’s a lot more to say about the man and how I experienced him, but today – and for these times generally – let’s remember his dogged (AKA maddening) persistence.  I get a daily reminder of this thanks to my two boys (especially Ike), who were clearly born with this trait and I have him to thank methinks.  They certainly didn’t get it from my father, who was about as persistent as Andy Capp.  It was this determination that culminated in the appearance of Althea, a 1,500-pound cast iron dragon with red lamps for eyes, in his backyard.  Despite well-reasoned scrutiny and protest from family, he had a vision.  He willed it into existence. Commissioned it, had it fabricated by a local artist, delivered and installed at a gut-quivering cost (at least for me).  You couldn’t interfere with the man when inspiration struck him, and he was usually right at the end of the day (Althea is majestic and extraordinary… I can’t bear the thought of it ever being in the hands of someone outside our family).

I would experience this in incredible fashion one-on-one in early June 2013.  By that time, he was doing dialysis at home, and was restless, not sleeping well as the full complement of his medical issues started to close in on him, as diligent as he and Sandy were about maintaining his daily care regimen. Those challenges were rough enough, especially losing kidney function and his entire pancreas (making him both diabetic and an extraordinarily rare survivor of pancreatic cancer) but they were also very hard on his heart, which would eventually be what killed him.

At Wolf Lake, I generally woke up hours before anyone else, drank stupid amounts of coffee and read books. I also spent a lot of time photographing the property and sitting lakeside in attempted contemplation (mixed results there).  By 2013 however, Ira was so uncomfortable in bed he would squeak downstairs in his robe just before dawn and pepper me with a battery of questions on a multitude of topics (this is what he’d call “having a conversation”).  It was always about family, career, or music – his passions. He hated small talk almost as much as he hated injustice, and he hated that a lot.  Then maybe he’d drift off to sleep in his recliner, I’d read some more, and the only audible sound would be two humans breathing together at dawn.  That’s a pretty cool thing to do together in solitude, when you think about it, especially in a space where loud music, the squeal of children, barking dogs and loquacious siblings typically rule the day like Alexander the Great in a K-hole.

Sometimes he’d start and cry out, due to a sharp pain or an aching muscle, but Ira was always emoting, even when not really in pain.  He he’d punctuate every toss of sod into his garden cart, every successful weed extraction, every press of twisted newspaper into the fireplace with “Aah!” or “Ooh!” or “Hah!” so likewise for a crook in his neck or a numb foot. It was just who he was, and my wife is exactly the same way.  No big deal.  But that morning he really started complaining about his neck and back incessantly, and he couldn’t settle.  No drifting off to sleep, just wincing and crying out.  I asked him if he wanted me to wake up Sandy or take him to urgent care and he dismissed those notions with a wave, instead asking me to rub his neck.  “Ooh!  Ahh!  Hah!”

By now of course most of you are saying to yourselves, “Ketzer you dumb fuck he was having a heart attack!” or at least “Why didn’t you just call an ambulance?”  And my answer is… I don’t know.  It’s not like I don’t recognize the signs.  I’ve watched people having actual heart attacks before, and if you spend any time on this page you also know that a massive one killed my father when I was young.  So. I don’t know.  I have no clue, except to say that you walk on eggshells around the Silverback, and you do what he says.  And that morning he put on his slippers, grabbed his overcoat from the foyer closet and said, “Let’s go for a walk.”  So we went for a walk.

We kept talking as he shuffled down S. Shore Drive, still clearly in pain, down to a home on the other side of the road that had been vacant for a few years.  The year prior several young ash trees had fallen on that property and we drove over with a chainsaw to gobble all that good firewood up into his Subaru to feed the ever-expanding woodpile in his garage, which was like the Opus 40 of woodpiles. You see, Ira viewed any tree that fell on Wolf Lake that wasn’t obviously going to be claimed by another property owner as rightfully his, and his alone. But you had to act fast, and you had to be ready to explain to the lake association patrol what you were doing and why (which of course, he was).

That morning was chilly, and he was struggling, but just as I was contemplating faking a seizure so I could get him to turn around, he suddenly grabbed my shoulder and pointed toward the empty house.  He said, simply, “Look.”

I looked.

“It speaks to me,” he sighed with furrowed brow.

And I followed his finger, his gaze of Zeus, to the very spot where we basically stole someone’s trees in 2012 and sure enough, there stood a single pink mountain laurel.  Nothing else near it.  The Catskills are literally teaming with laurel, and if you have a light winter and not much rain in Springtime the blossoms are mesmerizingly beautiful, weaved into and against all the crooked limbs and the other flora in the canopy.  Insanely delicate white blossoms, like tiny faerie parasols left to dry on the deck, everywhere.  But very once in a while, you can find one with pink flowers. Not quite as uncommon as surviving pancreatic cancer, but still.

“Get the shovel,” he commanded.

When I returned he seemed to have rebounded somewhat, uplifted perhaps by the beauty of the rare plant or the reverie of past gardening adventures, but I think most likely his joy was the direct result of pilfering a rare pink mountain laurel and transplanting on his land.  Which we proceeded to do.  Quickly.

When we picked the right spot, I dug a massive hole (not easy to do in Sullivan County without heavy equipment) for the root ball and when finished I was surprised to see that he had gone to the garage, retrieved another shovel and was dragging along a sack of compost from his outdoor bin.  And we planted it knowing full well that mountain laurel is not easy to transplant, and that the odds were high against it surviving.  Then we went inside, where Sandy immediately called an ambulance to take him to Orange Regional Medical Center, because.  You know.  He was having a heart attack.

The following year, he’d have another, and be gone.

But not the mountain laurel.

It speaks to me.

Look.