Our dear friends Rosemary and Isaac hosted an unusual dinner party in their backyard last night.
They have been to hell, and 16 years later, try as they might, it does not seem likely that either ever will be whole again.
Last night’s gathering of perhaps half a hundred Persians, Armenians and standard-issue American Jews testified to the extraordinary fibre of their refusal to surrender to overwhelming forces.
Rosemary is an inordinately sensitive author and artist who, in her personal contract with life, has scaled uncommon heights. Her tenderly textured words have told intensely personalized stories that have graced our pages from the beginning.
As for the gentle Isaac, the embodiment of the notion that sweet silence is of the most desirable hue known to striving men, a further characterization regrettably must be postponed. Meanwhile, years of mourning may have numbed his warrior spirit but have failed to make a dent in his sense of kindness.
Up or Down?
At dusk, as Diane and I were walking down the Fairfax sidewalk to their longtime home, we were pondering exactly how to greet Isaac and Rosemary. My wife is the socializer, and I am the antithesis of a social butterfly, which already was sufficient conflict if we had been entering a traditional dinner party, let alone this uncharted one.
No one is likely to see this unique conjunction of starkly contrasting events again — on the same evening, a celebration of two joyous milestones and the painful commemoration of a heartbreaking accident that forever rearranged the lives of the five surviving members of Isaac and Rosemary’s family.
This evening was the quintessential trial for the still-grieving parents, the latest but far from the last test for their beaten-up hearts.
On the jubilant side, their New York and San Francisco precincts were heard from. Their daughter the doctor was home for a night from the Bay Area to celebrate her birthday with adoring family and friends. The Cohens also were celebrating the impending birth of their first grandchild, in Manhattan, where Isaac and Rosemary’s son is an oral surgeon and their daughter-in-law is engaged in her family’s business.
A Choiceless Burden
On a starlit evening under a very late summer sky, a splendid five-piece mariachi group, which understood the need for a balanced mood, elevated the joy to a fresh decibel.
The weekend also marked the 16th anniversary of the immeasurable sudden death of the Cohens’ 18-year-old daughter Liana. On the final Friday night in August1992, the family — two daughters, two sons, exquisitely skilled by any objective academic, cultural, moral barometer — was returning home from Shabbat services at their synagogue.
A crazed drunk driver rammed them. All six were severely injured, but the wounds were fatal only to beautiful Liana, who was to leave the next day to begin university studies.
By one reading, that was the hour the family clock stopped forever.
By another, this was the opportune but uninvited moment when each family member’s indomitable spirit took over, and the backbreaking burden on the scales of life has reflected a different, but horribly difficult, weight for all five of them.
