In the last week of July 2016, a Norwegian filmmaker named Jan Christian Mollestad sat beside a hospital bed in Oslo and read a short letter aloud. It came from Leonard Cohen. It was meant for Marianne Ihlen, the woman he had loved on a Greek island in the 1960s and the Marianne of “So Long, Marianne.” She was dying. A little over three months later, so was he.
A text message nobody expected
Marianne Ihlen was 81. Only about two weeks earlier, she had visited Mollestad and seemed fit and healthy. Then a text message arrived: she was in the hospital, she was going to die, and she asked him to look after her husband and son.
At the hospital, Mollestad learned she had been diagnosed with leukemia and was not expected to live out the week. Marianne had one request. She wanted Leonard to know.
That night, Mollestad wrote to Leonard Cohen, apologizing for the intrusion, explaining that Marianne would soon die and saying it would mean a great deal if he could write something. What came back first was an automated reply saying Cohen was away. By early the next morning, the real answer was waiting.
What Leonard Cohen actually wrote
The letter was only a few sentences long. It opened with “Dearest Marianne,” and its first line was the one people still repeat today:
I’m just a little behind you, close enough to take your hand.
Leonard Cohen, then 81 himself, did not pretend to be well. He told her his old body had given up, just as hers had, and compared what was coming to an eviction notice that could arrive any day. He wrote that he had never forgotten her love or her beauty, then stopped himself, because she already knew that and nothing more needed saying. He wished her safe travels, called her an old friend, promised to see her down the road, and signed off with love and gratitude.
The moment she lifted her hand
Mollestad printed the letter in large type, slipped it into a plastic sleeve and took it to the hospital. He first read her his own note to Leonard, then Leonard’s reply.
Marianne was still fully awake. At her request, he filmed it. In that footage, which later appeared in Nick Broomfield’s documentary Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, she lies with her eyes barely open, visibly moved, murmuring that it was very beautiful. When Mollestad reached the line about Leonard being right behind her, close enough to reach her, Marianne raised her hand.
Two days later she slipped into a coma. She died on July 28, 2016.
The letter the world heard was not quite the letter he sent
Within days, Canada’s CBC radio tracked Mollestad down. The interviewer acknowledged he did not have the letter in front of him and asked whether he could remember it. He tried. On the recording, he stumbles, repeats phrases, and ends with a mumbled “something like that.”
That recollection, smoothed out for the CBC website, is the version that spread around the world. It was longer and gentler. It had Leonard predicting he would follow her very soon, praising her wisdom as well as her beauty, and picturing Marianne stretching out her hand to reach his.
Leonard Cohen’s own words, later published with permission from his estate in historian Simon Sebag Montefiore’s collection Written in History, were plainer. There was no talk of wisdom. In his version, he was the one close enough to take her hand. And instead of a soft goodbye, there was that eviction notice, a wry, unsentimental image from a man who knew exactly how sick he was.
Her last hour
After Marianne died, Mollestad wrote back to Leonard. Cohen later asked that his letter be shared as part of an online memorial to her. In it, Mollestad described how she received the farewell:
When we read it aloud, she smiled as only Marianne can.
He told Leonard that the letter gave her deep peace of mind, and that in her final hour he held her hand and hummed “Bird on the Wire” while she breathed very lightly. It was fitting. Marianne had long said that song began with her, on a gloomy day on Hydra when she told a stuck, depressed young poet to get up and write something.
For her funeral, she asked for another Leonard Cohen song to be played: “Anthem.”
A little over three months later
Leonard Cohen had been in declining health for much of 2016. On November 7, at his home in Los Angeles, he fell in the middle of the night and died in his sleep. He was 82. His death was announced three days later.
The farewell to Marianne suddenly read differently. “Just a little behind you” had turned out to be almost exactly true.
A year after his death, at a tribute concert in Montreal, his son Adam Cohen wove the letter into a performance of “So Long, Marianne.” The song he wrote for her in the 1960s and the note he sent her in 2016 finally sat side by side.
Do you remember where you were when you first heard “So Long, Marianne,” or when you learned the story behind this letter?