Mark Cohen
This is what I read at Dad's funeral:
I stand here today with deep love for my father — love that includes all of him, not a simplified version.
Dad was a complex man.
He was brilliant, curious, intense, sometimes overwhelming, often funny, and always unmistakably himself.
And he was committed to building a life for our family that had purpose and meaning.
Dad served in the Air Force and spent most of his professional life as a scientist and defense contractor.
One of the most defining choices he and Mom made was moving all four of us — Nicki, me, Lee, and Dale — to Israel in 1968.
That decision says a lot about him.
But it says just as much about Mom.
She had the courage and trust to follow his lead, to cross an ocean with four young children, and help build a life in a completely new place.
In Israel, Dad worked for Israeli Aircraft Industries and later for another company supporting the military.
And it was during those years that he told one of his favorite stories — that he had scored a ride in the back seat of a fighter jet.
As a kid, I thought that was heroic.
Years later, when I was serving in the United States Navy as a JAG, he asked if I could get such a ride in a Navy jet.
I explained the training and clearances, and mission necesssity required, and the conversation moved on.
But decades later, he quietly told me that the ride had never happened.
He apologized.
And that moment revealed something tender and honest in him.
It wasn’t the details of the story that mattered.
It was what the story meant to him — a longing to feel extraordinary, to feel included in the world of daring and accomplishment that he admired.
And it mattered to him, later in life, to tell the truth.
I’ll admit, after that, I sometimes wondered about other stories he told over the years.
He loved to share tales — like the one about going around a crooked gambling establishment, collecting the first easy win at each table until they threw him out.
It’s a great story.
It might even be true.
But after the jet story, part of me wondered.
And part of me didn’t mind wondering.
Because the stories weren’t about arrogance.
What I saw was a man who needed to feel capable, to feel intellectually present, to feel like he belonged in every conversation.
That need could be irritating at times, yes — but it came from a softer place, a vulnerable place, not from superiority.
I remember years ago, Nicki was working on her PhD dissertation in Educational Psychology.
She told me about how she tried to explain her work to him, and he kept interrupting, insisting on what he already “knew” about her field.
It was frustrating for her, and familiar to all of us.
But looking back, I see what was underneath it.
He wanted to understand.
He wanted to be included.
He wanted to remain important in the lives of his children, even as we grew into our own areas of knowledge.
That was his language.
And yet, in his later years, something truly softened in him.
His “Poelitics” poems arrived like dispatches from a newly opened room inside him — witty, sharp, reflective, sometimes even tender.
When he responded to my own writing, it was with a depth I hadn’t seen when I was younger.
When I wrote the line, “Creation gathers itself,” he loved it.
He held onto it.
He reflected on it.
And I’ve often wondered why that line spoke to him so deeply.
That line — something I wrote about the quiet moment before something new emerges — spoke to him deeply.
I think it’s because he understood, in his own way, that life is not a straight line.
A life gathers itself.
It gathers from striving and longing, from imagination and regret, from love and from loss.
And he knew loss.
The loss of my brother Dale at age 44 stayed with him.
It shaped him, quietly and permanently.
Through all of this — the stories, the need to know, the intensity, the vulnerability, the humor — he cared.
He tried.
He influenced us, taught us, challenged us, and loved us in the ways he knew how.
We became who we are, in part, by learning how to stand with him, against him, and ultimately beside him.
Today, we remember him honestly — not perfectly, but lovingly.
Not idealized, but whole.
Dad, thank you —
for what you gave,
for what you tried to give,
and even for what you struggled to give.
May your memory be a blessing.
Mark Cohen, Allen's son.