Leonard Cohen’s Son Adam Pens Tribute to Late Singer

Leonard Cohen‘s son Adam penned a tribute to his late father that also thanked fans for their “kind messages, outpouring of sympathy and for your love of my father.”

“My sister and I just buried my father in Montreal. With only immediate family and a few lifelong friends present, he was lowered into the ground in an unadorned pine box, next to his mother and father. Exactly as he’d asked,” Adam Cohen wrote.

“As I write this I’m thinking of my father’s unique blend of self-deprecation and dignity, his approachable elegance, his charisma without audacity, his old-world gentlemanliness and the hand-forged tower of his work.”

Adam would go on to thank his father for his wit and humor, “the wisdom he dispensed,” their conversations and for teaching him how to love Montreal and Greece.

“And I’d thank him for music; first for his music which seduced me as a boy, then for his encouragement of my own music and finally for the privilege of being able to make music with him,” Adam Cohen added.

Rufus Wainwright, the father of Cohen’s granddaughter Viva, said of the late singer-songwriter in a statement, “I had very few deeply personal experiences with Leonard, enough to count on one and a half hands. Like for most of us, for me he dwelled in a higher strata inhabited by some living but mostly passed icons who seemed to have this direct line to the galaxy, whilst at the same time knowing exactly when to take out the trash. Formidable in both the sacred and the mundane.”

Cohen died last week at the age of 82. His family did not reveal his cause of death, but Adam wrote at the time, “My father passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles with the knowledge that he had completed what he felt was one of his greatest records. He was writing up until his last moments with his unique brand of humor.”