Paul Moishe Kohl, OD
My dear friend died after 11 years plus of dying and reminding everyone that he had cancer for each and every one day he lived. That was his introductory statement to all newcomers. But the lives he touched and helped is a very incredible long list. Period. Exclamation Point. Below are three items. An article I wrote about 'us' in 1994. An image I made of him the last year of his life. This image is also on the Chickmas.com site for the 2012 card. It is my impression of him in fetal position near the River Lethe. And lastly is the unspoken eulogy written for his Pacific University memorial service. Perhaps it is trying too hard to say all those things one doesn't really want to acknowledge & yet that was always the basis of our coffee talk.
Plant's Review of Books, 1994
Paul by the River Lethe Summer 2012
March 21, 2013
Oh Paul, you have left us. You have no idea how I missed you and I have
thought about you everyday the past two years. I am still very sorry
that you and I had not talked for such along time. I met you in 1981 and
we were both bearded and not quite the cloth cut of white belted - white
shoed optometrists across America. Both from easterly directions we
somehow ended up in the west hoping for some Lewis and Clark
independence of the past holdings. He, always the seeker of fellow people
who knew who was the President of Freedonia or who was Rufus T Firefly.
I knew him as a scared grade school boy who hunkered down under the
apartment bathroom sink in fear of duck and cover politics of our atomic
childhood era. I knew him for his insight into the foibles of humans
and his ability to skewer people with that razor sharp decapitating
humor. I saw him humbled by the thought of bringing children into the
world and the atlas holding responsibility of teaching them how to live
when he was still validating how to live with his own good intellect and
fortune under the low ceiling skies of insecurity. He surrounded himself
with incredible good soulful people and was always so genuinely
surprised at how people loved him. I don't think 'love' was quite most
frequent vocabulary word that Paul uttered often and it certainly was
dwarfed by the past 11 years by the phrase, "I have cancer." That was
Paul. I have cancer. It could have been, I am a Jew. It could have been
I'm from New York. But in the last decade, it was I have cancer.
He was so stuck, in all the decades I knew him. He and I traveled to
Oakland in the middle 80s to see his climbing buddy. We listened to
Berlioz at Larry's house. We listened to Patrick Sky, to Doc Watson,
Lauro Nyro, Bob and Joan Baez and talked about Rory Block's father who
made sandals in Greenwich Village where I lived above Mamoun's falafel
shop. He gathered me up one night in March to photograph Cathy's first
born being delivered some 29 years ago. (tomorrow?)
So flash forward through all the accomplishments that you all know
about him. When I think about death and I see it and hear about it every
week in my work in geriatrics, -I see that people die like they live if
their mind is mostly intact. There is a sadness in Alzheimer's in that
vacancy. They really don't get an illusion of choice. In Paul's 'I have
cancer' identity, my sense was that it was comforting that he wasn't
vaporized by a Hiroshima or turned into a lampshade at Bergen Belsen. It
was that bathroom refuge that he hid in refusing to go to school for
fear of an atomic attack. It was some armband badge that he made it
along a natural arc of life to approaching death. Maybe a little too
early. But no different than Meatball his dear cat. He really wanted
Maja happy and married. He really wanted Jess to face his demons with
some grace. He wanted to see his redwoods survive the hillside of his 12
acres. He wanted Cathy to be provided for. He wanted to follow the
changing foliage on the east coast from mid-America to the north. He did
not. I asked him 20 times to come on a hike in the Gorge with me; I
asked him to try a new place instead of Produce Row. But cautious
control was a rule of Kohl. And like Meatball the cat with its
attachment disorder personality, the cat and Paul could easily walk away
needing you. He wouldn't hike as it was not the same as rock climbing
that he and Larry had done upon their arrival in the west of the 1980s.
And it seemed that all I could give him was that sense of control in the
last score of months. I sent him some music despite no talking. And
years ago, we had talked about the play-list of tunes he was going to
have at his memorial and I am hoping that is here. As he and I both knew
that we humans have such deep veins of conceit, evil, humor, honor,
selfishness, stubbornness, brilliance and failure, yet we also knew that
music has such a deep archival voice of nature in recording human
insight in eloquence and so we always agreed that music can better
articulate the real 'us'...one should let the music speak about & to us.
And for both of us I think Carmen McRae is dead correct in interpreting
Thelonius Monk's tune 'Looking Back': "we just peek through the crack of
what is real and what is false." And perhaps this is the crux of my dear
brotherly friend Paul, he worked hard at knowing what was good.bad,
true.false, dumb.smart...all those dualities and his trying to find
where is the needle pointing today on the compass path? He was such a
good hearted tender person without his really needing to put on some
critical evaluation scale. I have cancer. Yes you did; but get over it.
~ A. J. Zelada