Longtime Great Neck Resident Sonia Cohen, beloved music teacher, composer and artist, died on March 11 at the age of 93.
“Most of the time when someone passes away there are tears, difficulty, crying,” said her husband of 71 years, Joseph Cohen. “My children and I were very happy that she never had a debilitating disease. She never had pain.”
Their marriage was the best kind of miracle, said Cohen, who lived with Sonia in Great Neck for 50 years. The two met at a fundraiser in 1939, where his future wife was playing duets on the piano. They married after a nine-month courtship.
During his three years overseas with the U.S. Army during World War II, Cohen said he wrote her every day.
Sonia wrote nearly everyday, despite a demanding job at a war plant, he said. It was a brief break from a career spent teaching piano to hundreds of students from her home and through Head Start.
“I came home and we continued to live an enriched life,” he said. “I don’t mean we were floating in money. We were floating in enjoyment of life and love.”
The couple raised three children, and during retirement visited Manhattan several times a week to attend the ballet, opera or hear chamber music.
After a massive stroke left her partially paralyzed at 80 years old, Sonia composed music that she could play using only her non-dominant left hand. Those pieces were proudly featured at private concerts in their own home, or the house of the fiddlers with which she played.
Though the stroke was a case of malpractice and need never have happened, Sonia did wallow in bitterness, Cohen said.
“She simply went on to live,” he said. “She did exercises everyday, and we used to walk her around the house.”
With the help of master artist Arline Michaelson of Great Neck, Sonia created paintings that were displayed at the Great Neck Library and The Graphic Eye in Port Washington.
Cohen said the stroke gradually brought her busy teaching schedule to a halt, with the exception of one student who could not bring himself to leave.
Sonia was immersed in music until the end when she requested from her hospital bed her favorite baritone, Dimitri Hvorostovsky, which they played with the aid of a small record player.
Sonia Cohen is survived by her three children, Andrew, Beth and David, and five grandchildren.
“It was a very quiet, very interesting life in Great Neck,” Joseph Cohen said.
