'So Long Marianne' - One Of My Favourite 60s Songs Brings A New Poignancy.

Now, we have a new ode to the passing of a loved one that will surely be added to the canon of memorable farewells.

When he heard from one of her close friends that his former lover lay dying of leukaemia thousands of miles away in Oslo, the response from the singer Leonard Cohen was heartfelt and immediate.

Old and failing, too, he would soon be reunited with her, he told his muse of decades past, the Norwegian beauty Marianne Stang Ihlen.

‘It only took two hours and in came this beautiful letter from Leonard to Marianne,’ her friend Jan Christian Mollestad recalled. ‘We brought it to her the next day and she was fully conscious and was so happy that he had already written something for her.’

Mollestad said he read the letter to Marianne before she died a week ago, aged 81 — she was the same age as Cohen.

Cohen’s words: ‘Well Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.

‘And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and for your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey.

‘Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.’

Mollestad said that when he read the line ‘stretch out your hand’, Marianne stretched out her own in response. Two days later — on July 29 — she lost consciousness and died. Mail.