Following Leonard Cohen on Facebook made it feel like he was your family

I didn't know Leonard Cohen -- of course I didn't. But his loss is profound to me, as it is for so many, because I felt like I did.

His music affected into me so throughly that I couldn't imagine a dark moment where his words, whether I wanted company or not, reminded me I wasn't alone.

And then he became an unlikely public figure that I felt like I got to know through his Facebook page. I don't know how much Cohen himself (or his family) had to do with it, but the page's updates felt like the sort of thing you'd get from a relative.

Pictures of youth. Grainy cell phone shots. A man whose verses are etched into my brain as the paragon of elegance and sorrow trying to fix his car's engine and bending down to fix his shoes. Cohen's sense of humor was always in tact.

It's not the aspirational stuff we expect from our icons. It was just moments from the life of a man who helped us laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.