Obituary: Rachel Myers Cohen
August 9, 1850

Even before an individual finds his head hoary with the frosts of seventy winters, be often realizes the melancholy sensation of the poet who says “he feels like one who treads alone some banquet hall deserted.” One by one those whom he once knew and valued, disappear from the stage of life, and the little grass-covered hillock which marks their last resting-place, is all that is left to tell that they were once here and lived their brief span of years. We, too, have often pondered deeply, when we accompanied to their sepulchre the remains of departed friends, and yearly have we seen with pain the circle of those we valued growing narrower and narrower, without our wishing even to supply their places with new and more youthful substitutes. But it is well that we are thus taught our own mortality, and become gradually prepared to exchange ourselves the temporal for the eternal, a brief stay here for an abode in the world of spirits “where the wicked cease from troubling, and where the weary are at rest.”

These feelings came over us with renewed vigour when we lately witnessed the interment of Miss Rachel Myers Cohen, who was summoned away from this life in the night of Thursday, from the 8th to the 9th of August, after many years of great suffering, which she bore with calm resignation, so that even her sickness was made beautiful by the calmness with which she endured it. Deprived of sight by disease, she could still picture to her mind the friends she valued; and in every instance she displayed that yielding to her Maker’s will, which true religion alone can produce. She well exemplified the purity of the life of a Hebrew who serves the God, the Creator of heaven and earth; and when her end came she sank into death, as an infant falls asleep on its mother’s bosom, where it finds protection and care during the hours of repose. May she indeed have found the peace of the righteous before the Father of spirits, according to whose command she departed from this world.