In March 2020, just as the pandemic was about to force the country into lockdown, Lynn Marcus was dealt a much more serious blow: Her daughter, Leilah Cohen, took her life.

It’s hard to imagine anything more painful for a parent than to lose a child, but the onslaught of COVID-19 made Leilah’s death even worse. Because of health concerns, Marcus recalls, her family couldn’t even hold a proper memorial for Leilah, who was 21; only immediate family members attended a masked funeral service.

But three years on, Marcus, of Northampton, has now arranged a proper memorial for her daughter — one that’s designed to celebrate her life as an artistic and sensitive person who had an infectious laugh and fought her depression and anxiety as best she could.

“Sanctuary,” a new exhibit at Anchor House of Artists in Northampton, features Leilah’s surrealistic drawings and collages, samples of her journal writing, and a number of other displays, including a graphite portrait of her drawn by her brother, Ben Cohen.

But Marcus, who’s worked with Anchor’s co-directors, the married couple Michael Tillyer and Susan Foley, hopes that “Sanctuary” can do something more: bring attention to growing rates of suicide and serious depression that have been documented in recent years in the U.S., especially among young people.

Last month, as one example, the federal Centers for Disease Control reported that nearly 1 in 3 high school girls said they had considered suicide — a 60% rise in the past decade — while about 6 in 10 girls felt persistently sad or hopeless, enough to halt their regular activities.

“I want people who are struggling to reach out for help, to share their stories and not suffer alone,” Marcus said. “Leilah found it really hard to accept help. She didn’t want to feel that she needed it … she wanted to be normal.”

Marcus says the exhibit will also finally allow Leilah’s friends and extended family to come together and remember the different faces her daughter showed the world.

“On one hand, she was very sensitive and felt things very strongly,” her mother said. “She could be very intense. But people who knew her, they all remember her laugh and how she could be silly and fun. That was very much part of who she was.”

And Anchor seems a fitting place for the exhibit: Tillyer, the founder, started the gallery in 1997 specifically to provide exhibit and studio space for artists who were dealing with mental health issues.

“What I wanted to provide was a platform for artists,” Tillyer said recently as he was hanging one of Leilah’s drawings, a dense concentration of faces and other objects.

“Healing has to come from within,” he said, “but art can be part of the process, so [Anchor] could ideally also be part of it as well.”

In fact, Leilah had approached Tillyer just shortly before she ended her life to ask if she might rent studio space at Anchor to work on some of her art.

“We had a nice conversation, but I didn’t hear from her after that,” he said.

Now that he’s had a chance to look at her work, including reviewing some of her journals, which contained poetry, observations of her life and the larger world, and drawings, Tillyer says he’s impressed by Leilah’s talent.

“She had a lot to offer,” he said, pointing as one example to a poem she wrote about the difficulty of just getting out of bed; her verse presents depression as a physical and psychological bully that holds her down and degrades her sense of self-worth.

“It’s very powerful,” Tillyer said.

‘She tried very hard’

As a younger girl, her daughter had been very shy, Marcus said. Yet she also enjoyed being a performer: She was a dancer, spending a number of years at Pioneer Valley Ballet, and she also danced as a student at the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School.

Art, in fact, runs in the family. Leilah’s father, Ed Cohen, is a wood artist and designer in the Valley, while Ben Cohen studied art at Skidmore College and now works as a tattoo artist in Brooklyn, New York.

Marcus says “Sanctuary” will include some video footage of Leilah dancing at 33 Hawley, the Northampton Community Arts Trust building, in a program conducted by Kelly Silliman, the program director of the Northampton Center for the Arts.

Her daughter, though, was dealing with rising levels of depression and anxiety as she got older. Neither counseling nor medication seemed to help much, Marcus says, and Leilah tried to fight through her pain by keeping busy and helping others.

As Marcus writes in exhibit notes, “She tried very hard to manage her own discomfort by focusing on others and distracting herself from her own darkness.”

Sometimes that worked. Marcus says Leilah finished high school at a residential school in eastern Massachusetts, took a cross-country trip with her brother, and also found work on an organic farm in northern California, where she was later offered an internship.

“She loved being outside, being in nature,” she said.

Leilah also did a solo hike on the Appalachian Trail in North Carolina and Virginia and spent a year at Warren Wilson College in western North Carolina, where she took creative writing and other courses. But her depression worsened and she ended up back in Northampton as the pandemic was picking up steam.

“She made friends,” said Marcus, who notes that some of Leilah’s classmates at Warren Wilson College later created a memorial there for her. “But she wasn’t able to reach out to them.”

For “Sanctuary,” Marcus has partnered with Pioneer Valley Coalition for Suicide Prevention, a regional chapter of the statewide organization that offers a range of resources for people contemplating suicide or who have lost loved ones to it.

At part of Northampton’s Monthly Arts Night Out, there will be an opening reception today (Friday, March 10) from 5 to 8 p.m. for “Sanctuary,” and PVCSP, which is co-sponsoring the exhibit, will offer free literature and other resources at the event, including a slideshow with photos of Leilah.

“We are honored to have a role in this, for the opportunity to participate in a meaningful and creative endeavor … and [to] support the wonderful mission of Anchor House of Artists,” Jen Matoney, co-chair of the coalition, said in an email.

“We deeply respect and applaud Lynn’s strength, courage, efforts, and dedication to making a difference,” Matoney said.

Matoney also noted that a national emergency phone number, 988, has now been established for 24/7 coverage if someone is feeling suicidal.

For her part, Marcus said it was difficult for her to put the exhibit together: “I’m not really a public person,” she explained. But she felt it was important to try to celebrate her daughter’s life and use that as an opportunity to convince others struggling with suicidal thoughts to seek help.

And she’s thankful Anchor House of Artists has let her do that. “I’m so grateful to them,” she said.

There will also be an open house for “Sanctuary” on March 18 from 12-2 p.m. The exhibit runs through March 31. Other artists featured at Anchor House this month include Vincent Spano, Nan Salky, and Helen Murphy.

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.

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