Two Sundays ago, on October 19, 2025, just after 4pm, my longtime friend Shane Coen breathed his last, and left his body behind to sleep in the stars.
Shane was a unique, vibrant, creative soul, who loved music, design, nature, and his family and community. His passion for landscape design and the architecture of public space inspired his work building and creating environments designed to connect communities and Nature, bringing people and place together to evolve a better world across time, space and culture.
Shane and I were born within 6 weeks of each other, and we first met when we were wide-eyed 21 year olds, during my first few months in the Amherst area in the mid-80s. I was recalibrating to the default world after three renunciate years in my Cambridge healing community; Shane was preparing for his Landscape Architecture & Design graduate school program at the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at UMass Amherst. We bonded through our shared community, our joy in living, and our mutual love of music—especially classic Jamaican roots reggae and the Grateful Dead. We also loved using plants to get high together back in the day, dancing and laughing and celebrating the wonders of Nature. We spent years seeing tons of shows and enjoying the vibrant Western Mass community together, and we bonded for life.
Plants and wild life were a big part of Shane’s life story; he found joy walking through the forest, experiencing trees and plants, and especially foraging for wild mushrooms–which he sure had a natural gift for! While he later worked with plants professionally to bring joy and perspective into the modern world through his award-winning landscape design firm Coen + Partners, he knew their darker side as well. Shane was among my friends back in the day whose love for plants landed him in unhealthy patterns of using super refined and addictive compounds like heroin and cocaine; after we lost a number of friends to addiction and overdose, Shaney got the memo and went to Hazelden treatment center in the Twin Cities to begin his road to recovery. He stayed based in Minnesota for the remainder of his years, co-founding Coen-Stumpf there with a fellow recoverer, and eventually marrying Kat and bringing two gorgeous children, Ryder and Nico, into the world.
Shane is one of the very few people I knew who left the world of hard drug addiction and successfully created a new life for himself, working happily at the top of his field and finding happiness and connection in new and beautiful ways. That in itself distinguished him from the crowd, and he continued to speak and engage in the recovery community, hoping to inspire others to build healthy lives for themselves beyond addiction.
We stayed in touch over the years, catching live music, comparing notes on our journeys through life, sometimes dreaming up fun projects, enjoying the occasional romp in the New England woods, which he loved. (He had a special love for White Pine trees, which he felt were often overlooked by others, and my back forty has plenty of those, so those were always fun walks.) It was my joy to follow and celebrate his ongoing adventures and accomplishments. One of his earlier big professional projects was Jackson Meadow in Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota, a meticulously planned small community development that he spent years designing and later lived at for many years with his young and growing family. A couple years earlier when he and I were road tripping together in Vermont I brought him to Thetford, the little town just West of the Connecticut River where my grandparents had bought a rundown farmhouse during the Depression and where my family had remained connected ever since. He was so struck by the classic beauty of the New England architectural vernacular of the houses around the small Thetford Center green that he insisted on roaming around through town and taking tons of photographs of the simple yet satisfying lines and proportions that have made New England architecture so beloved over the centuries. He then used that architectural alphabet to model the Jackson Meadow housing design—bringing a little of my childhood to life in a new way. That was classic Shane: seeing the surrounding patterns and beauty in ways that may have slipped by other folks, but which he could recognize and perhaps repurpose or integrate in a way to help create livable, sustainable and satisfying public and private spaces where people might happily live and work, bringing community and nature together.
Shane and I were often taken for blood brothers when we’d go out in public, and I think we both enjoyed that. We shared a natural closeness that knit us together, even when life’s busyness might mean we’d go for some months without contact.
When Shane began navigating some difficult health challenges in late 2024, he chose to keep this journey extremely private; I didn’t find out until we spoke one day early this past summer and he mentioned he was dealing with some health stuff and coming to Concord New Hampshire (a couple hours drive from me) to seek some alternative treatment. I said “Wait, you’re coming to Concord, tomorrow? And dealing with some health challenges? Okay, I’m coming up: I’ll see you tomorrow.” I spent several days there catching up and coming up to speed, and returned a month or two later for another few days—still not fully realizing how serious his condition was.
After he returned to his hometown of Boulder in late September to be with his family during his father’s last days, the next message was that he was returning to New Hampshire–and it turned out that was his last week in his body. I remain deeply moved to have heard early that week from his second wife, Sara, and his children, and to have been invited by each of them to share what turned out to be his last tender week in his increasingly fragile body. I cooked soup and made salad and grilled cheese for the family. I played my harmonium and chanted with him. I curated some final playlists of vintage Jamaican reggae and classic Grateful Dead tunes, a last wave of enjoying together the music that has been the soundtrack of our lives.
In a simple twist of fate, our old buddy Tommy also happened to be in New England at that time and was able to be with us for a couple of days at the very end.
In the end, with beeswax candles burning, on a sunny New England autumn Sunday afternoon, and surrounded by loving family, we witnessed the final breaths of our beloved Shane–our friend, father, husband, family member. With all the tears and heartache that comes with such a time, we did our best to let him go with grace, and were left behind with each other as Shane sailed into the Mystic.
What to say? Shane Coen was a beautiful man: deep feeling and kind, human and flawed, joyful and inspired, and with a love for life and an infectious enthusiasm that helped him bring people together to create beauty and sacred spaces in the natural world, where people live and move and find our way. He will be remembered fondly, and held in the hearts of many in the years to come.
Fare you well, friend. We love you more than words can tell.
It all rolls into one
and nothing comes for free
There’s nothing you can hold
for very long
And when you hear that song
come crying like the wind
it seems like all this life
was just a dream…
Robert Hunter
(Photo: a happy Shane showing off the gorgeous Lions Mane mushroom he foraged out in my back woods some years ago while we were roaming the hill behind my old farmstead.)
