Honoring Andy Kohn: A life cut short offers lessons on giving and gratitude

It began as intended: a luxurious vacation to Greece, where Sally and Andy Kohn would splurge on the best accommodations and once-in-a-lifetime outings while reveling in Mediterranean culture with their closest friends, a Greek couple they’ve known for decades.

They arrived in Paros, in the heart of the country’s Cyclades islands, on Thursday, September 21, and went out for dinner that night. On Friday, they chartered a 50-foot-boat; the captain took the couples to little beaches and private coves not accessible by land. 

“It was truly a magical, magical day,” Sally said, going through pictures on her phone of the trip: she and Andy, along with their friends Evan and Anastasia, basking in the sun, smiling brightly with the crystal-clear Aegean Sea surrounding them. 

It looked perfect. 

That evening, after returning from dinner and a nightcap, Andy drifted to sleep with Sally beside him. Shortly after 3am, Sally awoke, alone in bed. She found Andy unresponsive on the bathroom floor; by the time help arrived it was too late. He had died of a massive heart attack. 

Two days into their dream trip, Sally was planning how to get her 56-year-old husband’s remains back to Northport. 

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Thanksgiving day will mark two months since Andy passed. Two years ago, the couple, consummate hosts, held Thanksgiving at their home, right off Middleville Road in Northport. Sally and Andy often invited friends over for pool and cocktail parties. But 2021 would mark the first time they’d host Thanksgiving – and they were up for the challenge. 

“We loved hosting,” Sally said. “Andy and I were a team. We just loved putting out great spreads of food – no amount of food could be too much.”

From a seat at the Kohns’ kitchen table, it’s easy to picture family and friends gathered around the large island, socializing and snacking on small bites as Andy played bartender in the background. The kitchen windows offer a view of the beautifully tiered backyard, the pool and newly installed fire pit. You can feel the warmth and energy in the home, even when it’s quiet and empty. 

That first Thanksgiving, Sally and Andy’s oven quit halfway through the cooking of the turkey. “Okay, everybody have another drink,” Sally recalled saying. And then a plan: the men would carry the main course and all of its accompaniments into the backyard, through the gate in the fence, to their neighbors’ (and party guests’) house and into their oven. 

“The turkey came out perfect,” Sally said. 

And that’s how it was for Sally and Andy who, for the 15 years since moving to Northport, had built an incredible network of friends, many of them neighbors – the kind of neighbors you install a gate in your fence for, to make the comings and goings even easier. It’s those friends and family who are now helping Sally navigate this new way of life, of living without Andy. 

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Sally and Andy met in 1996, co-workers at a private equity firm in Manhattan. When Sally left the firm in 1999, the two began dating. 

“I would go into his office and we would just talk. So we were really good friends,” Sally said.  Once she knew she was leaving the firm, Sally allowed herself to see Andy in a different light. They’d been together ever since. 

They lived their first decade as a couple in the city, and discovered Northport on a whim.

Frequent visitors to Bayville for golf outings with friends, Sally and Andy thought maybe a small house of their own on the island would offer a nice respite from city life. So for a few weekends they drove around, using 25A as their guide. During one trip, as they made their way from Huntington Village toward Northport, Sally told Andy to turn north on Woodbine Avenue. “Well, it's that approach at the top of the hill, as soon as you start driving down, you see the water and you see the boats. We told each other, ‘This is home. This is it,’” Sally said. “Neither of us had any connections to Northport other than it just felt like home.”

For years, Andy worked from their Northport residence while Sally commuted back and forth to the city; they kept their place in Manhattan until about eight years ago, when Northport became a full-time home for them both. The two filled their weekends running errands together, and became regulars at many local businesses: Robke’s, V&F Meat Center, Northport Deli, to name a few.

“There’s such a sense of family and community here,” Sally said. “Everyone just embraced us. When we came here, everyone was so down-to-earth and welcoming. And it instantly felt like home for us. And that's why I said I needed to bring Andy home and just have him here because this is our home. This is where we built our life.” 

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Sally made the decision to have Andy cremated in Greece; his remains arrived in Northport just two days before his October 28 celebration of life service. The service, at Nolan Funeral Home in Northport Village, was standing room only. 

“People loved being around Andy,” Sally said. “He was a private guy, but had such a great presence.” Sally spoke of Andy’s kind spirit, his loyalty and sense of humor, how he was a homebody but never missed a step when keeping up with Sally’s social nature.

Andy’s ability to not only listen, but pay attention to and remember the details in the lives of people whose paths he crossed has become a common theme since his death.

“He always took interest in other people,” Sally said. “He never put himself first. He just always cared and always asked questions.” She said a family friend put it best when he said that Andy could connect with an 8-year-old, a 28-year-old, a 58-year-old, or an 88-year-old. 

“He made such an impact on so many people’s lives,” she said. “And I just hope he knows how much of an impact he made because people are calling me from all directions, and all walks of life, and all stages of life to say so. Andy wouldn’t help someone or do something for someone for the acknowledgment of it; he just did things because it was the right thing to do. And that was a really cool thing about him, too. You know, he just did it because he wanted to help people. And never asked for or expected anything in return.”

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One of Andy’s final acts of giving will be posthumous, via Sally’s decision to have donations made in his memory to the Downtown Northport Basketball Court Revitalization project, a local effort to refurbish and expand the existing but long-neglected basketball court in Northport Village’s Cow Harbor Park. 

A campaign to revive the court began in the summer of 2021, with $65,000 quickly raised by initial outreach efforts on GoFundMe. The efforts to build the court, however, have been stalled by opposition to the project, with numerous rounds of back-and-forth detailed in local newspapers. 

“Andy had been so enthralled and just completely consumed by the story,” Sally said. He would relay the most recent articles to her, advocating for the court to be built despite not knowing the men behind the effort, members of the 1995 Northport High School Long Island boys championship basketball team. 

Whenever there was an article, Andy would update Sally, “and he would just get so into it,” she said. “He loved the story and he loved that it was, you know, five local guys from the basketball team trying to help improve the community and give back to the community. Andy was all about that.”

After Andy passed, Sally’s close friends began thinking about where, in lieu of flowers, donations could be sent. They asked Sally what he was passionate about. “That was the one thing that I could think of that he would be so psyched about people contributing to,” Sally said. 

So she reached out to lead organizers of the revitalization project, Thomas Radman and Doug Trani, and announced the call for donations in Andy’s obituary notice. In the time since his death, at least $16,000 has been raised by Sally and Andy’s friends and colleagues, all donated in Andy’s memory. 

As of yesterday, the project’s GoFundMe page had officially surpassed $86,000.

At Andy’s celebration of life service, Doug Trani asked Sally if she would cut the ribbon once the court was finally completed. Sally said yes. “I'm thrilled to be a part of their team, and I will do anything in my power to help,” she told the Journal.

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Right now, Sally is “encompassed by so much love” from her family, friends and coworkers; she recently returned to her job in the city, a decades-long routine she believes will bring her additional comfort. She feels thankful for all the support she’s received and understands too that there are gifts intertwined in her grief. She said she has every intention of honoring Andy and keeping up with their traditions: “I'm a very independent person, and he knows that,” she said. “I know he would be proud of me and would expect nothing less of me to continue doing the things that made us happy together.”

Sally said she hopes to be ready to host Thanksgiving next year and will continue to surround herself with the people who showered her and Andy with so much love, and now, support, in her time of loss. 

“You know, any way that I can possibly honor him, I will, because he was just a wonderful man and a wonderful husband. Our love story may have ended too short, but we had a love and a marriage like some people will never experience in their lifetime. So, you know, for that I have to look on the bright side. I'm just so grateful that we got to have all those amazing memories and times to reflect on.” 

To donate to the Downtown Northport Basketball Revitalization project in Andy’s memory, click here.