Man and His Family Find the Self He Left Behind : Identity: Fourteen years ago, Leonard Cohn of San Marcos was someone else. Literally.

For everyone who has ever wanted to take a Mulligan in life, who wanted to leave it all behind and start over with an entirely new identity, meet Dennis Rarick. Better yet, meet Leonard Cohn, The Sequel.

Rarick was 35, a prominent figure in mathematics and computer science, a brain who was presenting his papers on linear computing to fellow scientists at The Hague.

But on a hot, humid day in August, 1976, mired in a personal black hole of depression, Rarick walked out of his Bethesda, Md., apartment. He left behind his wallet, his private papers, his car and a cryptic note that his father remembers as saying:

“I’m going on the kind of a trip where you never come back.”

The 14-year trip has come to an end here, where Dennis Rarick--no, make that Leonard Cohn--has surfaced, alive, well, successful and now busily explaining to family and friends--and his wife of 10 years--how he ended one life and started another.

His father says he doesn’t want to ask too many questions. A brother says he figured Dennis would surface somewhere, somehow. His current wife is reconciling herself to finding out that her husband has a past, that he’s seven years older than what his driver’s license states--and that she has a father-in-law.

Even the bureaucracy is catching up with Leonard Cohn--or Leonard Dennis Rarick, the name he plans to adopt when he finishes all the paper work.

Court officials back in Maryland--where Rarick was listed as “presumed dead,” have now officially declared him very alive.

The Internal Revenue Service has even refunded Cohn $7,700 for taxes assessed on an inheritance that Rarick’s estate shouldn’t have been assessed because the guy never died.

Cohn came clean with his history last Christmas, although word of his two lives has only now surfaced because he went back to court last week in Montgomery County, Md., to clear up some records.

What caused him to unveil his background?

“There was no single event or critical thing. But it took a number of years to get over my emotional problems, and quite a few more years to gather the strength to come forward and tell the world what I had done,” said Cohn, a quiet, soft-spoken man who is now 49 and who owns a company in Mira Mesa that even he has trouble describing. “I’m a mathematician. I’m an algorithm design engineer. I solve problems.”

But even as a man steeped in the science of mathematics, engineering and computers--a man who said he was able to compartmentalize his past into a small box that he hid far back in a mind otherwise teeming with esoteric equations and formulas--he says he realizes the problems he himself has caused.

“Emotionally, I hurt a lot of people,” he said. “All I want to do at this point is for no one else to hurt anymore.”

He spent Life No. 2 productively: getting master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science, marrying, having two sons, building a successful business.

His wife, Martha Weaver--an opera singer for the San Diego Symphony and Opera--recalls that night last Christmas season when she got the word that Leonard Cohn, her husband, was also Dennis Rarick, presumed dead.

“He chose an evening when he knew I didn’t have a choir rehearsal. He said, ‘There’s something very serious I have to talk to you about.’ My first reaction was that he was ill. I never expected to hear what he told me--which was that, 14 years ago, because of some quite unreasonable emotional difficulties, he just decided to get away from everybody and everything.”

Over dinner, and in the ensuing weeks, he explained how he had concocted much of his personal history.

“I had told her I didn’t have a family and there were no records (of me) because I was a draft dodger,” he said. But now he was setting the record straight, and Weaver was dazed.

“It was a shock, like someone had died,” she said. There was such a strain, in fact, that the couple sought counseling.

“I was trying to get my trust in him back,” she said. “How could you lie to me after all these years? But I realized that through our relationship together, he became a complete person and was able to heal enough to the point where he could come forward with his past.”

“The hardest thing about coming clean,” Cohn said, “was facing my wife. I had lied to her for 10 years. Marriage is the one situation where you need to be open and honest in communications. I didn’t know what her reaction would be. It certainly created a crisis, and it was unclear for several months if we’d manage to work it out. But we did, and we’re stronger and closer now than we ever were.”

Cohn also had a wife in his previous life, but they had been divorced long before his disappearance.

After talking to his wife, Cohn then contacted his parents in Nashville, Ind., by writing them a letter that was delivered by an old friend.

“I was sitting in my easy chair when the phone rings,” recalled Keith Rarick, 76. “A woman who I knew--she was a friend of Dennis’--said, ‘I talked to Dennis today.’ This was the first I knew that he was alive.”

The woman said Cohn had left a letter for her to deliver to his parents. Please read it now, the elder Rarick asked. “It was apologetic,” he said. “It said something like, ‘I can never repay you for the hurt and damage I’ve done.’ ”

Ask him to call me, the father said.

“His voice sounded great. But there was sadness, too, that his mother could not be here to hear him,” Keith Rarick said. She had died four years earlier, not knowing the whereabouts of her oldest son or whether he was alive.

Keith Rarick had watched over his son’s estate, and finally--10 years after his disappearance--completed the necessary court papers that declared him “presumed dead.”

“I didn’t know what to think, one way or the other, about whether he died or just took off. And we never went to the extent of hiring private investigators to look for him,” he said. “One of my other sons said it might be a mistake to try to trail him because we might trigger a negative reaction, like a suicide, if he didn’t want to be found. So we sat quietly and waited for events to happen on their own.

“I’ve never asked him to explain why he did what he did, and I don’t intend to ever ask him. I don’t think he’s happy with what he did, in retrospect, and I have no reason to punish him by asking him about it.”

Father and son were reunited in person last May. “I purposely delayed going out to see him because I knew that Martha and he were having to absorb this realignment,” the father said. “To complicate the matters--for her to have to accept me that quickly, as a father-in-law she never knew about--would be just one more difficult element.”

Ron Rarick, a younger brother who heads the art department at the University of Indianapolis, said he knew his brother would surface sooner or later.

“I had no reason to believe he was dead,” he said. “I figured he was somewhere, doing something. There was no way of anticipating when and where we’d find out--if ever--what he had done with himself, but I’m not surprised he had taken on a new identity and been successful.”

For his part, Leonard Cohn said changing identities was not difficult--and about the best option available to him. Depressed over a crumbling relationship with a woman, and having considered suicide as an alternative, he decided simply to leave the old life behind.

“It was a matter of survival to me,” he said. “By doing something different, I was able to compartmentalize what was troubling me, put it in a box and stick it away in the back of my mind.”

He moved to New York City and lived for several months on $30 a week--money from savings he took with him.

“I spent $20 a week on a room, $9 on food and $1 for essentials,” he said.

For a new identity, he visited a cemetery, found the name Leonard Cohn--who had died as a child--on a tombstone, got the birth certificate and re-established a new paper trail for himself. The Jewish name sounded like a natural, Cohn said; he had converted to Judaism while in college, 15 years earlier.

He hung out at Columbia University, established a rapport with the professors in the electrical engineering department, displayed his proficiency on computers and got a job as a programmer. Claiming to be self-taught without even a high school degree, he was enrolled as a master’s student--and then earned his doctorate in computer science. He quickly established credibility, not just on campus but in the mathematics and computer fields, and soon found himself on the road, delivering papers to other scientists.

He met Martha Weaver in New York; they married and found their way to the West Coast about five years ago. They moved with their two young sons to San Marcos about 1 1/2 years ago.

And, until last December, he kept his secret.

“My wife has a difficult time understanding why this wasn’t constantly on my mind, that I was keeping this from her and my family,” he said. “The counselor explained that people who are logically constructed are capable of putting things in a box in a corner of their mind and ignoring it. I did. I would go for months at a time not even thinking about it. It just wasn’t there.”

But on a business trip to Washington late last year, Cohn started to bridge the two identities. “I was in a hotel room and I looked up the name of an old friend in the phone book,” he said. “He came over and we talked for three hours.”

The old friend’s reaction? “He was surprised--and delighted.”

So far, Cohn said, his sons also think of their father’s news as fun and exciting. “They will realize the seriousness of it when they get older,” he said.

Bridging the two identities has had its moments, the couple say.

“When his family calls,” Martha said, “they say, ‘Uh, is Den-uh-Len-uh-Den there?’ ”

Said Cohn: “She can’t believe I’m really seven years older than what my driver’s license says. I told her you’re only as old as you say you are.”