Following Cook’s death, his former patients are sharing memories of his kindness and humor in the examination room, his former co-workers are sharing the inspiration and mentorship he gave them and his family is sharing tales of their adventures in the wilderness.

Practicing family medicine and pediatric care here since 1975, he treated up to six generations of families through North Country Family Physicians, which he ran with doctors Roy Slaunwhite and Barry Kilbourne.

A public celebration of Cook’s life will be held this Sunday at the Dewey Mountain Recreation Center from 3 to 5 p.m.

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A Cook family Christmas card with their mountain of shoes pulled from their basement. (Provided photo)

Service with a smile

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Cook was born in Pennsylvania and attended medical school there. After finishing his residency in Buffalo in 1975, Slaunwhite told him about a pediatrician opening in Saranac Lake. He looked on the map and saw a lot of water, a lot of trees and a lot of snow. It was perfect. Eventually, Kilbourne joined the practice and the three ran North Country Family Physicians for many years.

When he got older, he started seeing adults as a general practitioner and then worked at the nursing home in Tupper Lake.

“George went with his age,” his wife, Marijke Ormel-Cook said with a chuckle.

George Cook, right, with Marijke Ormel-Cook and their grandchildren (Provided photo)

Each age group loved having him as their doctor, she said.

It didn’t matter if it was his 20 millionth earache; she said he never saw their ailments as inconsequential, always spent time with them and saw them as a person.

“My mantra has always been, ‘Let me in those rooms because that’s where the people are,'” Cook said in 2021. “I was so enthralled by what it meant to get to know people.”

Ormel-Cook said he was always trying to get the nurses to call him George instead of Dr. Cook. They worked as a team, she said.

“I worked in Dr Cook’s office as a nurse for twenty seven years with he and his partners, Dr Kilbourne and Dr Slaunwhite,” Shari St. Louis wrote in a message on Cook’s obituary. “We were the busiest best office to work for, they were the best bosses and were very good to us all. We shared some tears and many laughs over the years.”

George Cook and Marijke Ormel-Cook (Provided photo)

Holly Balzer-Harz, who now works at Adirondack Medical Center, recalled meeting Cook when she was a student at Paul Smith’s College and was sick.

“From then on I saw him here and there, around town,” she wrote. “When I had my first baby and he stopped in to say hi and tell me “good job, kid!”

“George gave all he had to his patients without hesitation,” Warrene McCarthy wrote. “He will be missed be many.”

One person, who only identified themselves as “Kiddo” in their note, said Cook helped guide them onto their path in the health care field.

“You were a bright light in the darkness of my teenage years and provided me with the parental influence that was lacking at home,” they wrote. “I am forever grateful for your patience, kindness, and willingness to help a kid who had lost her way. I’m over 25 years sober, have a beautiful family and home, and enjoy my career in medicine. Hope I’m making you proud Doc! Love, ‘Kiddo.'”

His former patients talked about how he would play hide-and-seek in the patient room, be generous with his time and attend the funerals of his patients.

“One fond memory that stands out is George bringing various mushrooms into the ER for me to see, spreading them out on the counter, bugs crawling all over,” Denise Griffin wrote. “George always had a big genuine smile.”

Cook retired for three days in 2013, but actually officially retired in 2021. He also became the medical director for High Peaks Hospice and for the Palliative Care program at Adirondack Health.

He saw people he helped recover from drowning as toddlers graduate from Paul Smith’s College. He’d tell families with sick children to bring the kids over to his house for assessments. He’d give his phone number to patients and Ormel-Cook joked that she got a crash-course in pediatrics listening to him talking on the phone.

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Adirondack adventures

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Ormel-Cook worked as a nurse practitioner herself.

“We met in the hospital,” she said.

She had come to the U.S. from the Netherlands to work and always planned to return home. But she’s now spent 43 years in the states because she fell in love with Cook.

“He was the best father,” Ormel-Cook said. “He loved his kids.”

They had four kids — Jessica Zobel, Mathew Cook, Annelies Cook and Marlijne Kruse — with two from a previous marriage. His son Matt is a physician assistant with Northern Nephrology in Plattsburgh.

Ormel-Cook said family dinners were so important. The kids were all going a dozen different directions with school, sports, music and other activities, but they’d always get together for supper and Cook would read the “The Chronicles of Narnia” or “Little House on the Prairie” to them before bed.

Ormel-Cook said their kids adopted many aspects of his personality — a love for family, for nature, for medicine, for reading and even his habit of being late.

Their Christmas family photos were creative. One year, they took every pair of shoes out of basement — a mountain of them — and piled them up in front of their six occupants. Another year, the pile was all of their bikes.

“He just had so many passions, and he would delve into them really deeply,” Annelies said.

And then, he’d find the next thing — writing letters, writing poetry, photography, singing, whitewater kayaking, skiing, biking, hiking, swimming.

The whole family shared his love for the outdoors. It gave him energy, Ormel-Cook said. Cook estimated in a 1995 Christmas letter that he slept outdoors 14% of the year and put on his skis, kayaks, bikes or boots for 400 hours per year.

They had many, many “adventures” together.

Ormel-Cook taught him to ice skate. When the kids were young, they would ski the Whiteface toll road with their poodle pulling the kids up in a sled. They had a houseboat on Lake Flower and would jump off the roof into the water.

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Like a doctor

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Cook’s obituary said he fulfilled his wish to “die like a doctor.”

Ormel-Cook admits she never fully knew what that meant. In her home country, she said people treat death differently — they talk about it more openly, things like medical aid in dying are legal and it is not a taboo topic.

This mentality was one Cook adopted, too.

To die like a doctor meant “to know what’s going on” — to accept, plan and understand. This was a mentality he sought to instill in others, too. Cook gave dozens of speeches on death around the Tri-Lakes, advising people to prepare for it.

“The death rate is holding steady at 100%,” he would tell crowds.

Cook himself battled skin cancer three times. In his years of working in hospice and palliative care, he had seen people talk too late with their families about dying and their wishes after they leave.

“He always said, ‘Nobody should die alone, afraid or in pain,'” Ormel-Cook said.

Cook died in his sleep, with dignity and without pain, she said. But for his family, it came too fast.

They were just adjusting to a terminal diagnosis he had received two weeks earlier. In that time, she said the whole family gathered from around the globe on a video call to discuss his wishes for a green burial and other matters.

“We all talked and laughed and giggled,” she said.