LEONORA

Here rests our precious and beloved daughter, sister, and cousin Leonora,
daughter of the late Manuel dos Santos Lourenço and Sylvia Wallinger

Lisbon, 11 March 1981 – Innsbruck, 27 September 2001

Address by Sylvia Wallinger, delivered on 27 September 2015 at the memorial gathering at the Jewish Cemetery in Innsbruck

Dear friends and all those gathered here,

First of all, I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for finding the time and strength to stand here at Leonora’s grave and to come together in quiet remembrance.

After many years of effort, and following the death of Leonora’s father in Lisbon on 1 August 2009, we finally succeeded in bringing Leonora’s mortal remains from the Lourenço family grave in Sintra to the Jewish Cemetery here in Innsbruck, where she could be laid to rest among us.

I would therefore like to extend a particularly warm welcome to the members of the Jewish Community who are present today, and to express my gratitude to the community. After many obstacles had been overcome, permission was granted for my daughter to be laid to rest in this peaceful and dignified place of Jewish spirituality.

Fourteen years ago today, at 6:27 in the evening, Leonora died at the age of twenty in the intensive care unit of Innsbruck University Hospital, after a year-long struggle for her life.

Many of you gathered here supported her throughout her illness with leukaemia and remained with her until the end. You suffered with her, and at times you laughed with her. After her death, you were also present at the farewell ceremony at the cemetery in Hall, and some of you later visited her former grave in Sintra, Portugal.

Many of you here today—and many of those who cannot be physically present but have sent their greetings, their thoughts, and their prayers—carry a distinct and vivid image of Leonora within you. Yet not everyone gathered here had the opportunity to know her personally.

This gives us an opportunity, for a brief moment, to bring Leonora’s character, her actions, and her aspirations back into our thoughts. And I, as the person who was perhaps closest to her, though not necessarily the person who knew her best, would like to call forth a trace of memory for all those who feel touched by it—a memory that, according to the image each of us has, or once had, of Leonora, may continue to have a lasting and positive effect within us.

Leonora wished for a book to be written about her and her illness, so that an inner connection with her—and above all with her passionate dedication to medicine—might continue to live beyond her death.

That book was never written.

But today, at my request, a website dedicated to Leonora has gone online. It contains photographs and texts, including Leonora’s account of her illness up to June 2001, which, apart from its final lines, I wrote during her lifetime and which she had read and approved.

In this way, Leonora—or Leo—may become present to us again in spirit, if we wish to enter into a spiritual connection with her through the memories, feelings, and images of her that we carry within ourselves.

Leonora was a person of many facets, with a luminous core to her personality that she always kept hidden from view. Those who encountered her therefore tended to believe that they knew her in their own particular way, because she could be like a mirror.

Leonora was at once ever-changing and unchanging. Because of her fatal illness, she was compelled far too early to draw upon the full potential of her gifts and abilities, so that while still in the first flowering of her young life, she attained a maturity and serenity more often associated with age.

Zeev Mitzrabh will now lead us in prayer.

As we remain in silence for a few minutes—whether standing here or walking quietly in remembrance—I would also ask you to remember Leonora’s father, my beloved husband, Manuel Lourenço. Seven years after the death of his daughter, he developed cancer of the maxillary sinus and died from the disease only nine months later, after great suffering.

If I may express in two sentences the message that, as Leonora’s mother, I believe I have received from my daughter, it is this:

1. “Celebrate life in all its forms.”

2. “Celebrate the precious gift of your own human birth.”