Laura was
born in Buenos Aires, Argentina May 12, 1976, to Nora Picoroso
and Carlos Alberto Rufino. She was a beautiful and healthy girl,
in fact she never went to a hospital until the day when that
horrible illness touch her.
She
started to talk with a large vocabulary very soon, sooner than
others of same age. Laura started to sing and enjoy music at
early age too, and become a professional when she was seven or
eight years old, singing in a record as background vocals, with
a popular singer here in Argentina: Sandra Mihanovich, and
singing in uncountable jingles for radio and TV.
When her
brother Pablo was born, she felt very happy, without a trace of
jealousy which is so common between brothers and sisters, she
always had a sensitive heart to people and animals, and she
loved pets, mainly cats. We have a survivor cat that is 13 years
old now, that belonged to her.
Laura become
a teenager like any other, with a lot of friends, going to rock
concerts, playing piano, talking for hours by telephone, she was
very close to me, we were very similar about our taste in music,
or sense of humor, we spent a lot of time together, after her
passing, many of her high school mates, told me, "She always
talked about her dad." In a way, I can say that she was "a
daddy's girl"...
Laura, or
Laurie (as we used to call her) was also a big fan of
computers, and she made a lot of good friends not on the
Internet (in that time was uncommon here) instead in that places
called BBS's or Bulletin Board Systems, where people used to
call through telephone lines with a computer. She was also kind
of math genius, she used to make algebraic calculations just for
fun, when she felt bored, she planned to study science at
College in 1996.
In
1995, in the earlier part of that year, she had otitis twice (a
middle ear infection), in that moment we didn't know that the
door was opened for something worse.
Then, on
Wednesday, December, 6, 1995, she started with a headache
and fever, nothing uncommon for a teenager girl. The next
day, she went to the local hospital with her mother, but she
didn't want to wait to see a doctor, because there were a lot of
people waiting. Her mother tried to convince her to go to
another hospital, but she refused.
On Friday,
December 8, she took a bath, and try to eat some fruit,
but she felt dizzy and started to vomit.
We called an ambulance at 5:30 am on, Saturday, December,
9. They came but didn't know the cause of her
illness, and they asked me if she drank something?
At
the hospital, the doctors asked her name , she responded, but
that was her last words., She stopped breathing in front of my
eyes.
Though
she overcame this situation , she fell into a comma.
The
doctors realize that she could have Meningitis, but they didn't
gave her antibiotics before they tested her to be sure, and time
was passing by...
Then the
nightmare, really began.
At 6 PM,
they gave us the bad news, , Laura had died.
My
wife couldn't walk, we felt shocked, thinking that this would be
a bad dream, that everything will be ok soon, but it wasn't.
I had, (and
still have) many questions, and fewer answers, how could this
happen? How a happy family of four, was destroyed in a blink?
How a brilliant brain was taken by a horrible illness like this?
It has no sense at all.
Laura used
to write down the sentence: "Life is Short"
Maybe
this is clue, maybe we all have our lives defined from the
moment we are born, I don't know, but I hope to find the
answer someday.
A friend of
Laura's told me, they had a chat about life and
death. He said, Laura ask him: "What do you think
happens when we die? He replied, " Just disappear? "
She said. "Oh no! I
don't think so..."
|
( Laurie )
We
love and miss her,
dad Machi, mother Nora, brother Juan Pablo