Morgan Rae Kurowsky was full of life. She lived for excitement, for her numerous friends, and for her family. She felt deeply, and she lived life to the fullest. She was fearless. She was fantastic at everything she pursued.
I told my kids if you are going to do something, do it right, and she certainly did. Amongst her special skills was music. At twelve years of age her piano teacher "snuck" her into the high school summer music camp at the University of Alabama where she began to get the attention of the Director of the "Million Dollar Band". By thirteen years of age, her piano teacher said there was nothing left that she could teach Morgan. Morgan was section leader in marching band and drumline, amazing audiences with her four-mallet marimba playing. I loved to watch her play marimba, but it was a particularly special event when one could hear Morgan sing while playing piano. Her voice was amazing, with seemingly perfect pitch. Numerous times her mother and I would sneak up the stairs to the hallway outside her room so we could hear her sing in the shower. She was also a student of ballet. She wasn't satisfied until she mastered the ability to dance on pointe (on the tips of her toes). She was even a talented makeup artist; many of her friends were excited to have her do their makeup for dances, and one for her own wedding. She also graduated at the top of her high school class as a National Merit Scholar.
Morgan won a full scholarship to her chosen school, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), which she selected due to its reputation as a world-class medical school. In her second year there she was a Pre-med Senior with a 4.0 GPA. She was the Vice President of the Phi Sigma Honor Society, and Supplemental Instruction leader for a Pre-med course. The Sunday before her death, she and I sat at the computer to find her a flight to Spain. She was very excited to go study abroad and finish her Spanish Minor.
The most interesting part of her time at UAB was the long hours she spent in the Neuro-Oncology lab doing brain cancer research. The Neurosurgeon who runs the lab told me she was a leading student researcher, and together they were doing promising cutting-edge research. She was even teaching others how to achieve her research results. He was shocked to hear of her death.
Today someone told me "Every time I saw her, she was always such a bright light." You can see that light beaming from her face in so many of the pictures on the Pictures page of this website. She did, however, have darkness brought by Bipolar Disorder. One of her doctors also said she had Borderline Personality Disorder. Despite our hard searches for more an more new doctors with better solutions, it seems that all they could do was make her feel numb. She did not want to feel numb. Amongst the worst parts for her mother and me was the issue of the disease causing her to take unusual risks. Scary risks.
There was never a doubt that Morgan was going to be her own person. Though I'm sure it hurt when mean kids do what they do, she was never going to follow the herd. She knew who she was, and she was quite comfortable in her own skin.
The most amazing thing about Morgan I never realized until after her death. I assumed her schoolwork, her cancer research, her research on current events (as those who debated her well knew), and caring for her two dogs kept her very busy, even though she took time to come home to see her mother and me every few weeks. I certainly knew she had friends, but I figured that her workload and her disease kept her pretty internally focused. We have been extremely surprised by all the reports of all of the people she has touched--warm story after warm story of all of the people whose lives she made brighter. One person even told us that she stopped him from committing suicide. Clearly those are some of the reasons why there have been 3,778 visits to this website over the past few weeks.
Morgan was a truly brilliant person in every way. She was a genius, she was a scientist, she was an artist, and she was a philanthropist. Heaven has gained a very special angel indeed. Amen.
For more information, visit http://www.morgankurowsky.org/