Dr Leslie Cabraal

A beacon of light for the poor

Fr. Aloysius Pieris, S.J.

Qualis vita, mors ita. So runs a Latin proverb. The manner of dying mirrors one's manner of living. The way Dr Leslie Cabraal left us makes sense when one looks at his whole life and his character.

Everything happened within the short space of one and a half months. Yet nothing was abrupt. For, his exit seemed planned, just as he would have wished it to be it was the climax of a series of unspoken good-byes. A husband who had been taking care of an ailing wife, was seen to slip away day by day from her desperate clasp; a father who had been a beacon of light for his children was gently flickering out of their sight; a physician who had gone round the ward for 40 odd years was himself anguishing in a hospital bed; a Christian who served his God faithfully, began to recognize the Voice that summoned him and decided to say "yes".

Dr Leslie Cabraal

The final call came at 7.45 am on October 10, 1994. The approaching death had itself educated him to face the great moment of truth. The sacraments of the Church and the assistance of the Church's ministers were available in abundance. I myself prayed with him and accompanied him in those uncertain moments of waiting for the truth to dawn. When the inevitable happened, he was more than prepared and more than resigned to go where he was called.

I have no words to express the sense of loss I feel since his demise; for our friendship had grown from strength to strength during the last three decades. He looked after me as he has done many other priests and nuns. His profession was also a ministry of caring, like that of a priest; it breeds friendship.

More than half of his 73 years of life was consecrated to this noble ministry of healing, the very ministry by which Jesus announced the coming of God's reign on earth. His close priest-friend and my brother, the late Fr Theodore Pieris, in one of his "mission vignettes" published in the Messenger in the 1950s, had made an interesting reference to then the young Dr Cabraal's unique style of doing his professional duties :- his unruffled calm that inspired confidence even in the most fatally ill among his patients, his round-the-clock attention to the poor in rural hospitals, his nose for diagnosis and his healing touch. No wonder, the people of Nawalapitiya had come in delegation to stop him from going to Horana on transfer. Ever since he left Horana three years ago, his name has grown to be almost synonymous with St. Michael's Nursing Home Colombo.

But wherever he served as a doctor, his professional efficiency went hand in hand with his reputation for being an exacting superior. Meticulous by nature and a perfectionist, he could not tolerate mediocrity. His subordinates had to do things superlatively well, or get out. But whoever tried to keep pace with him was never the worse for it.

However, it would be a mistake to think that his sense of duty ever made him a workaholic. He had a variety of other interests that kept his mind sane in the midst of work. For instance, he had an entourage of canine friends - all Alsatians, who won him national fame after they pocketed a whole series of prizes in one year alone. Globe-trotting became his other pass-time during the last two decades. He and Mrs Cabraal often relaxed together visiting friends and relations all over the world, enjoying the aesthetic achievements of the world's great civilizations and making pilgrimages to holy places. He had good friends in the Vatican, who brought him and his wife face to face with two popes - Paul V and John Paul II.

One cannot, however, speak of Dr Cabraal in the singular. He would not have achieved professional success or seen his children so well educated and so well placed in society, today, if not for his wife, Trixie, who stood by him in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, and kept the home fires burning.

Hence it is all the more incomprehensible to our puny minds, except in the light of our Faith, why she who shared the weight of the family with him for over four decades has now to bear the burden of his death in virtual silence. Deprived of the art of voicing her grief, she lives her saddest moments in the silent desert of her heart. "Give sorrow words" warns Shakespeare, "The grief that does not speak whispers the o'erfraught heart and bids it break".

On his birthday December 17, we, Leslie's friends, pray that his eternal "thank you" to her may never cease to reverberate within the depths of her being as God's own word of comfort, since it is only God who has a direct line to the human heart. To her and to her children, we offer our condolence and our continued friendship.

May he rest in peace ! May he watch over his dear ones from his heavenly home!