Maura Cassiana De Souza Memorial Scholarship

The Maura Cassiana De Souza Memorial Endowed Scholarship is established by Erin M. and Joel C. De Souza in memory of their daughter, Maura Cassiana De Souza. Maura was born on June 23, 1986, in Long Beach, California. The family moved to Spring, Texas when Maura was just one. She graduated from Spring High School in 2004, spent three months traveling with her family in Brazil when she was eight, and spent a semester with her grandmother in Brazil when she was 16. These experiences changed her outlook on life. Maura grew in her awareness of global circumstances, her compassion for those in need, and her thankfulness for her many blessings. She became known for her smile and her kindness. The Spring of 2008, her fourth year at SHSU was filled with many successes, but it would also be the same year that she was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer called sarcoma. Maura spent the next and last year of her life bravely battling sarcoma, and while she lost many things from the disease, she never lost her faith or her smile. This scholarship is her legacy, in addition to the many lives that she touched. Maura’s parents, Joel and Erin, want to encourage and support vocal students just like Maura, and reward them for being talented, smart, and kind. They hope that in some small way, Maura can continue to be an inspiration through this scholarship. They also hope that more people become aware of sarcoma and its devastation to the lives and families of many young cancer fighters. For those of you who receive this scholarship and who never knew Maura, who were young or maybe not even alive when she walked the earth, they leave you with these parting words from the last paragraph of The Bridge of San Luis Rev, by Thornton Wilder:

" … But soon we shall die and all memory of [. .. ] will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”