I learned of the death of Leonie Boehmer via an e-mail from her daughter, Monica, sent to me and a handful of other recipients nine days after the fact as I was accompanying my late husband, Morris’s nephew, Joe, and his wife, Kathy, on a shopping trip in a Boscov’s in Christiana, Delaware, on a Sunday afternoon. I was staying with Joe and Kathy as a stopover on my way from Albuquerque to Frankfurt, Germany, where I intended to spend the rest of my life. Joe had been named Personal Representative of Morris’s estate, and I was there, for the most part, to transfer custody of Morris’s “residual estate,” which consisted of several boxes of his personal effects and the proceeds of the sale of the contents of the home we had shared for almost nineteen years, for disposition according to his Will.

I had left Albuquerque on the 4th of June, three days after I’d stopped by the skilled nursing facility, a re-purposed residence in the far Northeast Heights, where Leonie was being cared for in what I knew in my heart were her final days, to say my last “auf Wiedersehen.” Sadly, by this time, Parkinson’s and the infirmities of age had robbed her of the ability to communicate; but I believe she understood me nonetheless when I told her that these were our last moments together, that I was immensely grateful for her friendship, and would greatly miss her. She knew already about my plans to relocate to Frankfurt; we had often discussed it at our monthly lunches at Sweet Tomatoes (only when cream of mushroom soup was on offer!), from the opening of my German bank account in April 2017 to the month before I left to spend the month of April 2018 in Frankfurt looking for a place where I could live while looking for an apartment after selling my house and moving there. Exactly one week later, unbeknownst to me at the time, Leonie died.

I first became acquainted with Leonie Boehmer through the International Soundex Reunion Registry (ISRR). In late 1986, I traveled to Germany to begin looking for my birth mother, but was unable to establish her whereabouts more recently than the mid-1960s. Upon my departure, I contacted the Adoptions­vermittlung (adoption placement office) in Frankfurt, leaving with their promise of assistance in my search. (German adoption records have been open to adoptees since the late 1970s, and the social workers there will sometimes assist a returning adoptee beyond merely providing access to records.) Unfortunately, they, too, were unsuccessful. Not knowing where next to turn, and being engaged with efforts to contact the two older siblings I had just discovered I had, I put the birth-mother search on the back burner.

In late March 1987, after learning of its existence from Hal Aigner’s book, Faint Trails, but with no real expectation that it would do any good, I submitted my search data to the ISRR. In response, the ISRR referred me to Leonie, then President of Operation Identity and an active facilitator of adoption-related searches in Germany as a registered Independent Search Consultant. I telephoned her immediately. Leonie advised me that I was already doing all that could be done in the circumstances and wished me luck.

Although not actively involved in the search for my birth mother, Leonie did provide invaluable assistance in identifying and locating the man whom my mother had named as my birth father (she had given the social workers in Frankfurt only his name and month and year of birth), as well as finding and contacting my older sister. When I began publishing my newsletter, Geborener Deutscher, in 1988, she graciously helped me to write a profile of her for the first issue, and many of the German-born adoptees she had assisted wrote articles for the newsletter in subsequent years. In 1991, together with Christine Swientek, a well-known author on adoption-related topics in Germany, we also co-published a German-language newsletter, Das Adoptionsdreieck (“The Adoption Triangle”). That same year, I also started typesetting the Operation Identity Newsletter.

For whatever reason, we became friends and each of us visited the other in our respective homes in Albuquerque and Brooklyn over the ensuing years. In late 1991, we traveled together to Germany to reconnect with respective family and friends, as well as to meet mutual “friends-in-adoption” in various cities. At some point, she told me that she would gladly help me get settled should I ever want to relocate to Albuquerque. At the time, although I appreciated the gesture, I did not imagine I would ever avail myself of the offer. Then, in 1993, I did.

Upon reflection, it seems to me entirely appropriate that our respective lives in New Mexico ended practically simultaneously. It was Leonie’s offer of assistance that prompted me to move to Albuquerque when I decided to leave New York City 25 years earlier. And, if I hadn’t moved to Albuquerque, I never would have met the man with whom I fell in love, and who would eventually become my husband. And, most likely, I might never have been able to realize my dream of returning to live in the city where I was born.

For many, Leonie Boehmer was the Search Angel who enabled them to become reunited with their German family lost to adoption, and she was that to me, as well. But she offered me so much more than just search support and assistance; she gave me her friendship, and her love. She quite literally changed the course of my life, and for that I will be forever grateful.