“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
Marcus Aurelius
Memories in motion
Leon Kercova: Memorial Montage
A life remembered in photographs and home film.
His Life in Words
Remembering the life he shared with family and friends.
Leon was born in Ealing in the early hours of 23 September 2002, weighing eleven pounds. He was loud from the very beginning. More often than not, you heard Leon before you saw him, and the laugh came first: that deep, carrying laugh that travelled the length of a school corridor and told everyone within range that the day had improved.
He was quick-minded, and just as quick to make others laugh. As a small boy he learned his times tables faster than the lessons could keep pace with, and then continued, past twelve, past fifteen, all the way to twenty, simply because he wished to. He won the child genius award. He won prizes for his writing. When a birthday card needed words, it went to Leon, because he could write down the thing the rest of us only felt.
He was never just clever in a room. At eleven he joined a BMX circuit and rode it with very little regard for caution. He loved his football, supported Brentford, and was proud of the work experience he completed there, and he loved the water just as dearly. Above all he loved to understand how things were built and why they worked, often by taking them apart to find out.
The same boy held a funeral in the back garden for his goldfish, and mourned it sincerely, because he had loved it. We can smile at that now. We also understand it. He cared deeply for everything he loved.
That same curiosity extended naturally into the kitchen. He baked constantly. Burgers that became infamous. Macaroons. Through the pandemic he baked so prolifically that we used to say our teeth would pay for it, and he gave all of it away, because the making was only half of it. The other half was watching others enjoy what he had made.
Those were difficult years, and he met them well. He completed sixth form during the pandemic, at a new grammar school where he knew no one, and still secured a degree apprenticeship at Deloitte in Data and AI, chosen ahead of other offers. He was fascinated by the use of data in Formula 1. He had every reason to be proud of himself. He rarely spoke of it.
Leon made time for people in a way most of us only intend to. He would sit and talk for as long as you needed, and he had been able to do so since boyhood, holding his own with adults more than twice his age, no matter the topic. He was the one who carried the shopping in, the one who watered the neighbour's garden, the one who would get you out of the house for a much needed kickabout. No one around Leon felt awkward. He would not allow it.
He was twenty-three. It is nowhere near enough, and we will not pretend otherwise. But a life such as his is not measured only in years. It is measured in the laugh; in the help no one ever had to ask for; in a boy who took things apart to understand them, and a young man who listened as though no one else were in the room. He meant it, every time.
We were all fortunate to have known him.
A brother's tribute
Shemsi Kercova, his brother.
Leon was our friend. He was our brother. He was our son. And he will be, forever. Leon was my best friend. And I know, because of who he was, that at different stages of life he was also the best friend of many of you. Leon was only twenty-three years old. And yet he had such a profound positive impact on all of our lives. Leon gave so much warmth to others, even though he sometimes struggled to offer that same gentleness to himself. Seneca wrote, "It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it." We lived this.
Between ourselves, we laughed and made light of everything. Everything was fair game. The more difficult the adversity, the harder we worked to keep smiling and laughing.
To say it has been tough to uphold this tradition since Leon's passing would be an understatement. I know you have been watching over us all, laughing at the cruel irony of fate, urging us on, giving us strength. Leon lit up every room. Every interaction was a chance to laugh, to smile, to find the lightness in the heaviest of things. Babies and children loved Leon from the second they saw him. Over time, it dawned on us why. To them, Leon must have seemed like a giant, warm, friendly teddy bear, always welcoming, always smiling, always able to put a child at ease. Leon loved science. He loved his science sets, his experiments, and the joy of finding out how things worked.
That same natural curiosity found its way into baking, where he made the most amazing desserts. Whether academically or professionally, Leon could and did achieve whatever he set his mind to. And yet these external achievements were never what made him special.
The thing that made him special was the lift you felt the moment you saw his face.
There is a deeper memory we keep returning to.
Whenever Leon and I stepped outside in the evenings, he would turn his head skywards, hoping to catch the stars. He would point them out, recall the constellations, and then offer a fact about each one. The number of years the light had been travelling before it reached our eyes. The size of the star compared with our sun. The distances that no one can really hold in mind.
Then Leon would always bring it back to us. He would say that whatever trouble we were carrying that day could be eased by a sense of perspective. That our planet, our lives, our day-to-day worries are less than a grain of sand against the universe God created. And that the only thing left to do, knowing that, is to live this moment fully. Everything else is small. It worked. Every time. The awe of the shift would lift whatever I was carrying that day.
Leon would no doubt want us to keep that sense of perspective now. No matter how difficult. Leon, who so often looked upwards, who found awe in the heavens, who helped us see our lives beneath that vast and beautiful sky, is now at peace. And we hope and pray that God rests his soul, releases his spirit, and surrounds him with the same light he so often helped us see.
Wherever any of us stands, the sky is the same sky Leon gazes at in wonder. The stars are no further from us here than they are anywhere else in the world. They become a shared place of remembrance and meeting.
When the evening comes, and the sky begins to darken, and the first stars appear, let us look up. Let us look up to where Leon is now. Let us remember the vastness of God's creation. Let us remember that our lives, our grief, and our love are held within something greater than we can comprehend. Marcus Aurelius wrote, "Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them." Leon lived that line.
He watched the stars. He found beauty in being small under them. And now he runs and dances among them in spirit.
And so now, when we step outside in the evening and turn our heads skywards as Leon taught us to do, two things happen at once. The old gift returns; the weight of the day eases against the vastness above. But something new is there with it: the natural lifting that Leon himself always brought to us, the lift you felt the moment you saw his face, still here, still working. And in that lifting we see him, his spirit running and dancing with the stars, no longer beside us but among them now, meeting us there every time we look up.
Thank you, Leon. Run with the stars, and we will look out for you whenever we look up to the heavens.
Shemsi Kercova
A poem shared between Leon and his sister Klaidia
no help for that
there is a place in the heart that will never be filled a space and even during the best moments and the greatest times we will know it we will know it more than ever there is a place in the heart that will never be filled and we will wait and wait in that space.
The stars Leon loved
Cygnus
A swan carrying a soul through the heavens.
Orion
Watching over those who look up.
Libra
Harmony, fairness and beauty.
Pleiades
A close cluster of seven stars, a place for remembering those who have gone before.
Summer Triangle
Three points of light, holding one another up, as siblings.
Leon Kercova2002 - 2026