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Printer-Friendly ModeChildhood memories don’t make it easier
February 8, 2010 —
I became friends with Steve Ignatowski in kindergarten at St. Mary’s Elementary School. My older brother struggled in the public school system, resulting in my parents’ decision — though we weren’t Catholic or particularly religious at all — to put me in Catholic school. And so my best friend’s family was Polish Catholic — the Ignatowskis. For most of my childhood, I escaped the misfortunes and lack of structure in my own home, at least on the weekends, by goings to the Ignatowskis. They loved me and treated me like a son, and I never in my life thought that I would have to think about doing for them what they asked me to do this week.
Steve’s older sister, Amy, as we were growing up, was an extraordinary character. She had long blond hair, big brown eyes and a million-dollar smile framed by Angelina Jolie lips. She was the kind of friend’s older sister that it would be easy to have a crush on as a little kid. But she was hilarious. She was like my sister. I couldn’t ever see any of the Ignatowskis as anything but family. Amy was a daredevil, too, and more than a bit of a free spirit. One of my fondest memories came the summer that she was on a tether, house-arrest, for having too much fun.
So it was a July, 90-degree day and Amy was babysitting Steve and me with her fancy ankle bracelet. Their dad left us a list of chores to get done during the day, at the top of which was to clear the front porch of the infestation of flies that had conquered it to the point that it was no longer a viable corridor. This sun porch, probably 20 feet wide and at most 8 feet thick, had picture windows both into the house and facing out to the front lawn. The flies were so thick that, though the sun was shining, only occasional, thin, sparse rays of light reached the living room; a curtain of winged insects had caused an eternal state of twilight in the Ignatowski family room.
So we covered ourselves from head to foot in painter’s suits, work-gloves, fencing masks, chemistry goggles, tube socks and nostril plugs, and armed with Off, Raid, and flyswatters, charged into the front porch to lay waste to the invaders. Thinking back, I don’t know what the Off was meant to do, apart from making the flies hate themselves, thereby demoralizing the enemy. I don’t know how many we killed, probably hundreds of thousands, but it barely made a dent in their forces before Amy, overcome with disgust, retreated through the front door out onto the lawn, setting off her tether and causing the police to arrive only to find us clad in our fly-slaughtering garb.
This is the sort of memory — typical, believe it or not — that I have of growing up with the Ignatowskis. The occasional boredom only resulted in events that Dr. Suess would say are stranger than fiction. But more than they were fun, they were and are the most loving people I have ever known, which is why the past two years have been so incredibly difficult.
In the summer of 2008, Amy, then in the Coast Guard in Corpus Christie, Texas, training to be a part of a helicopter rescue team, was murdered. A man followed her home from the bar, or went home with her, and strangled her. I found out, because information travels so quickly and incautiously today, via somebody’s facebook status while sitting in the computer lab in Science East. The man wan who killed Amy was turned in by a friend after he told that friend that he thought he might have killed somebody while he was drunk. On February 8, he will finally stand trial in Texas after a series of appeals and postponements. The Ignatowskis asked me to write a letter to the court explaining the significance and magnitude of the loss of Amy to the Ignatowskis.
The magnitude is easy to describe: It devastated that family. How a family with such a conviction that a benevolent god rules the universe copes with the loss of such a wonderful sister and daughter is beyond me. They have not ever been the same, and who could expect them to be? I could say that, in much more descriptive and emotive words, but I cannot cope with what those words will mean to another family. Those words could put a young man, albeit a murderer, to death. I don’t think I can say entirely if that is right or wrong, but insofar as I can’t say, I can’t bring myself to take part in the killing of a human being, even if he took from me and so many beautiful people such a wonderful person as Amy.