This is the text, as best I recall, of the eulogy I gave for Ewa at her funeral. I hope it captures the essence of her personality.
So what can I tell you about Ewa?
She was a great teacher. Knew her stuff, prepared well, explained clearly.
She had an accent and some people assumed that would handicap her teaching.
But she had a technique to put the students at ease about it. At the start
of each new class she would close the doors to the classroom, gather all the
students around in a huddle and whisper, "I'm going to tell you a secret."
When everyone's curiosity was peaked she would say, "I've got an accent."
Yes she knew her stuff, prepared well, and explained clearly.
But that's not what made her a great teacher, that's what made her a competent
teacher.
What made her great was that she truly cared
about her students. She gave them her time and lots of it. She listened to
them and let them know she cared about them. She took them seriously. She
learned their names. She let them know how they were doing with regular feedback.
And when they did something good, she praised them - and she meant it; nothing
made Ewa happier than seeing her students do well.
She was an excellent research mathematician. She wrote two papers in Analysis
that both received exceptionally nice reviews in the Mathematical Reviews.
She solved a problem of mine in Combinatorics that had been around for over
a decade and many people had attacked it without success. I even tried hard
to discourage Ewa from working on the problem, but she persevered in spite
of me. And although I thought it would be impossible for her to solve it
– after several months of effort, she succeeded. In addition to those papers,
she and I wrote several joint papers together - including a chapter
in a forthcoming book. She had been invited to give a talk at an upcoming
conference in March and she was looking forward to that.
In her personal life, Ewa enjoyed many things. When she lived in Poland she
played volleyball and was captain of championship team from the University
of Gdansk. She took up tennis later in life and played regularly - often
on the Volvo teams where she was rated 5.0.
She loved to walk and we took many
hikes together and very long walks along the beach. She also ran for exercise
and in fact was an exercise 'nut' – when we traveled together and stopped
at a hotel, she would always ask first if they had an exercise room. She
was enthusiastic about life – she loved doing so many things and was always
active.
The way she played tennis exemplified her approach to life in general. She
went for everything. Her greatest strength in tennis was her determination
to get every ball back no matter how hard it might be to get to it. Once
when we were playing I hit a great shot at the net and was so confident that
I had won the point that I raised my arms in a sign of victory. As I did
this, the ball came flying back underneath my upraised arms for a winner
from Ewa. How she got to it I will never understand.
She had a strong spiritual side as well. It sounds cliché, but Ewa loved
her fellowman. Ewa was the most wonderful and truly kind person I have ever
known. And it was this that first attracted me to her. She was a great believer
that actions speak louder than words and she was active in many charitable
activities. Her favorite at the time of the accident was helping the girls
at the Florence Crittenden Center for Unwed mothers. She (occasionally accompanied
by me) would take them for meals and to the movies and other activities.
She also tutored some of them in Mathematics. One of the girls she tutored
last year will attend the College of Charleston this year thanks to Ewa's
efforts. The week before her accident Ewa had driven one of the Crittenden
girls to her home in Hartsville. Last night Father Fix read one Ewa's favorite
poems. let me read you another.
Here I read the poem, Abou
Ben Adhem.
But I LOVED Ewa and the kinds of things I've mentioned so far are things
that I admired her for, but the feelings of love that go so much deeper
are triggered not just by those things, but also by more subtle things
- her smile that was her trademark – she was always smiling. I loved that
smile more than I can ever express.
Another thing that touched me deeply was her vulnerability
- the things that made her cry. She was an exceptionally strong person
– for herself – never feeling self-pity, but she was acutely attuned to
the pains of others. Her vulnerability contrasted beautifully with her
strength.
She had a wonderful sense of humor. I loved her accent and the way she would
reverse her word order. She once called me on the phone to tell me that my
football team had "won by a gold-field." And, when she was still
very new to the United States, she refereed to someone as being "rich
and filthy." She once said that a song moved her so much that it gave
her "goose pimps."
Ewa admired selflessness and heroes and she had several people on her personal
hero list. They included Richard Feynman the Nobel prize winning physicist,
Maximillian Kolbe who gave his life for others in a Nazi concentration camp,
Zhuowei Yin a brilliant high-school student who died of cancer a year ago,
Mother Teresa for her humanitarian efforts, and of course her own mother,
Teresa, whose strength she so admired in helping them get out of Poland and
to the United States.
Now Ewa showed herself to be, as I always knew, a hero as well. And she was
brave, I always knew that - I never doubted her courage, determination and
strength but the recent events in the Intensive Care Unit in Savannah Georgia
demonstrated this to me dramatically.
That's a part of Ewa's life that only a few of us were really privy to –
and so many of you that we kept updated only saw the Reader's Digest condensed
version of what happened in Savannah. I regularly kept some of you up to
date on her progress but to really appreciate what she did, you had to see
it progress moment to moment.
That first night in the ICU she was so swollen and battered that I couldn't
recognize her. Her injuries were extensive and included a fractured right
arm and pelvic, 11 of 12 cracked ribs, a lot of internal bleeding, fluid
in her lungs, a collapsed lung, and most significantly severe head injuries.
She was in a coma. She remained in the coma for 11 days and it was touch
and go during all of that time. I was very nervous that she might not make
it. I asked one of her doctors, Doctor Davis, what her chances were. He
told me that of 100 patients in her condition he might expect 15 to make
it - the 'insult' to the body from her injuries was terribly great he said
and it is hard for the body to muster the defenses it needs to thwart them
all. I told him that I was now certain that Ewa would make it. For he had
just told me that it was possible for someone to recover from these injuries
and I knew that if anyone could, Ewa could.
While it's not true that I was absolutely confident that she would be OK,
I really did expect her to survive – I knew just how truly strong she was
both physically and mentally and I was counting on that.
She had to undergo some operations in her fragile state and those were scary
moments – she had her spleen removed and then in a separate operation her
gall bladder was removed. She came through both operations just fine. She
ran a high fever and was fighting off infections for some time.
Her mother Teresa and I had been told that Ewa might never wake up and that
if she did the best case scenario would be that she would only be able to
dress and feed herself and function perhaps at a high-school level intellectually.
"She's not going back to college teaching," we were told. And based
on the extent of her injuries that was probably an accurate prognosis.
But on the evening of December 21, after 11 days in
a coma and on my birthday, she opened her eyes when I asked her to. She was
not consistent, and I couldn't convince anybody that it wasn't just a coincidental
reflex action, but I told her before I left that night that I knew that she
had done it on purpose. The next morning she stuck out her tongue on command
from a doctor - and she was officially awake! We were high-fiving all over
the waiting room. Sticking out her tongue was her best trick for a day or
so, but she seemed to stick it out with a great deal of pride and wanted to
make sure that we saw what she could do. Her progress after this was fast
and dramatic.
She smiled - that beautiful smile!
She blinked her eyes - as many times as requested. Such
a determined wink, too.
She wanted us to see clearly what she could do.
At first she could not move anything below her neck. Then the next morning
when an intern came by, he said, "I've heard she's a mathematician."
I said, "that's right." He asked her – half-jokingly, "So,
Ewa, what's the square root of four?" And to everyone's amazement,
she held up two fingers on her left hand.
Still there is the fear in any head injury case that the person will lose
some cognitive ability or change their personality. I referred to Ewa as
Ewa Number 2, and wondered how she would compare to Ewa Number 1.
I imagined
that someday I would tell Ewa #2 about Ewa #1, and I wondered how the new
Ewa would view her previous self.
One day I leaned down to say something to her and she lifted her head and
kissed me. I was thrilled by that and told the nurse that meant that either
Ewa remembered me or she decided I was someone she wanted to get to know better.
It was about then that the doctors declared her no longer critical. Still,
they continued to keep her in the ICU and she was still connected to the respirator.
It would still be some time before she could breathe on her own.
She struggled to do everything we asked of her. Sometimes I tried to move
too fast and she was frustrated, but she responded so well to so many things.
She fought hard to get better and overcome her injuries. I was so glad to
see that the part of her personality that caused her to be so determined was
in tact. That same quality that caused her to get to impossible shots in tennis,
and persevere on hard mathematical problems. When I saw that was still there,
I knew she'd make it for sure.
One day a physical therapist was showing her mother and I
how to help Ewa exercise her arms. She was too weak to move them herself so
we were supposed to help her move them. After a few minutes the therapist
said that she thought Ewa was getting exhausted and we should quit for now.
As we were leaving the ICU, we looked back and saw Ewa trying to move her
arms by herself.
Still, I was worried about her emotional state – she was smiling all the
time. And she didn't have much to smile about. Could her smile be a symptom
of something ominous? One afternoon I came in when she had her suction tube
in her hand. She was smiling as usual and I said, "Ewa
I love your smile, but what would you do if you were mad at me right now."
She smiled even more, which at first disturbed me – then she reached over
and gently hit me on the head with the tube three times.
She progressed rapidly and finally she came to Columbia for rehabilitation.
She was effectively recovered from the accident and already a success story.
A tribute to her strength, determination and the support and care she received
in Savannah. She still had a tube in her throat, was frequently groggy and
in a great deal of pain. But she was progessing dramatically.
That last Friday in Columbia, she was Ewa Number1 after all. It was just like
old times. When I arrived at the clinic that afternoon, the speech therapist
met me at the door and said Ewa was making dazzling progress and had passed
all their cognitive tests with flying colors. She showed me how Ewa could
write on a pad with her left hand.
I was so excited I could hardly stand it. I rushed in and said to her, "So
I hear you can write with your left hand." She smiled and nodded yes.
I handed her a pad of paper and said, "So tell me what's on your mind."
She wrote with great difficulty, "I love you more than I can say."
These were the words to a song that Ewa had liked when she first came to the
United States and they had an extra special significance to me. I had whisperd
them softly to her while she was in her coma in Savannah.
I told her about her accident and how I wanted to take her back to Savannah
to meet the nurses and doctors that had cared for her there. She seemed
to like that idea. I told her about a mall near the hospital there where
they had a cinnamon bun place right next to a cappachino place - two of
her favorite things. I told her I was so sad the day I was there because
she wasn't there to enjoy it. I told her the first thing we would do when
we went to Savannah was to go to that mall for a cinnamon bun and coffee.
She communicated clearly – spelling her responses via an alphabet board.
Ewa and I were soul mates in every sense of the word, and I had missed our
conversations more than anything. 'Talking' to her, that Friday night was
more wonderful than I can possibly relate. She was coordinated, moved smoothly
and showed no motor disabilities of any kind. She knew what had happened to
her and was not distraught but excited about getting over it.
We made so many plans that night. There was so much that I was looking forward
to doing with and for her.
Then the next morning she was gone again.
I'll miss the things we did, but I'll miss far more the things we'll never
do.
The words of a song from the Great Gatsby come to mind.
What'll I do when you are far away and I am blue, what'll I do?
What'll I do with just a photograph to tell my troubles to.
What'll I do with only dreams of you that won't come true, What'll I do?
I admired Ewa for the things she could do, her talents,
her strengths, her abilities. I loved her for her caring way, her enthusiasm,
her vulnerabilities, and for the way she looked at me and the beautiful
things she said.
And finally, after watching her heroic efforts in Savannah she became a hero
to me.
I'll love and cherish her forever.
Ewa's Obituary