Patricia Tonkin Obituary

Patricia Tonkin died on June 16th, 2025, precisely one week after her 80th birthday. She is survived by her desolated husband of 58 years (six weeks short of 59!), two daughters (Kirsten and Natalie), two grandchildren (Paul and Matthew Scott "Scotty"), four sisters (Janice, Marianne, Judy, and Deborah), and cousins and nieces and nephews and friends and students and thousands of people whose lives were changed by her even if they never met her.
She was consequential. She was stubborn. She was smart. And she tried, so very hard, for so very long.
The story of a life can't be told in an instant, and all the more true that is if the life lasted eighty years. There were triumphs and tragedies, despair and elation, rich times and poor ones, and if I only listed those things and their reasons I would have written a book. I won't.
So let me tell you about this wonderful woman so you'll know why she was wonderful and why so many people will care that she is no longer here.
Patricia Joyce Stefaniak was born in Detroit. Her father was Polish, her mother Ukrainian. They married and he went off to fight in the Pacific, a US Marine trained in jungle warfare. He did most of his fighting before he turned 21. Patricia was born when he was on Iwo Jima. When he came back, he drank a lot and didn't talk about the war. But he tried to provide for his family, which grew to include five daughters.
Patricia had migraine headaches from as far back as she could remember, but she did well in school. Money was tight, and there was tuition for the Catholic schools she attended, so as soon as she could earn money by baby-sitting she did, and paid her own way. Often those baby-sitting jobs extended to midnight and she had to get up the next morning at six to get to school. She was thirteen and fourteen years old. She couldn't eat breakfast because of the migraines and the nausea they caused.
After her freshman year of high school, the family moved to Romeo Michigan; her father had always dreamed of owning a farm, and one was available. Patricia wasn't going to a parochial school any more, but a public school. It wasn't in the city, but the country. All the other students had known each other since kindergarten and she knew no one. But she applied herself and won science fair contests with her talent in mathematics. I believe one was a description of projective geometry and its applications to quadratic equations. She would have been about fifteen then. There was one tub of hot water for the family of seven each day and the furnace burned deadfall wood. They made do.
The tuition problems were over but the money problems weren't. Patricia's summer vacations consisted of doing day care for children, five days a week all day. She'd dreamed of taking driver's training classes the summer after she turned 16. She worked instead, attending to twin two-year-old boys. Her migraines persisted, but so did she. She was selected to attend a special program for high school students and took a college math class at Oakland University before graduating from high school. That was almost unheard-of at the time. It's still rare.
She took the National Merit selection exam. That year, it was the PSAT. She did well enough to be named a finalist, and even won a small scholarship to attend the University of Michigan. She ran out of money toward the end of that year, but her grandmother (Ukrainian side; the Polish side was called Bapcia) gave her enough money to pay tuition and finish that year.
So Patricia went back to Oakland University and worked her way through the rest of her education – mostly as a grocery checker at A&P – almost always sharing a car with her father to attend school even though it meant getting up very early and usually returning to school in the evening (though the round trip was about 50 miles, and the car was a Volkswagen with basically no heater and no radio).
When I met her, her home was a madhouse. She was 20, her sister Janice was about a year and a half younger, and the rest of her sisters were full-on teenagers except for Debbie who was in probably second grade. Patricia was driving that Volkswagen to Oakland to sit in the grill and nurse a cup of coffee and smoke just so she could have some peace to study.
When I saw her for the first time, I will have to say what I've always told everyone: She looked like a painting of the Madonna. I thought she was way out of my league. And she always told me that she thought I was waiting for another girl, because I was too handsome (!!) for her.
I was too scared to ask her out that night, but a friend of mine from high school had arranged the whole thing and wanted to make sure I did. So he gave me a dime for the pay phone (the dime she'd given him) and ordered me to call her and ask her for a date. She was pleased to say yes, and I couldn't believe I was so lucky.
From that day to the day she died was more than 59 years, so I knew her longer and better even than her parents or sisters did, better than anyone. And she could have said the same thing for me. I loved her then and I love her now and I will never believe I told her that enough.
I proposed to her after I was drafted and in the army. I put it in writing and mailed it to her and I made sure it was completely clear that I was proposing and that I meant every word. And she said yes! And it was off to the races to get a wedding planned, and for me to take mandatory religion classes because her family wanted a Catholic church wedding. From the time we first met until the time we said "I do" was about six months. From the time I proposed until the time we were married was about two months. And she planned ALL of it. She did all the work. I just grunted my way through Basic Training. She arranged to have a $25 wedding dress and share the costs of the flowers at the wedding and all kinds of things that I will never fully appreciate.
So, we were a team when she graduated from college. Yeah, I was in the army then; I wasn't in school and was drafted and sent to Korea. Company Clerk. MASH unit. Near the DMZ. Sound familiar? But before she graduated I sent her a full military allotment from my measly military salary, which meant she didn't have to work QUITE as hard, and she had PX privileges and that meant she could go to the nearest military base and buy stuff at huge discounts there rather than at retail stores. So she and her whole family benefited. And when I got promoted and the money got better, the benefits became rather nicer. But by then she'd graduated and had an actual job teaching math to 7th graders. Commuting to work was a problem, though. And I could fix that for her.
As company clerk, I could write my own orders for rotation back to the USA. And so I gave myself ALL the rest of the leave I would have if I served the full two years, and sent myself out of Korea a few days early because I thought something bad would happen soon and I was right. But I was stateside then and they would sell me a new car. They would sell me a 1968 Ford Mustang fastback in Presidential Blue with a small V8 and a stick shift and a really good heater and a nice radio and it was just $65 and change a month for three years.
Soon enough, I was back in the army for the rest of my two years, and trying to get an early out to attend college while Patricia had a car of her own, the first such car of her life. But the best thing was that she could live away from her family and her teen-aged sisters, and when I got out of the army she could live with me.
That summer of 1968 was heaven. I did get out early to go to college – about a month – but it was just me and her and we were young. She still had headaches, but she was almost used to them. Almost. And she persevered. She did what she needed to do and she loved me.
When I got appendicitis, she drove me to the hospital. When I got a job working on the assembly line at Ford the next summer, she got up at 4:30 AM to make me breakfast. Patricia was a worker. And she loved me. And if the headaches wouldn't stop, neither would she. There was no stopping Patricia. Usually, that was a good thing. And when it wasn't, it was for a good reason.
I graduated in 1970, having finished my BA in less than two years – thanks to Patricia, working while I went to school. Thanks to the VA for my benefits. Thanks to my various jobs. But Patricia worked, she always worked, headaches be damned.
And so I went to grad school to get my MA. Patricia kept working – for a while. We'd planned to have children, and she'd already decided on a name: Kirsten. She loved that name and she didn't know why, but that was the name her first daughter would have if she ever were lucky enough to have a child and a daughter.
And so it was that she did have a daughter and did name her Kirsten. And that meant that she couldn't work as much and I had to work even more and now I was in grad school. So I became a part-time police officer and she substitute-taught when she could and her mother watched Kirsten and spoiled her because that's what Grandmas do.
When I got my MA in 1972, I went to the State of Michigan and asked them to find me a job, because I was looking and coming up empty. And they found me Chrysler, and that worked out perfectly and I was immediately making almost twice as much as she had been making. And it was time for me to work, and work hard. Even harder than I had on the assembly line. But I remembered what Patricia had done without complaint and I did it. And was promoted, three times in two years.
And Patricia had Natalie. And Patricia had health problems and gall bladder surgery (a big deal back then) and was sick and in pain a lot. But she persevered. She did a lot of persevering.
When life became even more difficult and Chrysler demanded that I lay off my whole department (six people) and do their jobs and mine, I told Patricia that we needed to leave Detroit and go somewhere else. And she agreed. And I found another job, in Chicago, for a lot more money.
So we moved to a place where she knew no one, far away from everyone who had helped her, to a State that didn't recognize her educational credentials, because she loved me and trusted me. And I knew that and promised that I would repay her trust.
I worked hard and was made an officer of the corporation in less than a year. I'd increased my salary by 50% when I'd moved, and increased it another 25% in a year. I did it because of what she was doing to take care of the children, alone, in a city where she knew no one.
Our social life was basically what we had from MENSA, an organization we both qualified for. We had instant friends and when we threw parties we knew the people attending would be good company, and perhaps good friends for decades to come. And we were right.
Our first home in Illinois was to a city known for high turnover – Hoffman Estates. It was relatively easy to sell our home in a short time and move to a place where we could settle. We moved to Highland Lake, an unincorporated area between Grayslake and Round Lake IL. We lived there for 18 years and loved it and loved our neighbors.
In the beginning, I had stable employment. She always said I was her greatest adventure, though, and I think we both knew I wouldn't be stably employed for very long. It took about three years before I was trying to make a living by being a free-lance computer programmer and DP consultant. That didn't work very well, but I did get a good reputation and was soon hired to be a systems engineer at Applied Digital Data Systems (ADDS). And then we had money to live on, again. It was less than I'd been making, but it was enough – and she trusted me, and still loved me, and so I worked all the harder.
ADDS sold out to another corporation and pretty much everyone was fired – on New Year's Eve, no less. I got the call at 11:45 PM. If the intent was to destroy our party, it failed. There was no party, not like that. I had Patricia, and that was enough. She had me, and it had always been enough.
I had gained a reputation for being a programmer, and back in those days it meant something different than it means now. Some of my programs consisted of writing things in machine language – a step below assembly, which most people think of as "talking to the machine". Nope, they'd write things like "Mov A, E". That almost looks like English, moving the A register to the E register. I'd write CDAF. CD was an operator, and AF was its operand. Their "Mov A,E" would be translated to the stuff I wrote. I wrote for the machine. CD and AF were binary representations of the native machine operations. If I'd had to, I could have written out CD and AF in binary.
That was nothing. Really, it wasn't. Patricia was feeding and educating our children. That was a job I couldn't do, and she could. She bought them food, too, and cooked it, and took care of them when they were sick, and cleaned up after them when they were.
Think about that, for a while. Patricia was smart. She was as smart as I was, and she could and would do those things to take care of the children we'd created. However hard I worked, it would never match what she'd done. Whatever triumphs I had were insignificant.
So I worked harder. This was the early days of computers, when everyone needed everything, and if you could program you were almost (but not quite) divine.
And I did everything. Want a printer driver written in hexadecimal, patched directly over the code you already have – the stuff that doesn't work? I have you covered. Need your operating system modified, and you don't have the source code? I can do it. I did stuff I don't know now how I did it, except I did do it and it didn't compare with what Patricia did. I wrote patches to programs that won chess championships, because it "felt" right, and it was. But Patricia fed and clothed our children and kept them warm and defended them against incompetent teachers, because she was Patricia and she was a FORCE.
I will now tell you that Patricia was an ultimate force, because if you messed with her children or her husband you were going to know complete disaster.
Meanwhile, I was ignorant of all of this. I was programming. I was writing a program that wrote programs. I was writing a word processor. I was writing system utilities. I wrote a compiler, a floating-point math package, and dozens of other packages.
Stop. Full stop. Patricia was as smart as me, maybe smarter. I told you that already, but I want you to understand that. She did other things and they weren't as exciting as what I did. They didn't make her famous. They didn't attract attention from famous people. She did things that needed to be done – getting orders packed, paying bills, making meals, shopping, washing dishes. She was really, really busy all the time, and so was I. I had the glamour, and she had the rest.
So she wasn't always happy and I didn't always understand why, but in the end she did those boring but needful things because she loved me more than I understood then and am only beginning to understand now, when it's too late.
But we had all those wonderful adventures together, and we got to be together far more than most couples; we had our own business together, we worked at NHC together, and we even taught at CLC together, for a time. When we took business trips to the West coast so I could speak at computer conferences, she represented our business (usually with Dave Wareham, who enjoyed the adventure himself and paid for a lot of the expenses). Alas, Dave died almost 20 years ago.
Patricia taught at CLC and loved it and her students loved her right back. She taught math to students who thought they were bad at math and couldn't learn and shouldn't try. But they learned, and discovered they were better than they had thought and had a future they had never thought to dream of.
Patricia always said that teaching at CLC was the best job she'd ever had. She taught until a month before her 72nd birthday, and stopped only because she just couldn't physically do it any more; the school wanted her back and offered her classes, but she was forced to listen to what her body was telling her. She did have fourteen years there, though. Many people never retire from a job they loved – they retire because they can't wait to get out.
Our bodies wear out. So many of our friends have died. It was inevitable that one of us would die, too. I was convinced that I would be the first. I was wrong. But now that I think of it, I should have known I would be wrong.
My wonderful Patricia had those migraines. They were supposed to abate when she was in her twenties. They didn't. They were supposed to abate when she had menopause. They didn't. They were supposed to be less frequent when she retired, but they became worse. She was losing feeling in her fingers and didn't know why. She had a heart attack (and never told me about it), then had heart problems that required a pacemaker. She survived breast cancer and lived nearly 30 years after it. She survived a burst artery in her stomach and losing about 2/3 of her blood supply. She had cataract surgery in both eyes, but shortly before the end she began losing her vision. Her hearing was bad and became worse. And she was so, so tired and hurt in so many places.
And at the end the health problems became a cascade, each more serious than the last and she had an awful cancer again and an infection and even more problems, until her damaged heart went too far wrong, too badly wrong, and couldn't be repaired and wouldn't ever get better and wasn't working well enough to keep her alive.
And so she died, having been in pain for years and soldiering on somehow, taking enjoyment where she could and when she could. And, if in the end I began to understand what she suffered and for how long and why and appreciate her, we grew together as a couple and held each other more tightly than before – because time was growing short, and we both knew it. I just didn't understand how short our time was, but perhaps she did.
We worked with Golden Retriever rescue organizations in Illinois and Wisconsin for more than 20 years, and that was one of the things that gave her pleasure. She loved those dogs, and they loved her right back the way only dogs can. I have one last Golden, Addie. We hadn't planned on adopting any more dogs, because we were old and sometimes dogs can be a lot of work (especially big dogs). But Good As Gold came to us; they had an older dog who needed Patricia's special touch and deserved a home to retire to. And so we adopted Addie, two years before Patricia died.
I have one last mission, now: To outlive Addie. I owe that to Patricia, and to Addie. It would only be fair that I complete that mission, but life isn't always fair. If it had been, Patricia wouldn't have known so much pain for so long and I would have been smarter and understood sooner what sacrifices she was making and why.
No, life isn't fair. But we make of it the best we can, and that will have to do. Soon enough, it will be my turn. I don't expect fairness there, either, but I've been luckier than Patricia. So far. But my story is not yet told, and hers is.
I've written two poems for my dear wife, who was the love of my life as I was of hers. One needs work, but one can stand and I hope its message brings you some comfort.
A Family Portrait
Days and days we ran in sun,
Spattered light, jumped and spun.
We had good luck so never knew
Our elders saw the world we drew.
Fortune favors few, we found
As life advanced, threw burdens 'round –
So raised our own on sunlit days,
Happy times and simple ways.
A child can't know how life is paid
How time is spent, nor work is weighed;
They draw our love, in warmest gold
Their elders buy, however sold.
When comes the end, and we are gone
Remember well how life was drawn –
With hugs and kisses, light and joy,
Olden things, a tattered toy.
When our life's a forgotten thing
And our last sigh the song we sing
Forever to our lost sunlight
Our picture stands, forever bright.
– By Bruce Tonkin, for his beloved wife Patricia, whose song ended too soon.
A Celebration of Life will be held at a later date. Please refer back to obituary for updates. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to As Good As Gold, Golden Retreiver Rescue of Illinois. For additonal information, please call (262) 728-2500.
Lazarczyk Family Funeral Homes of Delavan and Lake Geneva are proudly serving the family.
To send flowers to the family or plant a tree in memory of Patricia Joyce "PJ" Tonkin, please visit our floral store.