United by grief: Teen who lost dad to COVID wins scholarship honoring another COVID victim

When 18-year-old Robin Jolly read the application for the Jamie S. Malinowski "Good Character" Scholarship, the story behind it felt eerily familiar.

Jamie, who like Robin was a Chippewa High School graduate, died of COVID in November 2020. Jamie selflessly sacrificed her own life to take care of her parents, who were also sickened with COVID. Jamie thought she would be OK. She was only 34 years old.

COVID took her anyway.

Robin knew that family's heartbreak. She lost her own father to COVID just two months after Jamie died.

Robin had never met anyone else in Doylestown who had lost someone to COVID, and she hadn't heard of Jamie until she learned about the scholarship in Jamie's name.

"When I first read it, I was like, 'This sounds almost exactly like what happened to me,' " Robin said. "I knew I had to apply. I just felt connected with it."

Based on her top grades, her community and school involvement and her essay about dealing with her father's death, the volunteer scholarship committee — which included a Malinowski family representative, a Chippewa High teacher and this Beacon Journal reporter — unanimously chose Robin as the second winner of the annual scholarship.

It's worth $1,000. But the catharsis of finding each other in their grief as the rest of the world moves on from the pandemic may have been worth more.

Malinowski family's story started with emails

Jamie Malinowski's story might feel familiar to others as well.

In December 2020, the Beacon Journal published a 6,000-word story entirely from emails that Jamie's brother, Frank "Keith" Malinowski, wrote to update their extended family as his parents and his sister battled COVID.

The emails started with letting everyone know Frank Malinowski, Keith and Jamie's dad, had COVID and was headed to the hospital.

They chronicled his father's decline into intensive care and 10 days on a ventilator, all in real time, and then eventually his mother, Jody Malinowski's, illness and then Jamie's.

The emails were a way to cope, Keith said, as much as they were informational for relatives.

Keith wrote about trying to convince Jamie she shouldn't stay in the house once their parents were sick. But Jamie wouldn't leave her mother. The two were known in their neighborhood as being best friends, always seen together. They cared for each other, until one day, Jody couldn't wake Jamie and she was rushed to the hospital in Barberton. Her bed in intensive care was just a few doors down from her father's, but neither of them knew.

Jody, meanwhile, still battled the virus at home.

Jamie rebounded and was sent home after less than a week in the hospital.

But the following day, a beautiful fall day with Keith and his family doing yard work outside, Jamie's heart stopped on her way to the shower. She was again rushed to the hospital, but this time, they couldn't save her. Keith had to go to his dad's rehabilitation center to tell him his daughter had died.

Over a million people read those emails. They connected with readers in a way seemingly no other story in the pandemic had. The Beacon Journal received emails from across the country describing the story as a kind of light-bulb moment about the seriousness of the pandemic. Some said they thought they were taking the pandemic seriously, but realized they needed to be much more careful. Others said they didn't know anyone with COVID, and this was like reading about someone in their family.

That was the exact impact the private Malinowski family, who intentionally put in Jamie's obituary that she had died of COVID, was hoping their story would have.

"That's what we wanted out of the first story, was for people to realize that it was real, it's serious and it can affect anyone," Frank said.

'It scarred us'

Two years later, they have recovered from COVID, despite Frank's long journey back to health. Keith said his dad hates to sleep, because when he was in the ICU and they put him to sleep, he didn't know if he would ever wake up.

They don't expect to ever fully recover from losing Jamie.

"I'm still missing her every day," Jody said. "It scarred us."

Frank retired from the railroad this year. Jody still takes walks through her neighborhood every day, but instead of walking with Jamie, she walks with Jenny, the Shih Tzu they adopted about six weeks after Jamie died.

"She makes me laugh," Jody said. "She's my buddy. It's a good therapy."

Every spring now, they look forward to the stack of applications for Jamie's scholarship.

Robin Jolly remembers her dad as 'the sweetest person'

Robin, one of four kids in her family, including two with disabilities, was always her dad's buddy.

James A. Jolly Jr., originally from Kenmore, retired from the Army and became a stay-at-home dad. He was an older dad, nearly 70 when Robin was born, but "most of my childhood it was just me and him playing together," Robin said.

She still speaks of him in the present tense.

"He has a similar personality to me," Robin said. "He doesn't like to talk a lot, he's really introverted and he's just the sweetest person.

"He'll listen to anyone. At the grocery store he'll just find a random person and talk to them for an hour. 'Dad, it’s time to go home.'"

She woke up in the middle of the night in late January 2021 and saw her dad packing a bag. He had been fighting COVID and said he was having trouble breathing and had called for an ambulance. He'd had heart problems before, she said, but had always recovered, so she wasn't too worried. She also wanted to set an example for her siblings and her mom.

"It was very quick how he got worse," Robin said.

She started worrying when he was admitted to the ICU. Still, he was able to speak.

"That Saturday evening he called us, he said, 'Don't worry I'll be back home soon,'" Robin recalled. "I wanted to keep talking to him but he said he had to go, and I knew he had to save his energy."

The following day, he was unconscious. The family was allowed to visit from outside the room, talking to him through the glass walls.

"They said that he could hear us," Robin said.

Her father died nine days before her 16th birthday. He was 84.

They had a small funeral, just Robin, her siblings and their mother and a select few other friends and family members. Robin and her mom visit his grave often at Western Reserve Cemetery in Rittman.

"When we see him we both just cry together," she said.

Still, she said, she has mourned mostly in private, seeing the rest of her family destroyed by their grief and feeling like "someone had to step up and try and hold (it) together."

Returning to school two weeks after her father's death just didn't "feel right," she said, to be thinking about studying and homework when her dad was gone. Most of her teachers knew her dad because he used to send pizzas to them at school, Robin said.

This fall, Robin will be off to college at Ohio State University. She plans to study biology and wants to move back home as soon as she can. She's worried about leaving her mother, who still works full time, with three siblings, including two who need additional care.

"I've been trying to pump her up that she can do everything without me," Robin said. "I'm always a call away."

Scholarship asks students to describe adversity, how they help others

When Jamie died, the Malinowskis received about $9,000 through FEMA's COVID-19 Funeral Assistance program. But the family felt like it was their duty to bury their sister and daughter. So they took the government funding and turned it into seed money for a scholarship through the Wayne County Community Foundation.

Through friends and family, plus additional donations from Frank and Keith, they raised enough to start the scholarship with $20,000. Any student at Chippewa High School is eligible to apply. Applicants are judged on their academics as well as school and community involvement, and are asked to write an essay about adversity they have faced or ways they have helped others. The committee awarded the scholarship's first winner last year.

"We just wanted Jamie's name to live on," Frank said. "For her to give (something) back to the community, and for her name to be remembered."

They never imagined it would go to someone who was still hurting like they are because of the pandemic.

"It never dawned on me that it would go to a student who's lost someone to COVID," Keith said. "And then when I read the essay, I was just — it took me back. It really took me back to the thoughts and feelings that we had, and what she and her family must have been experiencing."

Robin's resume was already impressive, having been a peer mentor, a tutor for elementary students, a student council representative and a leader in her school's National Honor Society chapter and Academic Challenge team. She was also a cheerleader and ran cross country.

In her essay, she wrote about comforting her siblings after their dad's death and working a job to help her family financially. Her dad spent every day shaping her to be the person and student that she is, she wrote.

"I won't let that all go in vain, so I'll work hard every day to get closer to a degree that would've made my dad proud," her essay said.

For the Malinowski family, it was a stark reminder that others are still suffering too, but also a kind of comfort not to be alone in their grief. The world has moved on, they noted. But too many families can't because someone is missing. COVID has claimed more than 1.1 million lives nationwide.

Keith presented the scholarship at an awards ceremony at the high school at the end of the school year. He didn't quite make it through his speech without choking up, despite practicing it dozens of times. He planned to shake Robin's hand when she came on stage, but when she walked up with tears in her eyes too, they both knew that wouldn't do.

Despite having never met, they hugged and cried together.

"I was going to give you a hug anyway," Robin said.

How to donate

To donate to the Jamie S. Malinowski "Good Character" Scholarship, go to waynecountycommunityfoundation.org and click "donate" and search for Jamie S. Malinowski. Checks can also be mailed to the Wayne County Community Foundation, 517 N. Market St., Wooster, OH. 44691. Put "Jamie Malinowski scholarship" in the memo.

Contact education reporter Jennifer Pignolet at jpignolet@thebeaconjournal.com, at 330-996-3216 or on Twitter @JenPignolet.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Malinowski scholarship unites two families grieving Covid losses