Christine Augustyniak

Christine was a fiercely loyal sister and friend. She had an easy habit of making friends and loved nothing better than bringing people together. She loved to cook and entertain, to travel, and to introduce others to new experiences. Christine grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan at a time when there were lots of trees, dirt roads and fields for building forts and riding bikes. Our parents nurtured her strength and independence. Still in her young teens, she often organized groups of neighborhood friends to take the bus or train into Detroit to visit the museums, library and stores. She discovered politics in her teens and helped to organize the McGovern campaign in Oakland County, which was then a Republican stronghold. Christine left Michigan to attend Harvard in Cambridge, MA. She fell in love with the east coast and instantly became a ‘big city’ girl, loving the history, culture, and excitement of the city. She developed a love of theater and show tunes from working on high school and college productions. She didn’t entirely forget her Midwest roots, she returned to the University of Michigan to get her PhD. in Economics and she never stopped trying to introduce her east coast friends to the Detroit specialty of Vernors Ginger Ale. She taught briefly at Holy Cross in Worchester, MA before starting her career at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC where she remained for 30 years. She was very proud of the work that she did at EPA helping to regulate pesticides and toxic substances. Her work was recognized with an EPA Honor Award and by then President Bill Clinton. She was an intrepid and enthusiastic traveler. As part of her work at EPA, she traveled to Eastern Europe several times to teach economics and she supported the US delegation negotiating international environmental treaties in Paris and Senegal. For pleasure, she traveled extensively in Europe, Asia, Northern Africa, South America, and the US. As a teen she traveled across Europe and North Africa for two months with her sister on a Eurail Pass, falling into easy conversations with fellow travelers on the trains and in the youth hostels. Her laughter and love of life attracted other travelers to their train car, so their car was always full even when the train was not. She inherited an enthusiasm for driving from Dad and got her license as soon as she turned 16. On one family vacation shortly after getting her license, she took the wheel and drove from Florida to Detroit in just one day. While in college she routinely made the 720-mile trip from Cambridge to Detroit several times a year. She read voraciously and filled her home with books, converting walls to bookcases wherever she could until she ran out of walls. She loved mysteries but also read extensively about science, history, and politics. She loved wordplay and puns and was happy to make family and friends groan with laughter. She loved to entertain and cook for family and friends and was very creative. When living in the dorm without access to an oven she managed to “bake” a birthday cake in an electric frying pan. She also managed to make pasta verdi without any counters to lay out the sheets of pasta. She introduced her family to sushi in the 70s, at a time when there were few (if any) Japanese restaurants in suburban Detroit. She loved to try new recipes although she tended to favor labor intensive recipes that, in her own words, worked best if you had galley slaves or were on house arrest. That is, recipes with lots of fresh herbs and vegetables, often chopped in match stick size pieces. For her it was not only about nurturing, celebrating and keeping in touch with good friends, but also about bringing interesting people together. Another of her passions was picking out clothes. She was in her element when someone was starting a new job and wanted to upgrade their wardrobe. And she never stopped trying to get her sisters to dress and accessorize more fashionably. We will miss Christine’s love, strength, caring, and support. Most of all we will miss her intelligence, wit and the way that she pushed us to be better, stronger and more adventurous. She was a force of nature and our world is a bit emptier because of her passing. Godspeed.

Christine Augustyniak

April 4, 1953 - November 2, 2022