From Kindergarten To Cancer: A Love Story

The soldier never forgot his childhood crush, and once they reunited, neither war nor illness would keep them apart

- Tammy La Gorce 

JAMES GARISH IS NO spelling bee champ—in fact, he dropped out of school at 14 and spent more than half a decade in dead-end jobs before enlisting in the Army in 2008. But Garish never forgot the tricky string of letters that added up to the last name of his kindergarten crush, Elizabeth Stipkovits. He also never forgot the girl behind the name, which is why he typed it into his laptop one lonely night in 2010 while serving in Iraq.

“I started wondering how life had turned out for her,” said Garish, 34. He found her still living in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, the working-class city where they had grown up. So he sent a friend request on Facebook.

Stipkovits had no idea who he was. She was half a world away, a single mother raising her six-year-old daughter, Maleena. But her mother did recall a James Garish.

“She told me I was in kindergarten with him. Then I remembered,” Stipkovits said. “He was ‘Little Bad Jimmy,’ the class clown, the one always getting yelled at by the teacher.” That the onetime five-year-old handful remembered her and her hard-to-spell name stopped her in her tracks.

That was eight years ago. The relationship that unspooled from that friend request has bound together Garish and Stipkovits in a foxhole of brokenness, determination, and love.

In 2014, four years after they re-connected, 31-year-old Stipkovits received her first breast cancer diagnosis. The cancer returned twice and metastasized. At the end of 2017, she was being treated for cancer in her femur and lung. In January, it had spread to her brain. “Little Bad Jimmy,” now a supervisor at a McKeesport Rite-Aid, never left her side.

“Chemo has taken a lot of my memory,” said Stipkovits. “But he always reminds me he’s been in love with me since kindergarten.”