My big brother

From Memories of Stas Ionov

by Pavel Ionov

The horror of what happened is too big for my head to hold, but words do not come easily. Stas was a towering, monumental presence in my life, and I dare say in many other lives. It was not through his physical presence, but through the pure force of his personality. No amount of adversity could bring him down – he was indestructible. At least, so he seemed...

It is with a great reluctance that I proceed, as I feel my words will only be too limiting, too trivial to describe him. I proceed only because in my rational mind I know that only through a multitude of impressions of Stas (that we hope to see here over time) we can express the truth and essence of him. Thus, I will try to add my token effort.

We were born and grew up in Kharkiv, Ukraine (then Kharkov, USSR) – a sizable industrial city that even claimed the distinction of being a capital of Ukrainian Republic for a few years. With Stas being more than nine years older and having gone to college in Moscow, I have very few early memories of us together.

I think for Mom, Stas has always been a good boy who did the right thing. One could disagree with him sometimes on what that right thing might be, but never with his intentions. Stas took his responsibilities very seriously, particularly about his family and his work. He always felt responsible to take care of his wife and daughter, our parents, and his little brother. He also respected every single thing that he did and had to do it to the absolute very best of his abilities. It always puzzled me how, with younger age on my side, I could never beat my older brother on a downhill slalom course or on a tennis court. Well, I couldn’t, he was just so good at everything that he did.

By the time I went to college (the same one he went to, the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology), my impression of him, through Mom, reached mythological proportions. For all I knew at that point – he walked on water.

In Moscow I got to see him a little more often, but not nearly enough. He already was married and had a daughter, and we both had busy schedules. We could only occasionally get together to do that Russian drinking thing, and he took me along on a few adventures with his cool friends that respected him so very much: once on a proper mountain climbing trip to Caucasus mountains and twice on whitewater trips. I will treasure these memories for the years to come.

These interactions with my mythological hero were not enough for me, though. While, rationally, I understood the limitations of our circumstances, selfishly I resented the situation a bit. It was only after we were both in America that I came to really know him as my brother. When I got into the graduate chemistry program at USC in Los Angeles, my brother was already there as a postdoctoral researcher. Once again he did what seemed to be the only sensible thing, which was to come to the United States to do research when the USSR started crumbling. In fact, it was Stas and my good friend Mike D. (who also tragically died recently in a plane crash, while taking a flying class) who buffered the culture shock of coming to America from the decaying Soviet Union. Why did such good people have to die so young? Is it a small consolation that they went doing what they loved? Perhaps...

Following yet again in his footsteps left me with an uneasy need to do something worthy on my own. Stas and I went our separate ways after USC: he found a permanent research position at HRL Laboratories in Malibu, CA, where he picked up his love for running and bicycling in the beautiful Santa Monica mountains, while I decided that I wanted to “build things” and joined the ranks of process engineers in San Jose, CA. However, we parted a lot more like real brothers, our relationship having matured and then only continued to improve over time. I did not need him to walk on water anymore – what he was accomplishing was more than enough. He never quite stopped feeling responsible for my well-being though. In his mind, he was still my big brother and was supposed to look after me. And he did.

I miss you, Stas.