Crystal Lake soldier loses cancer battle
The courtship between Alie and Michael Vukovich may have been brief, but their love was supposed to last forever.
It carried the Crystal Lake residents through Michael Vukovich's 11-month deployment to Afghanistan, where he was responsible for locating roadside bombs as a U.S. Army combat engineer. He was stationed there from May 2010 through April 2011.
“It was a rough deployment, and I always wished that he didn't have to experience what he did,” Alie said, noting that four of his friends were killed in the war. “I kind of wished it upon myself.”
The pair, she 21 and he 22, had big plans and could not wait to have children.
Having survived the war, what kept them from fulfilling that dream was cancer.
Michael Vukovich, a Lake in the Hills native, died Sept. 30 of Ewing's sarcoma, a rare cancer that originated in his right lung and moved to his bones.
“We thought we'd have many years to come, but unfortunately that's not the case,” Alie said.
The two met through a mutual friend at Centegra Health Bridge Fitness Center in Huntley. They remained friends and kept in touch while he went away to basic training. When he returned in August 2009, they began dating.
Four months later on Christmas Eve, Vukovich popped the question while he and his bride-to-be were lying on the couch in his Crystal Lake living room.
Because she knew he was the one, she did not think twice about saying yes.
“It's just that feeling, you just know; you have no question in your mind,” she said. “He said to me on our first date, ‘You know I'm going to marry you.'”
Vukovich was diagnosed with the disease about a month after he returned to the United States in May and the two married while he was in the intensive care unit at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., on May 26.
“It was a very hectic day — he was supposed to go to surgery, but they were pushing back his surgery so we could get married,” Alie said.
In July, doctors told the family that the cancer was terminal. Once it spread to his bones, doctors suggested Vukovich return to Illinois to be near his family while he continued his fight at the University of Chicago Hospitals.
With her husband's death, Alie plans to complete two projects in his honor.
Her husband loved supercharging average cars and his wife will continue the work he started on his 2003 Pontiac Bonneville.
She will also follow through on her dream to become a registered nurse — she is in the midst of taking the necessary courses at Harper College.
“Going through this with him, it reassured me that I wanted to do nursing,” she said. “He reassured me that I could.”
Visitation will be held from 3 to 9 p.m. Tuesday at Davenport Family Funeral Home, 419 E. Terra Cotta Ave., Crystal Lake. His service will be held 12:30 p.m. Wednesday at Christian Fellowship Church of Crystal Lake, 3419 Walkup Road.