Michele Kruchoski was one of those community heroes whose work goes largely unnoticed.
But U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., noticed it. Kruchoski, an AIDS survivor and tireless volunteer at Martha’s Pantry, the Hazel Dell food pantry for people with HIV and AIDS, met with Murray when the senator visited the area Wednesday.
After the meeting, Kruchoski returned to her parents’ Vancouver home, where she died overnight at the age of 53. The official cause of her death hasn’t been determined.
Kruchoski was staying with her parents because her health had taken another turn for the worse, according to her father, Robert Steinbarge. Steinbarge said she recently had a kidney biopsy and was awaiting the results. Meanwhile, Kruchoski was determined to make that meeting with Murray on Wednesday at Martha’s Pantry.
She didn’t do it for personal glory, said Martha’s Pantry executive director Vicki Smith; she did it to make sure the senator understood how important Martha’s Pantry is.
“She was the heart of the pantry,” Smith said.
Martha’s Pantry founder Jerry West added, “There wasn’t a person who walked through the door who didn’t get a hug from her.”
New clients often feel “angry and devalued, and they wish they didn’t have to come here,” Smith said. Those are the people Kruchoski targeted with love and friendliness, and her own example as a long-term survivor. She was living proof that the stigma of AIDS as a “gay man’s fatal disease” was just plain wrong, Smith said.
It’s not that Kruchoski didn’t take risks and make mistakes, Smith said, but “she was a straight woman who got AIDS from another man.”
In the mid-1990s, Kruchoski’s case of full-blown AIDS convinced her she wouldn’t live long. She sustained two strokes and was partially paralyzed. But her parents’ care and an experimental drug being tested at that time saved her life. And Kruchoski devoted most of the rest of her life to Martha’s Pantry, her father said.
“Martha’s Pantry has become my second home,” Kruchoski told The Columbian in 2013. “We have grown into such a close-knit group. So many of us have disabilities. There is no judgment. There’s great camaraderie.”
Kruchoski didn’t just welcome clients, stack supplies and make deliveries to homebound people, Smith said, she also reached out to the wider community by organizing expert panels, strategic planning efforts, discussion groups for youth, World AIDS Day observances and much more. One of her pet projects was a monthly Martha’s Pantry field trip; one homebound Vancouver man who enjoyed a visit to Multnomah Falls in Oregon gratefully confessed that it was the first time he had gone anywhere in 20 years, Smith said.
Kruchoski also launched a regular arts-and-crafts session for pantry people who felt hopeless and pointless, Smith said as she pointed to a bunch of colorful dream catchers and pine-cone creations now on display in one corner of the pantry.
Martha’s Pantry borrows space in the basement of the First Congregational United Church of Christ, 1220 N.E. 68th St. in Hazel Dell. That’s where a memorial for Kruchoski will be at noon on Tuesday, Smith said.
“It will be an absolute celebration of life, a party, because that’s how Michele would have wanted it,” Smith said.
Contacted on Thursday, Murray sent this statement: “My heart breaks for Michele’s parents, the staff and clients of Martha’s Pantry, and the entire community. Even in the brief time I got to spend with Michele, I was inspired by her determination to make the world a better place, even as she personally dealt with so much hardship. I hope her loved ones find comfort knowing Michele made such a meaningful impact on her community.”
