Igor Andreevich Sokolenko

Igor Andreevich Sokolenko – 08/19/1996 – 07/09/2026

In Loving Memory of Igor Andreevich Sokolenko There is a particular kind of quiet that settles into a home once it has been fixed, tended, and loved by the same set of hands for years — a doorframe that no longer sticks, a garden bed that always comes back in spring, a shelf built exactly to fit the corner it lives in. That quiet is everywhere in our home now, and it is Igor's. Everything he touched, he touched with care. That was who he was. I called him monster. It started with cookies — though not the ones you might picture first. His love for Girl Scout Lemonades began years earlier, in his barracks, where a craving for something sweet became a small anchor for him and the men he served with. When he came home to me, that habit followed him, and it grew into one of our favorite home traditions: commissary runs, a pantry that somehow never stayed full for long. Mine were always the Snickers ones. His were the ones with the recessed peanut butter center, and no matter how busy his week got, buying them for me stayed on his to-do list, without fail, because remembering what I loved was simply how he moved through the world. He used to tease that I'd fallen for him the way I fell for cookies, and somewhere in that teasing I went from being his Tootsie Roll to being his Cookie. He, in turn, became my monster — not because anyone else called him that, but because that was mine to call him. And in the quieter hours, when the day had worn down and it was just the two of us, he was honey bun, a name reserved only for the version of him I got to keep. Igor was, without exaggeration, a Renaissance man — though he would have laughed at the phrase and probably made a joke about the cost of his hobbies instead. He kept a running, half-serious ledger of his own interests sorted by how much they drained the bank account. On the cheap end, indoors, there were origami cranes folded absentmindedly during phone calls, chess puzzles he'd leave half-solved on the counter, paintings, and evenings lost to Skyrim — he must have started that game over a dozen times and never once got tired of it. On the expensive end, indoors, he became someone else entirely — a cook, a carpenter, a joiner, a man who could not walk past a broken hinge without fixing it. I genuinely could not count the number of things in our home that bear his handiwork; I only notice them now in the way you notice a person's absence, all at once and everywhere. Outdoors, cheaply, he foraged, hiked, walked our dog, and kept the garden alive. Outdoors, expensively, he camped, hunted, scuba dived, shot, went to concerts and theater and conventions and renaissance faires in full, unapologetic joy, and then came home and expanded the garden some more, because apparently one hobby budget was never quite enough for him. Meditation and journaling were among the quiet practices he returned to — not rituals he kept every single day, just part of the wider rhythm of a man who took care of his own mind the way he took care of everything else. He never missed a day at the gym. He practiced patience the way other people practice a craft, deliberately and without complaint, and nowhere was that clearer than in the garden. I didn't fully understand it while he was alive. I do now. I'm the one out there mowing the lawn these days, learning slowly and clumsily everything he made look effortless, and only now do I see how much quiet, unglamorous work he was pouring into our yard all along. He used to tell me, "No matter what happens, everything will turn out well, as long as I do the work." I think he meant the garden too. What I want people to understand about Igor is not just what he did, but how he made you feel while he was doing it. He had a gift — rare, and I still don't have the right words for it — for making people feel loved, seen, and heard almost the moment he looked at them. He could talk to someone for twenty minutes and hand them back to themselves a little more understood than they'd been before. He was also, unapologetically, a brony, and he wore that particular joy the same way he wore everything else about himself — without shrinking. My Little Pony: The Movie (2017) was our movie, the one we always came back to no matter the year or the mood. His pony was Rarity — not for the glamour, but for the loyalty underneath it; he used to say real loyalty was rarer than anything she ever stitched together, and he held himself to that same standard, fiercely and without apology. His other favorite was Big Mac, and that one made sense the moment you knew him — steady, quiet, load-bearing, the kind of pony who shows up and does the work without needing anyone to notice. Igor saw a soldier in Big Mac, and he should have, because Igor was a soldier too, a Sergeant, E-5, and he carried that same unshowy reliability into every room he walked into, in uniform or out of it. Watching him hold onto something soft and unguarded in a world that often demands men harden themselves taught me more about real strength than almost anything else he ever did. We had been trying to start a family for six months, and in the last two weeks I had with him, we thought — really thought — that we'd finally hit it right on the dot. I didn't know then what he was quietly carrying. He would look at me, on the harder nights, and say, "It's okay, honey. I'll hold the pain. Don't worry." I understand now that he meant it literally, and that he was fighting something he never should have had to face without more hands to help carry it. I wish I had known sooner. I wish he had let more of us in. But I also know that shielding people he loved from his pain was, in its own way, one more act of the same tenderness that made him honey bun in the quiet hours and monster in the loud ones. Igor was intelligent, creative, thoughtful, kind, talented, determined, and generous — a profound person disguised, most days, as an ordinary one with too many cookie boxes in the pantry. He is survived by his wife, his family, and a circle of friends he treated like family, including his closest friend, who knew him in ways few others did. The cause of Igor's passing is still pending toxicology results, and the family asks for everyone's patience and privacy as they await those findings. A service will be held at Tahoma National Cemetery in Kent, Washington, on August 4th — our wedding anniversary — at 3:00 p.m. It will be streamed live on Twitch https://m.twitch.tv/sokolenko08wife/home for anyone who cannot be there in person but wants to be with us in spirit. In the meantime, the family welcomes the love, prayers, and support of all who knew and cared for Igor. ❤️‍🩹 Rest now, monster. Rest now, honey bun. You did the work — all of it, every day, without exception. Everything is going to be okay, just like you always said. I'll keep holding your half of it from here.