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Artist’s Dreams Fade After He Loses His Wife to Cancer

This was Shkolnik the Painter, as seen in snapshots on the refrigerator door, with his smiling wife, Alla, and their son, Albert.

Mr. Shkolnik immigrated to Atlanta from Kyiv 20 years ago with Ms. Shkolnik after he was invited to show his paintings there. He gained steady work as a portrait painter and a graphic and interior designer, and Ms. Shkolnik worked as a software engineer. Albert was born in 1998.

But Mr. Shkolnik’s life took a turn for the worse in 2008, when Alla Shkolnik began having chronic stomach problems, and the Shkolniks moved to New York for better medical care. Mr. Shkolnik feared that his wife had been affected years earlier by contamination from the 1986 nuclear plant accident in Chernobyl, less than 100 miles from Kyiv. A biopsy indicated no cancer, but her health worsened. In early 2009, the couple sought a second opinion, and those doctors told Ms. Shkolnik that she had Stage 4 gastric cancer.

“The first doctor tested the wrong place in her body,” Mr. Shkolnik, 66, said, and the mistake cost her crucial months of treatment. “From there, everything, in a short time frame, went down and down and down,” he said.

For three years, Mr. Shkolnik turned away from his painting and graphic design, and poured his time and energy into looking after his wife. This was Shkolnik the Caretaker.

Albert, meanwhile, was getting beat up by children in their Staten Island neighborhood. The family moved to Brooklyn, where, Mr. Shkolnik said, Albert found his peers more diverse and welcoming at the Seth Low Intermediate School 96.

But Ms. Shkolnik was getting worse even though she was undergoing heavy chemotherapy.

“It got so bad sometimes, you wouldn’t even recognize her,” said Albert, 13. “She’d be saying strange things and not even making sense.”

In the final months, with the chemotherapy wearing her down, Ms. Shkolnik could barely eat. She was taking strong painkillers but sometimes screamed in pain. Albert found refuge in computer games like StarCraft, a military science-fiction strategy realm that allowed him to escape into the 26th century, where he could control his fate and expel evil factions.

Ms. Shkolnik died in June at a youthful 54, and Mr. Shkolnik has broken grief’s grip only once, to make a poster of Ms. Shkolnik posing with a red carnation, their flower, which he framed and placed next to her headstone in a Staten Island cemetery. He freshens the grave site weekly with a carnation. “Every Sunday,” Mr. Shkolnik said.

In the meantime, he had become Shkolnik the Patient. In 2009, Mr. Shkolnik learned he had prostate cancer. After undergoing treatment, he is in remission.

Now, surrounded by his art, Mr. Shkolnik, who became an American citizen in 2001, has no studio and no money for new materials. He receives $399 a month in Social Security benefits, $478 a month in Supplemental Security Income and $367 in monthly food stamps. Albert, as a dependent, gets $302 a month in Social Security benefits. Mr. Shkolnik’s rent is $850 a month.

To help buy clothes for Albert, Mr. Shkolnik turned to the Edith and Carl Marks Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst, a beneficiary of UJA-Federation of New York, one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. Marks JCH used $300 in Neediest Cases money to help buy Albert shoes, a winter coat and clothes.

Before Ms. Shkolnik died, she told Albert she wanted him to succeed in school and make something of himself. Now, he is set upon testing into a top New York City public high school. He has become a whiz at computer programming and gaming, and tweaks computer games into more sophisticated versions. He has even rebuilt his aging computer to give it the capacity to handle the games.

Mr. Shkolnik, holding a photograph of his late wife, looked at her youthful, healthy image, and then at his son on the computer.

“It’s an impossible dream for me now to be an artist,” he said. “I’m thinking about his future now.”