Amy Therese Mysz

Amy Therese Mysz, 57, of Oak Forest, Illinois, passed away September 30, 2026, at home after a two-year fight with cancer that she met with grace and courage.

Amy was born March 30, 1969, in Chicago Heights, the third of four children of Mary Lynn and Lawrence Mysz. She grew up there, graduated from Marian Catholic High School, and attended the University of Illinois and Valparaiso University. Whether Aunt Amy was driving sideways, pushing a car across 100K miles or hiking with shoes on the wrong feet at the zoo as a child, there were always adventures, stories and laughs to be shared.

Amy met Jeff Martyka in 2007, and they were partners in everything for nineteen years. They married on May 7, 2026. They supported each other in their hobbies, love of travel and in their care for one another. They were each other's first call, best audience, and favorite travel companion.

Amy first saw glass being blown when she was six years old, on a family vacation, and never forgot it. Years later she devoted herself to learning the art, studying every chance she could at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking, the Fine Line Creative Arts Center, the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, Hot Shop Glass in Racine, Wisconsin, and many other studios along the way. She made birds, drinking glasses, vases, ornaments, paperweights, and jack-o'-lanterns, each one beautiful and each one unmistakably hers. Her house filled up with them. So did her family’s. Her friends' houses too.

She practiced tai chi for decades and was skilled enough to be an instructor.

Amy loved to travel, and she did it thoroughly. She visited all fifty states, much of Europe, and Australia and New Zealand. She and her husband Jeff liked to travel in the off season, when they could have a beach to themselves in January, be the only people kayaking with dolphins in February, or chase the aurora borealis across Iceland in the dead of winter. Amy always said she and Jeff were slow learners, so they had to practice for retirement as much as possible by traveling.

Her working life was spent in public service. She was an investigator with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, went back to school for a master's degree in environmental science, and in 1993 joined the Chicago office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, where she spent more than thirty years as an Environmental Health Scientist in the Pesticide Program. She became a nationally recognized expert in pesticide risk and cleanup, helped build the database of pet injuries that led to label changes credited with saving many pets' lives, and guided schools and child care centers on the safe use of disinfectants during the COVID-19 pandemic. She worked with the tribes of the Great Lakes region, helping build tribal pesticide programs from the ground up and creating the process, now used nationwide, for certifying pesticide applicators in Indian Country. One EPA colleague put it simply: "There are two or three people in the entire Agency who I can go to with a Tribal pesticide question, and Amy Mysz was one of them."

Amy is survived by her husband, Jeff Martyka; her parents, Mary Lynn and Lawrence Mysz; her brother Michael (Cathy) Mysz; her sister Laura (Scott) Jones; her brother Kevin Mysz; her nieces and nephews Thomas (Maureen) Mysz, Bridget (Chad) Waldron, Margaret, John, and David Mysz and Colleen, Carolyn, and Craig Jones; her great-nephew Bohdan Moran and great-nieces Erin and Grace Mysz. She was preceded in death by her best friend, Ann Marie Jensen.

Visitation November 6, 2026 from 4-8 p.m. at Colonial Chapel, 15525 S. 73rd Ave. (155th/Wheeler Dr. & Harlem) Orland Park, IL. Family and friends are invited to meet directly at St. Agnes Church, 1501 Chicago Rd., Chicago Heights, IL on November 7, 2026 for Mass at 9:30 a.m. Burial will follow at Assumption Catholic Cemetery, Glenwood, IL.

Express your thoughts and condolences at colonialchapel.com 708-532-5400