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Life of Agnes Cecelia Kozlowski
an unfinished autobiographical memoir

[A photograph of an old woman, appearing to be about 65, wearing a blouse with a vivid flowered pattern. She is sitting, facing the camera, smiling slightly, with her hands clasped in front of her, against a background of strongly patterned wallpaper. On the viewer's right, an end table with a small lamp on a doilie; an unframed photograph of a religious painting on the wall, with a small medal hanging from it. The woman is Agnes Kozlowski Nutter, the subject of the memoir presented on this page]

Agnes Kozlowski
or as I knew her many years later,
Agnes Nutter

my photo, Aug. 4, 2015 (when she was 88)

Agnes Kozlowski (1927‑2024) was not a historical figure. She was my neighbor for thirty-five years, and by and by my friend; an ordinary person. Yet she led a surprisingly interesting life with much to tell us, a reminder that we are all history, each in our own small way on God's great earth. A few years before her death, she asked me to make her story available online, and made a large trove of her papers available to me for that purpose, including the memoir presented on this page.

Hers is a thoroughly Catholic story, from her earliest upbringing in a devout Catholic family, to her childhood and adolescence in an orphanage run by Catholic sisters, to her own time as a sister, during which she ministered as a nurse in Africa, a job she volunteered for over the initial objections of her superiors. Yet you should not expect a tale of bland pieties, by any means; she is forthright in telling of her doubts as to faith and vocation, and her snapshots of life in the orphanage and convent, as she saw it, are more than candid and go a fair ways to explain those doubts.

I had come to know much of Agnes's story over the years, and expected her memoir to be interesting. What I did not expect was the power and immediacy of her writing. Look past her grammar and spelling, and you will be reading a very good writer; by the time I had read the first three or four pages, I realized that her expressive stream of consciousness would be much diminished by any fixes I might be tempted to make. Hers is one of the best first-hand accounts transcribed on my site; I hope I've been as faithful to it as she deserved.

Editor's Introduction

The division of this memoir into sections is entirely my own, for convenience sake, and therefore of no authority; and so with the titles I give below.

Earliest recollections

1

Early childhood in a boarding house

6

Early days in the orphanage

11

Teenage years in the orphanage

19

Postulant and novice in a religious order

28

Training in practical nursing

36

To Africa as a nurse

40

Life as a nurse in an African convent

46

Leaving Africa to return to the States

49

[decorative delimiter]

Technical Details

Source of the Text

The text transcribed here is that of a 60‑page typescript; this is its first publication anywhere. For access to this memoir and many other papers of hers, I am above all indebted and grateful to Agnes herself, and feel honored to have been called on by her to work on this material. I give full details of typescript and provenance in my "Editor's Introduction".

To a considerably lesser while not negligible extent, I am glad to acknowledge the permission of her estate and my indebtedness to Fr. Stanisław Czarnecki, S. J., for help in accessing a certain amount of supporting documentary and photographic material, traces of which can be found here but at some point fairly soon will be more significantly used, along with other material in my possession, and of course my own personal recollections, to write a general biographical sketch of Agnes Nutter covering her full life.

Copyright in the text of the memoir as published here is jointly owned by Agnes Kozlowska Nutter (2014) and myself (2025). For my part, I cede any legal claims upon my death; but copyright in this memoir will nevertheless subsist, following Agnes's estate, thru Dec. 31, 2094, as provided by United States law.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

This transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

Contrary to my usual practice, I've retained the text's spelling, grammar, and punctuation as I found it, with only those very few exceptions where it's clear we have a slip of the fingers in typing (usually adjacent-key errors or missing spaces, with the original marked in the sourcecode each time): there was no good reason to make changes, especially considering that the memoir has never been published. I do very occasionally insert a brief clarifying bit, either [in brackets] or as a footnote; and, as elsewhere onsite, measurements with a dotted underscore provide conversions to metric, e.g., 10 miles: glide your cursor over the underscored passage to read the conversion.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

[A head-and-shoulders photograph of a woman, wearing glasses, of whom we can only see the face; the rest of her is enveloped in a dark veil, with a wide descending rabit at the neck: a sister's habit. She is Agnes Kozlowski, when she was a sister in religion. The image serves as the icon for my subsite, that reproduces an autobiographical memoir of hers.]

The icon I use to indicate this subsite is of course a photograph of Agnes, as a sister in religion; the original photo is black-and‑white but I've given it a wash in the dark blue of her order's habit. In the headers of the chapters, however, contrary to my boilerplate practice in which I merely take the same image and color it red or blue, I've chosen to use two different thumbnails:

[The head of a young girl wearing some kind of veil for her First Communion.] [A photograph of a woman of about 40, wearing a somewhat severe hair style, gathered toward the back.]

The "previous" thumbnail is taken from an iconic photograph of Agnes's First Communion; "next" is from her government ID with the United States Post Office in around 1970: images of a confident young woman captured at either end of her youth. The memoir introduced on this page is essentially bracketed by these two photographs.

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Site updated: 21 Jan 25

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