Disclaimer: All facts gleaned from the filings stated hereafter are only as truthful as the petitioner. The tone of this article expresses a style of writing historically employed by America’s greatest writers and, as such, is for opinion purposes only. No intentional harm is due. Do not read if the topic of divorce (even your own) causes you emotional distress. Continue at your own risk.
The filing of a divorce petition can read like a ledger entry, but timing gives it meaning. Petitions rushed in during the final days of December—December 28 through 31—often feel like an effort to outrun the year itself, to bury something before celebration demands pretense. A filing made after the calendar turns carries a different weight. It suggests not haste, but resolve.
That is the context surrounding the petition filed January 9, 2026, in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, dissolving the marriage of Dennis Kamradt and Cynthia Riemer. The document does not dramatize the end of their union; it catalogs it. Married in Chicago in April 2016, the couple lived and worked within the same city—Dennis as a Chicago police officer, Cynthia as a nurse at the Hines VA Hospital. By the time the petition was filed, they had lived separate and apart for more than six months, and irreconcilable differences had hardened into permanence.
Through his attorney, Michelle Sinkovits Ferguson of Greenberg & Sinkovits, LLC, Dennis asked the court to issue a judgment dissolving the marriage. He sought an equitable division of marital property, an award of his non-marital property, and an order barring Cynthia from receiving maintenance now or in the future. The petition also requests that Cynthia pay her own attorney’s fees and costs. No children were born of the marriage, and no claims of dependency complicate the record.
Filed at the beginning of the year, the petition reads less like an escape than a declaration: that this chapter has ended, that obligations must be named, and that closure—however unadorned—still matters.
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