Notes from a psychologist: how to live without you, how to…

Running my eyes past faces, names, surnames, and Facebook photos, my gaze stops only where people who have already left this world look into my eyes.

I remember 2014… I ran to the department to give lectures and got into a conversation about how terrible it is for a mother to lose her child because after that, she lives out her life in the darkness of the night, and day no longer exists for her. These words stuck deep into my soul because they were confirmed by the death of the Heavenly Hundred, among whom were real children.

Now, in 2022–23, it is not a Hundred…

And the search for answers to those sacred questions that arise after the news of loss, the announcement that no one else will come to talk to you – death itself – will, at least for sure, disturb several generations of Ukrainians in a row.

Anxiety? It comes with the message that someone close to you, a relative or an acquaintance, has received an “invitation” to war. This anxiety is different from all the others. Anxiety in other circumstances means that a person is afraid of reality. The anxiety from the news that the war invites you to an audience is closed, cold, inaccessible and almost completely devoid of emotion. It seems that this anxiety is an anxiety of the brain, although the brain is never anxious. It is nonsense. But this anxiety first closes the mind, then destroys the feelings, bringing everything to some secret scheme, the symbols of which will be the news of life or death. In this anxiety, a person seems to be outside the world because the only way to survive in anticipation, in this terrible anxiety, is to abandon emotions and feelings. One can survive in such conditions only in deep faith or a total ban on joy.

Anxiety will not go away – it is the background against which apathy, loss, grief, and… death will flourish.

Apathy. Its purpose is targeted – the search for answers to the questions of why it is so and why it is happening to me. This apathy is dedicated only to the one who is waiting. Those who have gone into the whirlpool of war do not feel any apathy. They have other tasks. Apathy will destroy every minute of the life of someone who is there, outside the war, waiting. This waiting is terrible – because it becomes insufferable by ruining the reality of life.

And here is the big problem – if you have lived a decent life without foolishness, then apathy will not enter, settle, or take root in your inner world. But if you were traumatized in childhood, always going where you shouldn’t, and getting punished for it, then apathy will accompany you, drawing terrible pictures of loss and all the bad things you can think of.

Loss. It is a terrible thing. Initially, it is created in us as an element of a development by the psyche itself. It is when we first let our mother go beyond the threshold, and later we are afraid of losing a toy, a house, capital, or power. And later on, we transform this state into love, first for our partner and then for our children. Internally, the loss takes root as a constant tension in the expectation that something irreparable will happen. Something that you could not prevent is about to come to you, but in your imagination and nothing more.

Loss changes itself when the person to whom affection and love are directed disappears. If the psyche invents a loss, the body has to see and live it. The loss, when your loved one is there, in the middle of the line between life and death, becomes intolerable to your own life. Paranoidally, rituals and marks appear, the performance of which will take away this indescribable oppressive expectation of loss, which is unacknowledged oneself. But the loss of oneself when one receives the news of death becomes the primary meaning of life.

The news is a point of no return, after which you no longer expect anything. It is the symbolic death of someone who has been waiting for it.

And, most painfully, is there life beyond the point of loss? Death… No one knows who or what it is. It stops one universe and probably starts another. But for the bereaved, it is the disappearance of light from the world. Whether this light, which determines the joy of life, will return is rhetorical… Probably… But?

In fact, yes. Depending on who has lost it.

A wife loses her husband. At first, she will survive. Later she will take hold and probably start some new relationship. But the eyes of the bereaved will be dry and devoid of hope for the rest of their lives.

A child – of a mother or a father, or both? He will survive. He will break through. He will live his own life, and the images will probably slowly begin to fade and disappear. The main thing is not to interfere with this disappearance. Let the baby forget because it has the right to live.

To lose a son or daughter is a loss that cannot be replaced in any way. It is a change that will shake the inner world of a woman to the deepest point of her life. Having fallen there, into the hell of herself, she will either choose to give in to the instinct of death and then, like a bird, fly away to live for others, or, on the contrary, she will remain in this hell forever, without even asking anyone to help her out of it. There, in this darkness of depth, she will wait for her child until the other world accepts her.

And the last question is, can we overcome this? Yes.

On our own? No. There is a limit to defiance – the death of the body, without which the soul cannot take up arms. So, who can stop it? Three factors:

• offensive weapons must be provided without question, without doubt, discussion or bargaining;
• the war must change the territory;
• politicians have to put their own life – physical life – in the terrible cost of victory.

The above will only become a psychological essay if these factors are observed.

But until that happens, the chances of this essay becoming a prediction of Europe’s future are incredibly high.