When my dad died in 2016 after a long-lasted exhausting, and severe cancer, I was most afraid to wake up in the morning and realise that he was gone, that I would now go to the morgue and start filling out the documents for the death of my dear father. I remember when I handed over his passport in Kyiv and asked the specialist of the relevant service to give me his photo because I went into that office with my dad’s passport and came out with a certificate of his death. I was holding his photo from the recycled passport and realised that I didn’t know how I would live my life and what would happen to my life after his death. God, how hard it is not to know who you are without such a dear and beloved person.
24.02.2022.
A week before this inevitable Thursday, I did not sleep at all. For some reason, I didn’t go to bed until 3 a.m. And on Wednesday, before that inevitable Thursday, I asked my husband how hard it would be for me if the war started because how would I leave the city to get home? He reassured me, saying that the war always begins at dawn.
At dawn on 24.02.2022, I woke up abruptly, not from the alarm clock, no. It was my Viber. I opened it at 4.50, looked at it, and closed it. I ran to the TV – it was bombing.
I woke up my husband and told him the war had started. There, at 4.50 a.m., I lost everything that was holding me together and descended into a terrible internal state of the point of no return, the point X. This is the point of nothingness, where there is the imminence and complete loss of any control over the reality in which you find yourself.
Why am I telling you this? The point is that it may be helpful for someone to understand that the loss of a loved one and life in war have similarities but very different foundations for living. When we lose our sick relatives, we lose our emotional connection and feel irreversible, unable to touch and be together. When we live in war, we do not lose emotions. No! They are simply blocked, encapsulated and, in a daze, enter a terrible cycle.
No, in the war, we lose our minds. The construct of our mind is “how to live”. That’s why the death and living concepts in the epicentre of war don’t work. We cannot cry! War is terrible because it has no tears! War doesn’t cry! So when you start crying, you have good prospects. But if you have dry eyes, it is dangerous.
Everyone has their own war, inner silent impasse and conversation with God, despair and hatred for its author. But it is significant to remember one thing – we must live to cry, and that will be our victory.
In 2016, when I was driving home the coffin to bury my father, I did not cry. I did not know what would happen next. On 24.02.2022, I lost my future completely, finding myself at the point of no return. No return to what, you may ask? No return to me, who was worried about things now completely insignificant and empty.
Now I am overwhelmed with aggression and hatred for russia. And I will cry when the whole russia, with its lost humanity, enters the darkness of human life, from which my people and I have not yet emerged!
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