ENGI am an unmarried widow of a Ukrainian soldier

I’m from Kyiv, and Lyosha is from Odesa. We only met each other after the full-scale phase of the war had begun. I started volunteering in April 2022, he had just joined the army that March. I later found out he came across my TikTok that summer – and fell in love. He started messaging me on social media. I took a long time to respond. I was busy and his messages got lost in the message requests folder on Instagram, which I rarely check. Usually it’s just full of weirdos and spam. I finally looked through my message requests last autumn. I saw his messages, and responded.

Soon after we agreed to call each other, and ended up talking on the phone for three hours. “I didn’t think you’d respond,” he told me several times during that conversation. He was so happy. The next day, he came to meet me in Kyiv and rented a flat in an apartment block near mine, so that I wouldn’t have to travel far to see him. That’s how it all began.

I lost track of time. Suddenly it was December. I got a notification of his death. His brothers-in-arms told me later that he’d spent that entire summer talking about me, even in the trenches. [She smiles]

It was the worst day of my life. I was in Poland. I remember waking up and seeing a missed call from an anonymous number. First I thought that [Lyosha] must have called me, that the call was anonymous because his unit might be on a secret deployment. I started reading the news, every Ukrainian person’s morning routine. I remember there was a big attack, across all of Ukraine. I had a bad feeling. Then I got a message from [Lyosha’s] cousin, whose flat I was staying at in Warsaw. He said Lyosha was dead.

At first I was in denial. I replied saying don’t joke like that. Then I started calling [Lyosha’s] mom, and I couldn’t reach her, there was an issue with my SIM card. Nothing was working. I was sending messages to this guy in his unit with the call-sign Khymer. While I was waiting for his response I saw Lyosha’s friends I followed on Instagram posting things like his photos and the words “Eternal memory”. I thought, why are they doing that? Then I called his friend, I called my parents in Ukraine and asked them to contact his mom. A while later I got the message she’d sent me hours earlier: “Lyosha is dead.”

I eventually was able to call her and talk to her. Of course we were both crying, we were both in hysterics. But we did our best to concentrate on our conversation: I needed to get back to Ukraine as fast as possible. I ended up getting a ride on BlaBlaCar. The road was icy, and we weren’t going faster than 20 kilometers per hour for some parts of the journey. Lyosha’s funeral was scheduled for the next day. Lyosha’s mom called me and said they’d had to identify the body, and it was definitely Lyosha. I only processed that what was happening was real then, after Lyosha’s mom confirmed it was him.

In the car with this person I didn’t know, I was crying and realizing that I might miss the funeral. I was trying to figure out how I could get around Ukraine during the curfew. I called some volunteers, I called the soldiers I knew, I texted Khymer again. I got into Kyiv around two in the morning, we traveled to the funeral in Odesa.

People are insufferable. Many have no understanding – on an ethical level, on the level of plain empathy – of what those who lose their loved ones, their close friends and family, go through.

 People tend to think that a woman’s loss counts only if she and her lover lived together for a long time or were officially married. Even better if she is left alone with their children. People feel sympathy for someone like that.

But all of that was still to come for a couple like us, this future life was just starting to shape up, and so [people think] I’m just imagining all these feelings I’ve experienced after my partner’s loss. People don’t understand that feelings in a relationship that lasted a month could be truer than in one that lasted years and years.

I also get accused a lot of trying to somehow benefit from this or draw attention to myself. I got a lot of comments about that. People often say these totally wild things that I just can’t comprehend. I particularly enjoy accusations that I just wanted to profit off this, and so on…What profit? We aren’t even married. This is totally nuts. These comments are awful and unbearable, sometimes it really hurts to read that. I don’t know who they take me for if they think that I want to somehow benefit from this.

When you suffer a loss, it’s very difficult to talk about it. The way our psychology works, the first response is to shut down. It’s very difficult to write and talk about it. I could never in my life imagine that I would be writing about this grief of mine and discussing it publicly, because I’m normally pretty emotionally reserved. But that was my psychological response, my defense mechanism. I haven’t been able to do anything other than write to him or about him all this time. These posts I wrote were like pages of my diary, available for anyone to read. At some point many other women started reaching out to thank me for them. Many wrote that my writing helped them process their own feelings around loss.

Or when your ex dies, even if there was no longer anything between you, you did share a common past, you shared feelings. All sorts of things can happen in life and in relationships. Not grieving might not be an option. It happens on a subconscious level. But the feelings of women are often dismissed by society at large and even by their close friends. There are many things people know nothing about, but still judge. This is my biggest issue.

I am a widow. I haven’t asked anyone if I have a right to call myself a widow, because that’s how I feel. Unmarried, and yet widowed. We even called each other husband and wife. Lyosha had serious intentions from our very first meeting. He often talked about it, about our wedding, our future together. He proposed to me almost every day.

Before that fateful mission, we agreed that we’d get married after he got back. What am I supposed to call him after all that? I can’t call him my boyfriend. He was my husband.

I really couldn’t imagine that he could die. He seemed invincible to me, immortal. I don’t care what anyone else thinks about it. I feel as though we were already married. I can’t explain it. I – we – don’t need an official paper to confirm we’re married – why would we, what for? So that I’d be allowed to miss the person I love? Many men and women have that official paper, so what?

Often in our society “husband” and “wife” are meaningless designations. People can spend countless years together and never get to know one another – but have a marriage certificate. What an incredible achievement. [She laughs]

At the same time, we had such unbearably little time together. But the way we understood each other, the way we felt, the way we loved…It was something very powerful. Stronger than some certificate. There is a void the size of the black hole inside me now, and it’s impossible to fill it, it will forever be part of me. I’m young and I have my whole life ahead of me. With time I will find another person, another love. I will have a relationship, a family, maybe children. But I will never be able to live as if this hasn’t happened. Even when I fall in love again, I will always love two people.

By now, enough time has passed that I’ve experienced several different mental and emotional states. At first I felt fucking awful. I couldn’t sleep or eat and I was constantly crying. The thing that saved me was writing. It just happened somehow, I couldn’t do anything else. Sincerity for me is the way out. That’s how it is, sincerely talking about feelings and experiences is a way out. Not hiding them. I’m all for transparency in everything. All for getting rid of these stupid limits.

People almost always know what might help them, what would help them get out. But whatever you do you have to follow your feelings rather than the judgment of others. When you do something sincerely, in accordance with your own feelings, it doesn’t matter what you do: whether you write, paint, make music or TikTok videos, or even just simple morning stretches. I think that if you are doing something sincerely, you will always find people who will respond to it the right way. And moreover, we are living in a time when our lives could end any day, so why put on a show?

People around me helped me a lot, supported me. Not just close friends; sometimes these were people I didn’t know at all. It helped to have Lyosha’s parents, who are like second parents to me, and I had to take care of them. Yes, I’m in pain, but I can’t even imagine what it’s like, losing your only son. But I also remember that his mom would call me in my darkest moments and calm me down, she’d tell me I’ve got my whole life ahead of me, that I have to get it together. His mom! Who had lost her son. Around that time I realized that if she could be that strong, then I also have to be strong. I remembered Lyosha telling me again and again that I’m very strong, that I’m his little hero. [She smiles]

He always wanted me to be happy. Despite everything…In his last messages, he told me that whatever happens he will always be near me, and that my happiness was the most important thing. All of this came together.

 I know that it’s easy to give up when something like this happens, but I just can’t. For the sake of my loved ones. For his sake. For the sake of everyone who had sacrificed their lives for us to live, to fight, and to see this through. It is an enormous sacrifice, an enormous price, and I can’t give up, even when I want to. Because what’s all this for, then?

For a long time – at least a month – I was in despair. I went to Odesa 40 days after his death, then came back to Kyiv and realized that I had to move on somehow, to do something. I experienced this internal dialogue every day. I’d convince myself: “Yasia, you have to go and do something. Please, Yasia, please.” Now I realize that at some point I stopped just waiting every day. And I started returning to a familiar routine: eating, sleeping.

Another weird feature of collective psychology is that people think if you’re grieving, you have to keep grieving forever. To always be in mourning. If you say you’re unhappy, why are you smiling at all? Weird things like that. We do everything wrong: we cry the wrong way, we laugh the wrong way. Lots of hypocrisy, lots of personal messages and – excuse my language – people being total assholes to you, whatever you do. Now I feel that I have to move forward, but the way people react sometimes makes me hold myself back subconsciously. But no, you won’t make me [change course], I’m not the one to do that. [She laughs]

But I will never be the woman I was before 16 December. We didn’t break up, you know? Because when you break up, you know that that person still exists somewhere. We didn’t end our relationship. Death did. Death confronts you head on. A person was there, and then suddenly they are not. We still had a pending chat in a messenger app. What are you talking about? To be honest, I realize that this has also changed how I think about marriage and about men. Sometimes even the words “husband” and “wife” trigger me.

Lyosha really wanted to take me to Portugal. He and I dreamt about having a house there, about the ocean. We decided on names for our children and what kinds of dogs we’d have. I wanted a lab and he wanted one of those ugly fighting dogs. I always said it was a monster, not a dog. [She laughs] He’d always show me pictures. I always forget the name of the breed. We did talk a lot about all of that, and [Lyosha] was often the one to initiate those conversations. I remember one of the last times we talked about it, it was our last walk in Odesa together, during a three-day blackout. We were walking through the dark city, the rain was heavy, and we were talking about the ocean, about having children. This future will never materialize, because he is no longer here, and the old me is no longer here either. [She pauses]

He had an opportunity to leave, like many other [Ukrainian] men, who crossed the border at some point and are now doing great. We often had a conversation that went like this:

– Yasia, do you understand that I can’t be anywhere else while the guys are here?

– I get it, Lyosha, – I would reply.

І really did understand.

I recently went to visit friends in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. I found out about Kane’s death there. Maybe you’ve heard about it? He’s a guy from New Zealand, he saved a [Ukrainian] prisoner of war, and was killed in a trench near Vuhledar. Unfortunately I never met him but my friends told me lots of good things about him. We were staying with his fiancée. She is now another widow who hadn’t been married. She ran out of time. Just a few days before we got the news [of Kane’s death] we were congratulating her on their engagement, and she said that she didn’t want him to propose before coming back [from the front], because she didn’t want to be an unmarried widow.

My heart sank when I heard her say that. The way she put it, an “unmarried widow”. It really resonated with me, and it made me realize how common this predicament is among women in Ukraine right now. It pains me.

And then a few days after she said that, her fiancé was killed. I came to see her, I wanted to talk to her and support her, because I’d been through all that. She was experiencing this raw, fresh trauma. I heard her say the same things I’d said earlier. I was listening to her, unable to utter a single word. I was in pieces when I left her room, real hysterics.

I knew her pain so well, I understood it like no one else. But even knowing what she was going through, and even having recently gone through that myself, I realized that no one could help her then. I couldn’t even say anything to her. It’s so painful to see that. It’s insufferable, knowing that hundreds of women in our beautiful country go through this terrible tragedy every single day. Everyday we mourn, everyday people cry out in pain from their loss. The injustice of this is crushing.

First and foremost, I think a person living through the death of someone they loved should not be left alone. Under any circumstances. Just be near them. But don’t regurgitate stale Soviet narratives: “don’t cry”, “stop crying”, “calm down” – or the true classic, “you have to be strong because he wouldn’t like seeing you weak like that.” That’s cringe. You may think you’re helping when you say things like that, but you’re only making things worse.

A person living through a tragedy might tell you they no longer want to live, that there is no point in living. This is common after a loss. The best thing is to have people who can just listen, who will just be a shoulder to cry on, because at times you really do just cry your eyes out. I’ll say it again, the most important thing is not to leave that person alone. Give them time to be weak, to whine, to veg out. It’s their right. But always be near them.

As for therapy – you know, I’ve been working with a therapist for a long time, because I have certain issues that are difficult to deal with without therapy. But I wasn’t able to call my therapist for three weeks after receiving Lyosha’s death notification. That was really unlike me. I used to always look forward to our sessions because I knew they would make me feel better. This time, though, my pain was so great I couldn’t fit it into the format of a therapy session, though I love my therapist and she is a wonderful professional. I just couldn’t.

I called her once, three weeks after receiving the notification. I wanted to cancel our session on countless occasions, though I’d never done that before. When I finally called her I told her I didn’t want to talk to her, but decided that I had to do it. I told her everything during the hour of our session, I cried, everything like that. But any therapist would tell you the same – and I knew exactly what she would say. That there is no medicine or treatment, that no one could help me, that there isn’t a magic pill, that I had to live through it, to get through it, work through it, that it will take time. With time this pain will eventually shift. She told me that I should try going back to a routine.

I haven’t been able to talk to her since. That still feels like a bit of a strange episode to me, it’s very unlike me. Only recently, a couple of weeks ago, did I realize that I would like to go back to therapy and keep working. I just wasn’t ready back then.

This is very personal. Everyone has to tune into how they feel inside, and not put any pressure on themselves. Of course it’s great if you can, and want to, talk to a therapist and process the loss alongside them. Loss is an incredibly powerful shock to our mental health. But life goes on, even after something like this. Even when you think that it is over. Though a part of me died with Lyosha on 16 December, I’m physically still here. I’m still alive. I know that he fought for me, and I have to fight, too, and we all have to fight. Despite everything.