"Here I can allow myself to laugh." On grief and the military cemetery / hromadske
"It's harder in winter, in the fall, when it's pouring. But we drank coffee here, both in the rain and in the wind; nothing scares us," the women by the graves at the Lychakiv Military Cemetery, better known as Mars Field, tell us while serving coffee. Some of them come right after dawn to have their first morning coffee in the company of their closest ones— a deceased husband, son, or brother.
Some sit here until late evening, and the cemetery staff awkwardly have to ask relatives to leave the area after ten o'clock, as they lock the enclosed grounds with the graves afterward.
"We called ourselves the Mars family because we really are like a family," the women continue to share about their new lives. It is here in the cemetery that they found new friends, as they understand each other with half a word.
"The ones I was friends with before the tragedy don’t understand me. And they won't be able to understand because they haven't experienced what I have," says Olena, whose husband was killed at the front in 2023.
Anna, the mother of a fallen paratrooper, has limited her communication with her neighbors, who, according to her, offered unsolicited advice like, "Your pain will pass in time, hang in there."
Bohdana admits that she has completely changed in the two years since her husband’s death. She has become much stronger and braver because she set herself the goal of not breaking under the weight of grief. She promised her husband this when she said goodbye to him during the identification in the morgue.
Watch the report about living with grief from the Lychakiv Military Cemetery by Maryana Pietsukh and Oleksandra Dyachenko.
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