‘Idied along with him in Huliaipole.’ This is how Tetiana Vatsenko-Bondareva, a Ukrainian widow, describes the day her husband was killed on the battlefield. ‘At first, you don’t understand anything – just an abyss, no time, no space, nothing at all. There is just some kind of existence,’ explained another war widow, Oleksandra Kolestyk.
I first heard these words as figures of speech, the language of grief stretching beyond the limits of ordinary expression. Little did I know how thoroughly the widows’ voices would change this perception, how their words would tear me apart, turn my world upside down and undermine everything I thought I knew about myself, society and existence.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, I have been speaking with Ukrainian widows and collecting their testimonies. It was an attempt to be of some use: to listen and bear witness to stories of loss, suffering and the trauma of war. Looking back now, I see the fiction I was living inside. I imagined myself as someone who helps, the one who does the decent thing. It is still uncomfortable to recognise how naive that posture was. Without admitting it to myself, I had placed myself in the larger position, the one who remains intact while others speak from devastation.
As I stayed with the widows and their stories, that imagined position began to loosen, then collapse. The contrast between us reversed itself: my attempt to help shrank to something pitiful, while the widows turned out to be immense, larger than the world I had brought with me. The place from which I had been listening gave way beneath me. I was no longer the one who understood, who accompanied, who could offer anything. I became small in the face of what they carried – the knowledge that death is inseparable from love, that love risks literal dying, that trauma does not distort reality but exposes it. To hear them is to be dismantled by what they know.
Partly as a result of my own depression and partly because I’m a philosopher, I already understood our society as therapeutic; it operates by stigmatising and diminishing the negative aspects of existence while normalising the positive and imposing it as the only legitimate state of being. This commonsense, thoroughly psychologised outlook casts trauma or depression as deviations from how we are meant to be – happy and positive, radiating wellbeing. Even compassion becomes problematic in this context since it arrives not as genuine recognition but as a gentle pressure to return to the norm – the sympathetic hand on the shoulder that already contains, within it, the assumption that you will recover, that you should recover, that the goal is recovery.
Widows and others who carry the trauma of lost love appear, within this framework, as psychologically damaged, in need of diagnosis and compassion to help them return to the norm. Meanwhile, those on the other side of trauma take it upon themselves to bring them back.
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