MY EASTER HERE IS VERY DIFFERENT

Already the second such one.

There will be no beautifully laden table today, no beautiful festive clothes. No great, heartfelt joy either. For most soldiers today, there will be no meeting with their families; their children will not see them today.

For most soldiers today it is just another day at war. One more day toward victory, toward a brighter tomorrow for them and their children. One more such day for a different tomorrow.

Our Easter here is very different.

And yet all of this, understandably, cuts deeply into general family life, into relationships within the family, with loved ones. One soldier's wife told me that a long-distance relationship is hard work, requiring patience and dedication. She calls her husband every day on the phone, she describes to him what is generally going on, what her day was like, what she did at work, how their parents are doing, or if she saw or heard something interesting, also she writes him a few times a day: “I started doing it instinctively, and later I learned, that specialists recommend doing this in that way, to maintain the relationship”.

“I asked my husband more than once,” the woman says, “whether I am disturbing him, when writing to him, but I see that he reads my messages, you can see it from the message status in the app. And he himself says: no, no, everything is fine, your messages even 'pull' me out of that war state. Well, all those little things, I write him everything, every smallest detail, so he doesn't become too detached. For instance, in the morning, on the metro going to work, I always say hello to him, I write 'good morning,' send all sorts of funny pictures, memes. Sometimes I find something funny about military things, I send those too. In short, I try to find the topics that connect us, and I just do everything intuitively. From time to time, I try to send him a little parcel. I baked a cake in the morning, packed it up and I'm already sending it to my husband via Nova Post. Then I watch: aha, there, the parcel has arrived at the destination, there, he's already picked it up. And then we call each other, and I always ask him: have you eaten it yet, was it good?"

The woman talks about all these small things with boundless warmth, laughing from time to time, and I think about how many visible and invisible efforts a soldier's wife must put in, so that the family in such difficult circumstances is not just something on paper, but functions. During wartime, this is titanic work and endless sacrifice...

“A family on distance, a long-distance relationship, it's a very difficult thing,” the woman sighs. “In general, if someone from a family goes into the military and the other stays in civilian life, then usually all the 'work' of the relationship falls to the one who stays: maintaining the relationship, supporting the husband, participating in each other's lives. Of course, it can't be 100% only one person's work — there must be some reciprocal response. So, in my case - it's a part of my activity: that relationship maintenance, as difficult as it may be. 

Once I even told my husband: “You are turning into an abstraction, you are gradually becoming an abstract phenomenon”, but I do everything I can for us; our support is absolutely necessary to him. After all, they are completely emotionally exhausted out there; they have no days off; he doesn't even know what day of the week or date it is; their days just follow one after another.

In the summer, when he got leave and came home, my father died. And it so happened that precisely during his leave, so we were busy with all those arrangements, the funeral itself. And, you know, a paradoxical situation - pain, loss - on one hand and I almost apologized to my husband that it happened, and on the other hand I thought: God, how good, that he is here, beside me.”

“It's hard,” she says “And in the evenings, you come home lonely.”

The woman says that she gradually got used to it and tells of one New Year’s Day, when he came home for the holiday, but having been home only a few hours, they were suddenly urgently called back. “But to watch it all, emotionally is hard,” as though to herself, as though to me, she says quietly.

“For instance,” she says, “I see that he's burning out, he lost weight, I can see it’s hard for him. I see it. I simply see it.”

I thank the Media Support Fund for supporting the post series “War in Ukraine: The Gap Between the Military and Society”