Chernivtsi, Ukraine

Cash For Refugees volunteers work with refugees and displaced families in Ukraine, and we have gotten used to listening to a lot. To avoid compassion burnout, we need to constantly remind ourselves to focus on the meta-level of empathy: the overall values and beautiful lessons about human dignity that can be discerned from unimaginably horrible details  One of the horrendous stories during this war was the story about renting a coffin for an entire apartment building.

The displaced people in Ukraine tell us about how it is important for them to come back and conduct burial ceremonies for all people in their apartment building who died during bombings by Russian rockets. These are people they may never have seen before the war but now have spent months hiding within the basements of their buildings. At first, it was so difficult for us to comprehend how someone who had reached safety would come back and risk their lives to bury someone they barely knew, and come back to a place where they literally have nothing because there is just a hole where their apartment building used to be. Eventually, we understood that perhaps they wanted to bury their memories, so that they could keep them but not continue to carry them as a burden, like a stray dog buries a bone and always remembers where it is, even if he would never come back to dig it up again.

"Do you know how hard it is to dig a grave for your relative or a neighbor? We always were digging with breaks because there were bombs and rockets flying around and if you die who will bury the relative? But if we were not digging we talked to our dead relatives and promised them that the next day we'll bury them properly according to the Orthodox Christian traditions. We kept promising day after day and Russians were bombing us nonstop." Then with a smile. "You know, we had just one coffin for our multi-floored building. Ah, those old Ukrainian grannies, are always stocked for anything to happen. Our elderly neighbor from another apartment ordered a fancy coffin with ribbons for herself. Long before the war. Oh well, last two months we used that coffin many times for each ceremony. But after the ceremony, we rolled out the body and buried it wrapped in cellophane." 

What we heard in these stories is the importance of remaining human. Even if life is worth nothing during the war, memories are precious and there is a proper way to say goodbye to loved ones.

by Natasha Dukach
at Chernivtsi, Ukraine