I’m ready to join any hot spot. There is no fear. There was no such silent horror as at first, when my wife and son were hiding in the hallways of our Kyiv apartment trying to somehow regain their composure or even falling asleep amidst the howls of terror. great of air alarm and explosions. Of course, there is sadness: More than anything in the world, I just want to be with my wife, who is still in Kyiv with my son. I want to live with them, not die somewhere on the front lines. But I have accepted the possibility of me dying as a near-complete fact. Going through this Rubicon calmed me down, made me braver, stronger, more balanced. So it must be for those who consciously walk the path of war.
The death of civilians, especially children, is an entirely different matter. And no, I don’t mean that a civilian’s life is more valuable than a soldier’s life. But it’s a little more difficult to prepare for the death of an ordinary Ukrainian who is going about her life and is suddenly killed by Russian roulette. It also cannot be prepared for brutal torturemass graves, mutilated children, corpses buried in the courtyards of apartment buildings, and missile attacks on residential areas, theatres, museums, kindergartens and hospitals.
How to prepare yourself for the thought that the mother of two hides in the basement for a slow month passed away in front of them? How to accept the death of a 6 year old girl Who died from dehydration under the rubble of her house? How should we react to the fact that some people in the country, like in capture MariupolCatching pigeons eating and drinking puddles is at risk of cholera?
To quote Kurt Vonnegut, even if war does not continue like a glacier, there will still be old death. But the encounter with death can be very different. We want to believe that we and our loved ones, modern people of the 21st century, no longer have to die from medieval barbaric torture, epidemics or incarceration in concentration camps. That’s part of what we’re fighting for, not just for the right to live dignified but also to die dignified.
We Ukrainians, let’s wish ourselves a good death – in our own beds, for example, when the time comes. And not when Russian missiles hit our house at dawn.
Artem Chekh is a soldier, writer and author of the book “Absolute Zero”.
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