The testimonies of Ukraine’s war widows reveal the mortal risk of love and the possibility of dying while alive: a black pain

Olga and her daughter Veronika visiting the grave of her fallen husband Viktor, who died in 2022. Pokrovsk, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, June 2024. Photo by Johanna-Maria Fritz/Ostkreuz

is a Ukraine-born philosopher, psychoanalyst and writer. She is a visiting professor at University College Cork and University College Dublin, and director of the Institute of Psychoanalysis at the Global Center for Advanced Studies in Dublin, Ireland. Her books include Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead (2023), Negative Essays on Death, Love, and Depressive Realism (2026).

Edited byPam Weintraub

‘I died 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.

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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. As one widow put it: ‘Everyone expresses condolences – but no one wants to simply listen.’ Instead, what arrives are well-worn scripts to get over it: ‘You still have your life ahead of you,’ ‘You’ll meet someone else,’ ‘Stop grieving, life goes on.’ Alongside these responses, there is also a turning away. As Vatsenko-Bondareva puts it: ‘Society tries not to see us, as if afraid of being infected by our pain.’

If the traumatised are seen to report the truth, the whole order of truth and distortion reverses

We remain largely immune to their desperation because, when trauma speaks, when depression talks, we assume that’s not the real, happy you. You are presumed to be exaggerating, misreporting your own experience. Even when we do listen in therapeutic settings, the aim is to target the inadequacy, the disturbance that must eventually disappear: the insanity, the excessive horror that must be spoken out until it fades away, like a devil expelled from the body, with the holy water of therapy driving it out.

But what if we allowed the voice of trauma to........

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