'You will behave weirdly': what I learned from becoming an orphan at 22.
My parents are dead and now I don’t know where to spend Christmas. Dead! Killed by Putin’s evil war, almost in the initial throes of his campaign to try and capture Kyiv, they were on the motorway in the north and not far from Bucha, when their car was destroyed by the shell of a Russian tank. They were in it and driving to surprise me with a visit to the house share where I was living at the time, in the last months of my university course. Like, it was a grey, dreary day in February 2022, unsurprisingly three years after almost to the day I lost my brother, killed at the front.
I have had three birthdays without them – the family was wiped out, just my maternal grandmother survives in Jerusalem , in Israel. I got the sense of how she felt about losing so many of her family here in Ukraine 🇺🇦 entirely to go through a life with virtually no close relatives, her mother was only a young girl who was kept by villagers who knew her family, my family, sent to the death camps or simply murdered at Babi Yar, in 1941.
I used to hop through thick frozen grass on the hill near her house. If it wasn’t snow covered, then crouch among thin, leafless trees, and call her or my brother. Dad was a workaholic which is why they never seemed to go anywhere, except maybe a trip to Lviv as a treat.
This is another thing they never tell you about death: how, logistically, getting rid of two-and-a-half kilos of ground Mum and Dad is a nightmare. Firstly, it is never in an urn: the crematorium presents it to you in a practical-looking if grey-around-the-edges plastic tub, with a plastic bag inside it as rudimentary spill insurance. My brother did the hard work of organising this one, and we spent two hours in town slowly walking down to the river, digging a small hole, dumping the ashes, finding a bin for the ashes “urn”, then something to eat and home. Trying to think if I had an emotion that day. Don’t think I had an emotion. I was numb a long time afterwards, which is probably why he sent me to Israel.
So anyway, yes: Christmas is tricky. So is Pesach, and all the festivals we valued so much as a connection with our community and our family no longer with us.
“I am an orphan!” I would say to people, as a joke, and they would say: “You’re not an orphan, don’t be sil–” then realise that, yes, actually, I am, and just because I’m not some grubby-faced Oliver-style orphan, flat cap and itchy tweed asking a man for oats, doesn’t mean I’m not an orphan.
I’m an orphan. Look it up. I am the dictionary definition of an orphan.
It’s my turn – Dad, was 52, Mum, a little younger at 48, but still, when you sign up to push a baby out of your body and nurture it to adulthood, you are, in my opinion, signing an invisible contract: I am going to live long enough to see this one through so it can learn to live without me before it has to. It would have been nice for someone to teach me how to mend the roof, or what to do when the pipes freeze, or how many carbohydrates I should be eating (not that many!) before they died.
My parents are dead and my brother is dead! I am alone in the world! 🌍 In their house, I returned there with Tim, with the echoing floors and the still-bristling ashtrays and my mum’s phonebook, carefully handwritten and overwritten, years of house stores, with the names and birthdates of all her families and friends.
The voices are quiet, no reassurance from Mum on the phone when my monthly is savaging my insides. No comforting cuddle on the sofa with my Dad watching the game on the television. No idle chatter about the new season of tasks once winter had let go of the land. Just quiet!
So I travel, and I watch my fellow passengers in their lives doing the things that are important to them that they have to share in the public space that is a train carriage. I ponder as I look through the window and think about how I might strike some different poses for the photographers as they shoot me in lingerie in these European cities to which I escape for a time, although the past acts as my shadow and sticks to my feet.👣
Sometimes when I try to sleep I can still hear it exactly how she said it: “No, no.” With her voice breaking halfway through. And there was a pause, and she said, “I’ll have to call you back,” and I said yes, and then I sort of sat there, holding the phone, just sitting in the armchair, looking.
I have had three birthdays without them – the family was wiped out, just my maternal grandmother survives in Jerusalem , in Israel. I got the sense of how she felt about losing so many of her family here in Ukraine 🇺🇦 entirely to go through a life with virtually no close relatives, her mother was only a young girl who was kept by villagers who knew her family, my family, sent to the death camps or simply murdered at Babi Yar, in 1941.
I used to hop through thick frozen grass on the hill near her house. If it wasn’t snow covered, then crouch among thin, leafless trees, and call her or my brother. Dad was a workaholic which is why they never seemed to go anywhere, except maybe a trip to Lviv as a treat.
This is another thing they never tell you about death: how, logistically, getting rid of two-and-a-half kilos of ground Mum and Dad is a nightmare. Firstly, it is never in an urn: the crematorium presents it to you in a practical-looking if grey-around-the-edges plastic tub, with a plastic bag inside it as rudimentary spill insurance. My brother did the hard work of organising this one, and we spent two hours in town slowly walking down to the river, digging a small hole, dumping the ashes, finding a bin for the ashes “urn”, then something to eat and home. Trying to think if I had an emotion that day. Don’t think I had an emotion. I was numb a long time afterwards, which is probably why he sent me to Israel.
So anyway, yes: Christmas is tricky. So is Pesach, and all the festivals we valued so much as a connection with our community and our family no longer with us.
“I am an orphan!” I would say to people, as a joke, and they would say: “You’re not an orphan, don’t be sil–” then realise that, yes, actually, I am, and just because I’m not some grubby-faced Oliver-style orphan, flat cap and itchy tweed asking a man for oats, doesn’t mean I’m not an orphan.
I’m an orphan. Look it up. I am the dictionary definition of an orphan.
It’s my turn – Dad, was 52, Mum, a little younger at 48, but still, when you sign up to push a baby out of your body and nurture it to adulthood, you are, in my opinion, signing an invisible contract: I am going to live long enough to see this one through so it can learn to live without me before it has to. It would have been nice for someone to teach me how to mend the roof, or what to do when the pipes freeze, or how many carbohydrates I should be eating (not that many!) before they died.
My parents are dead and my brother is dead! I am alone in the world! 🌍 In their house, I returned there with Tim, with the echoing floors and the still-bristling ashtrays and my mum’s phonebook, carefully handwritten and overwritten, years of house stores, with the names and birthdates of all her families and friends.
The voices are quiet, no reassurance from Mum on the phone when my monthly is savaging my insides. No comforting cuddle on the sofa with my Dad watching the game on the television. No idle chatter about the new season of tasks once winter had let go of the land. Just quiet!
So I travel, and I watch my fellow passengers in their lives doing the things that are important to them that they have to share in the public space that is a train carriage. I ponder as I look through the window and think about how I might strike some different poses for the photographers as they shoot me in lingerie in these European cities to which I escape for a time, although the past acts as my shadow and sticks to my feet.👣
Sometimes when I try to sleep I can still hear it exactly how she said it: “No, no.” With her voice breaking halfway through. And there was a pause, and she said, “I’ll have to call you back,” and I said yes, and then I sort of sat there, holding the phone, just sitting in the armchair, looking.
