The questions wore her, heavy as a winter coat and the boots she still wears in the cold. Why did 48-year-old Vadym go to Bucha, where the Russians were so much harder than those who occupied their village? Who shot him while he was driving on Yablunska Street, where so many bodies were found? And why did she lose her son just one day before the Russians left? After receiving the news that Vadym had been found and buried by strangers in a courtyard in Bucha, she spent more than a week trying to bring him home to a suitable grave. But it was just one body in the hundreds, part of a world-wide war crimes investigation. Trumpchaninova is among many elderly people who have been left behind or have chosen to stay as millions of Ukrainians have fled the border or to other parts of the country. They were the first to be seen on empty streets after Russian troops withdrew from communities around the capital, Kyiv, staring out of wooden gates or carrying bags of food donations to icy homes. Some, like Trumpchaninova, survived the first weeks of the war only to find that they had taken their children. She last saw her son on March 30. He thought he was taking a walk as part of his long stroke recovery. “It would be crazy to go further,” he said. He wondered if he went by car to look for a cell phone connection to call his own son and wish him happy birthday. He wondered if Vadym believed that the Russians in Bucha were like those who had occupied their village, who told them that they would not be harmed if they did not retaliate. More than a week later, she found his makeshift tomb with the help of a stranger of the same name and age as her son. The next day, he located the body bag containing Vadym in a Bucha cemetery. He always stood out for his height and his foot came out of a hole in the corner. Worried not to lose him, she found a scarf and tied it there. It was her indicator. She thought she knew where her son’s body had been kept for days, in a refrigerated truck outside Bucha Mortuary. She desperately wanted to find an employee who would speed up the process of inspecting her son and issuing the documents required for his release. “I’m worried about where he would go and if I could find him,” he said. Once he had collected his body, he would need a coffin, equivalent to one month of her retirement, about $ 90. She, like other elderly Ukrainians, has not received a pension since the start of the war. She gets them by selling the vegetables she grows, but the potatoes she wanted to plant in March withered while she was hiding in her house. Her aging cell phone continues to lose battery life. She forgets her phone number. Her other son, two years younger than Vadim, is unemployed and troubled. Nothing is easy. “I would leave this place because I feel it is so difficult to be here,” said Trumpchaninova, sitting at home under a black-and-white photo of herself at 32, full of determination. She recalled watching her television while it was still operating, in the early days of the war, as broadcasts showed so many Ukrainians fleeing. He was worried about them. Where are they going? Where will they sleep? What will they eat? How will they rebuild their lives? “I felt very sorry for them,” he said. “And now, I’m in that situation. I feel so lost inside. I do not even know how to describe how lost I am. “I’m not even sure I’ll put my head in this pillow tonight and wake up tomorrow.” Like many older Ukrainians, she worked without devoting time to herself, determined to give her children an education and a better life than her own. “Those were my plans,” she said confused. “What plans do you want me to have now?” “How can I make new plans if one of my sons is lying there in Bucha?” On Thursday, he waited again outside the Bucha morgue. After another busy day without progress, he sat on a bench in the sun. “I just wanted to sit in good weather,” he said. “I’m going home. I will come again tomorrow. “ All over the city that day was the kind of closure that Trumpchaninova wanted so badly. In a cemetery, two 82-year-old women got up from a bench and crossed as the now-famous white van arrived carrying another coffin. The women, Neonyla and Elena, sing at the funeral. They have appeared in 10 since the Russians left. “The greatest pain for a mother is to lose her son,” Neonyla said. “There is no word to describe it.” They united the priest at the foot of the tomb. Two men with handfuls of tulips attended, along with a man with a hat in his hand. “This is it,” said a gravedigger when the exhausted priest was finished. Another man with a gold ink pen wrote key details on a temporary cross. It was about a woman who had been killed by bombing while cooking outside. He was 69. A series of empty tombs were waiting. Finally, on Saturday, Troubchaninova was reunited with her son. In a small cemetery in a field in her village under a cast-iron sky, she hugged a coffin. He knelt down and cried. And Vadim was buried.
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