I was sitting in the canteen with Ludmila just before lunchtime today when Grandmother Lena shuffled in, all by herself.  I was surprised to see her, because the elderly residents usually do not come up the stairs to the second floor.  Also, Grandmother Lena usually stays together with her close friend (who occupies the bed next to her in the dormitory room), so I was especially surprised to see her all alone. She looked a little bit angry to me. I thought maybe she was upset because lunch wasn’t being served yet.  But Ludmila said no, actually Grandma Lena was just lost.  She had gone to the toilet and couldn’t find her way back to her dormitory room. 

I thought we were really lucky that Grandma Lena came upstairs, instead of wandering out of the building and off into the countryside.  I have heard stories about people with dementia getting lost like that. But Ludmila told me Grandma Lena does come upstairs occasionally, whenever she feels lost.  Maybe she knows she can find someone in the canteen to help.  

Ludmila doesn’t think Grandma Lena has dementia.   She told me Grandma Lena has difficulty staying oriented and often gets lost here at the relocated nursing home, but she remembers everything from her life before the Russian attack drove her from her home.  Indeed, when Grandma Lena shuffled into the canteen today, she explained, “I’m from Luhansk, so I don’t know my way around here,” which seems to imply that she knows where her home is and understands that she’s not at home right now.  

Grandma Lena is most remarkable for her singing.  She has a beautiful, deep-timbered voice that is very comfortable to listen to, and she knows a lot of old Ukrainian songs by heart.

Grandma Lena is from a town in the Ukraine-controlled part of the Donbas region, but very close to the war front that existed since Russia’s 2014 invasion of the Donbas region. 

Then, as part of the major new offensive Russia launched in late February 2022, Russian forces laid siege to Grandma Lena’s hometown in early March of 2022. Grandma Lena spent the next month in a basement, sheltering from artillery bombardment. Eventually Grandma Lena was rescued from the basement and evacuated from the besieged town. She was taken to Bakhmut and then to the nursing home in Chasiv Yar. Grandma Lena doesn’t remember anything about the month she spent sheltering in the cellar, or about the evacuation. It’s as though she mentally closed a door on that experience. Now at the relocated nursing home here in Khmelnytskyi, she still seems uneasy. Perhaps she’s suffering something like “shell shock” from the mental stress of living under artillery bombardment and then evacuating in tense circumstances.

We learned recently that Grandma Lena has a son. He left Ukraine many years ago for school, and launched his career abroad after graduating.  He regularly returned to Ukraine to visit his family for many years. However, after the turmoil in the Donbas region in 2014, he was no longer able to return. It’s been 9 years since Grandmother Lena has seen her son. 

Because of all the turmoil after Russia laid siege to her hometown, her son lost track of her whereabouts. He had no idea that she was taken to the nursing home in Chasiv Yar and then moved to Khmelnytskyi when the nursing home relocated. 

After trying for nearly a year to find her, he had nearly given up hope of ever seeing her again. But just recently, someone who knows both Grandma Lena and her son was able to use social media to contact the son and let him know Grandma Lena is still with us here in Khmelnytskyi, and is actually in pretty good health.

Her son would like to care for her now, but his career has taken him away from Ukraine for many years, and it would be very difficult for him to return, at least not until his children are adults and he has retired. But now that her hometown has been destroyed and she is an IDP (“internally displaced person”), it might make sense for Grandma Lena to leave Ukraine to go live with her son.  However, unfortunately, the recent experience of evacuating from her home town in emergency circumstances and then relocating clear across Ukraine to Khmelnytskyi seems to have traumatized her so much that she’s uninterested in relocating yet again, especially to a foreign country.  So, even though her son now knows where she is, it seems unlikely that life will change very much for Grandma Lena, at least for the time being.