Losing Home

Unless you have been purposely avoiding the news out of Ukraine, we have all seen the images now of burned out, bombed apartment buildings. In one photo, a man was standing on the charred balcony of what was once his home. People have crowded into a subway platform, trying to create some sense of normalcy with makeshift beds and a jar of tulips set in the window of a subway car. A month ago, they had homes where they laughed and cried, fixed dinner for their families, tucked children into bed at night. Where they worried and dreamed and planned for the future. Then the bombs fell. Russian soldiers came to slaughter them. They fled with so little, but they took with them a determination to come back to their homes, their country, a righteous anger against a tyrant who plans genocide while eating breakfast.

Losing one’s home is a powerful wound. It isn’t just about possessions and comforts. It unmoors you, sets you adrift in an unpredictable world in which nothing is certain, not even waking up the next day. Our homes stabilize us, feed something in us that longs for security, for dependability. Within those walls, life unfolds and memories pile up. We carry all of that inside us. Home isn’t just a place, it’s an anchor that sets itself in our hearts and can keep us sane in the most turbulent times. When I look at the faces and hear the voices of Ukrainian citizens who are bravely trying to find moments of calm, even joy, as they crawl under blankets in the freezing cold, I am amazed at the courage and resilience that human beings are capable of. Young children play with donated toys in underground hiding places, having no idea what happened to their lives.

In the world of Alzheimer’s, there is a rare constant – dementia patients saying they want to go home. Caregivers have told me often that they don’t know which home their loved one is referring to. Their childhood home? The home they bought when they first married? The home they’re in now that they no longer recognize? My theory is that they aren’t referring to a physical home at all, they’re talking about a feeling inside that they can no longer find. That feeling of security, of familiarity when you close the door behind you and you are in your own home. It settles you, things make sense in that environment. With dementia, nothing is familiar anymore, and things almost never make sense.

In Ukraine, there are now millions of people who have lost their homes, their sense of security, the place where they felt rooted and sure of their surroundings. Those millions of people are also carrying with them the broken places in their hearts that were once intact.

Vladimir Putin knows this. Every tyrant does. If you destroy people’s homes, if you send them fleeing into the unknown of war raging around them, if you give them no safe place to call their own, you are very likely killing something so vital inside them that in time you can just sweep them up and do whatever you want to them.

And yet, the Ukrainians are refusing to surrender to their own heartbreak. The world should take note of what is possible when human beings reach into the chasms that have opened up in their hearts for courage and strength they probably didn’t know they had. While Putin scurries to the end of a mile long table because he’s too scared to be near other people, Ukrainians are huddled together for warmth, for support, and are bravely dreaming of having their homeland back.

However this war ends, Vladimir Putin already lost.