Better Left Undone. When Action Breeds Contrition

 

Everyone else guessed it, I had dismissed it as foolishly foreshadowing. A ruse. A game with no clear odds favoring one or the other. When at face value it was so commonplace, that I should have seen myself as the typical ‘subject’ and counted myself as a loss before leaving the gate. Or, to put it literally, crossing the border out of Ukraine.

It has become my form of PTSD. I can’t leave it, them, or most of what I encountered, behind. It’s become a haunting. It’s been a month since I got back home. Twice as long as I was there, and, still,, I can’t let them go. I can’t let almost any of it go. Worst, most painful of all, the animals. Not their medical stuff. The stuff so routine I dismiss it as collateral damage to pet ownership, domestication of the species. The medical needs of the animals struggling to survive in a war, all look like the medical needs of animals the globe over. No, it’s not those. It has become my lack of belief that they were better off after our acts of intervention. Our pulling them from the home they knew, whether it still stands any longer, or not. I am not sure if my efforts, my time, the efforts of those who are there has helped the pets we intervened upon made a better difference for them. They are now caged, full time, and stuck in purgatory limbo inside Ukraine. There is little hope they can be moved out. Little hope they can be adopted once moved. The numbers of pets in need is so great that the ocean just swallows them and grows a little bigger with each soul it consumes. With that burden, on top of the rest of the burdens, I have given them all names. The names they never had the time to be troubled with before. The designation of belonging when the concept of that left permanence and citizenship. I was a visitor. An overnight guest. They, the animals I was brought over to care for, they were residents. If their parents hadn’t deemed them worthy enough for a collar, a name tag, or even a bus ticket out, why would I give them names? Who was I to claim them? Baggage leads to expectations and I had no plans to stay longer than the pre-purchased round-trip ticket date designated. Ukraine was set up/expected to be, just a brief stay. A substitute teacher venue. Arrive, deliver a little vet-med grub hub style, meet/greet-guh-bye. I’m an expert vacationer, world-traveler, veterinarian on the fly. Surely this wasn’t going to be a big challenge. Nope, not for me. Indoctrination at the Academy lasted two weeks. Those were the longest two weeks of my life. That set the bar. I didn’t quit then. Why would I quit now? Sea year lasted (you got it) a year. Alone on a big cold, ocean for weeks on end. Nope that didn’t wash me away. The Academy, vet school both 4 years. Hard work, lots of grit and very little mercy for weakness and meekness. I know what serving a sentence voluntarily feels like. I can do it, bide my time, count the days, survive a great unknown. I can even make it memorable, dare I say, enjoyable. Ukraine from the outside, at the beginning was an adventure in serving a people whose country was so inconceivably violated. I was going to have my protests heard by volunteering to help their plight, vet-med style.

Four weeks later they have names. Five thousand miles away from me, and I give them names. It's madness. I have slipped in, gone all Rosemary’s Baby and become consumed with faces I will probably never see again.

I’m stuck. I now understand why/how it happens. Being here and feeling you should be there. The people who are there, willingly, volunteering, surrendering their life, the lives of those who love them from their home countries, they don’t get it. They don’t understand the compulsion to go there and the stickiness of wanting to stay. There is no allure to being there. No magical beauty that ties you to Ukraine. No amazing food, culture, architecture, luxurious accommodations, attractions, music, art, visitors Bucket List items for natural, manmade or otherwise wonders of the world. There are indisputably familial ties. Ancestral influences, but for those of us lacking that it is inconceivable anyone would go there wanting/willingly, and even more unfathomable that you would go back.

But, disaster, plight, travesty of any kind serves a void. A place of emptiness that can be filled of one’s own accord. You can become the answer to your own prayers, and fill a need not challenged by candidates en mass. There is a motley crew, and I use that term appropriately of volunteers cycling in and out of Ukraine. A small collective of die-hards who cross in and out with such frequency that the obvious realities of Ukraine have been dissolutioned/diluted away. There is a missing reality to their opinions and observations of living inside Ukraine while it is at war and the rest of our impressions of how that might feel. They have consciously, or, subconsciously decided to overlook it. They are able to let the air raid sirens come and go without pause. They work, live, fulfill purposes inside a country that I think has swallowed their self-preservation skepticism. I say that not as a point of judgement or contention, I say that as a character trait I now understand, identify with and consider re-succumbing to. I am debating what ‘going back” might look like. I am talking, tip-toeing, back into getting closer to that war, again.

There is unfinished work there. Nagging, gnawing, imprisoned memories of stories merely witnessed and not truly improved upon. There is need. That yearning, compulsion, despair in knowing, need is like its own addiction. The secret-shameful kind you cannot rationally explain away to those not bitten by it. The one insane thing that keeps that core group of crew, all running from something unmet at home, into a place full of so much stress and chaos. It is the explanation to too much of the fuels they consume in rabid proportions; Coka-Cola in liter jugs, chocolate, cigarettes, adrenaline. The diet of no sleep, no real meals, no real time off, no slowing in the tidal waves of need/requests/cruelty/neglect/abuse/injuries/devastation is a recipe for suicidal decisions. Why would any of us want to go there? Want to go back there? And not be able to explain it to others? I’m going back someday. Maybe not this month, next month, or (good Lord not while Russkies still traipse about pillaging and plundering), but I now understand the affliction, and the quiet shame in admitting there is a problem with that.

For all of the haunting, the nagging, the pulling apart the insides in silence I thought my one last act to gain some closure might be to get the animals I could back to a place where I could provide a happy ending from the perpetual purgatory. Even that has been met with resistance to the place of impossibility. The CDC won’t have it without lying. The adrenaline junky with the ego so fierce his temper is the only fuel he can’t medicate away, and the vet who wants to work for a paying client at the cost of a caged pet still in purgatory and I am here ruminating. Still. Compartmentalizing to the point of justification in some small, albeit unsuccessful, attempt to quiet the faces and break the bonds of the chains I cannot excuse away as kindness.

I need to stop... although I am not sure that it's not just contrition.. find another task to throw my heart into.. see if I can resurrect a soul I am not sure I left behind in Ukraine. 

For more information on the people and pets of Ukraine please see my previous blogs. To all of those struggling to find answers within the challenges of the places their heart strings lie I hope you find peace there, even if the world around you cannot.