My Father Never Saw a Drone

I had a text prepared about the ceasefires discussed here and there in the news, but the date would not leave me alone. Yesterday, July 30, my father would have turned 84 if he were alive. He went away twenty-five years ago.

There is so much to tell about this country, so much the world still needs to understand. But today, let me speak about my him. My life cannot be separated from Ukraine’s, it is all the same story.

Some days ago, I visited his cousins in the village where he spent his youth before moving to the cities. I had not seen these people for almost thirty years, and everyone spoke so much about his generous side. It was a generosity I had always known, but had never directly associated with him. I never came to associate my father with tenderness either, though I always loved him and cared about him.

It took a quarter of a century after his death, and a table in a village, for me to learn things about him I never knew.

My father lived almost his entire life under Soviet rule. He came from a village where people had been proud to be Ukrainian for hundreds of years. Until this war, I had never really considered what that did to his soul, to live as a Soviet man carrying other nation so deep inside him. We never touched the subject. Today I see that there was very likely a war inside him too.

Behind his seriousness, there were times when he was a little hard on me, especially when trying to make me get good grades at school. It left a wound in me that I still fight against, but I do not blame you for that, dad. Today I see you were doing what you believed a father should do, and you could not be completely free from the mentality you were educated into.

My mother and grandmother were always the skeptical ones, you were the one who thought everything would be fine in the end. You had a simple life, but you never stopped believing in the future of the independent Ukraine you saw only in your final years. I do not know whether that faith was entirely yours, or if you kept some of your fears to yourself because you wanted the younger ones to grow without carrying them. I will never know for sure. But whatever you carried inside, what reached us was courage.

You did a good job, because today there are moments when I see you in our flag and in our symbols.

I have always been defined by the women in my life. My mother, my grandmother, and more recently my wife. In everything I do and feel, and everything I think, these women are present, and sometimes I forget your part in my soul, my father. But in these last years, I have felt you inside me more than ever, and I am here representing you in some way.

My father, how could I explain to you what drones are?

How could I explain that they were turned into machines of war to kill people, and that they are over our country while I write this? That we are managing to reverse engineering them and sending them back to our aggressors, well, there are so many things about the world today that I would not even know where to begin explaining to you, I must have lived thirty years in the last five.

Sometimes I dream about you. I dream that we are talking of course, about our Ukraine, and about people. You would not say many words, and as always, we would try to understand what you were thinking from the expression in your eyes. Sometimes I think you would be proud of everything, other times I think you would not understand very much.

And there are those times I even ask myself whether I should tell you about our resistance, because that would require me to tell you about the aggression and the blood. It would be so hard for me to do, even knowing that you grew up hearing centuries of similar stories.

Every family here has a dead person we keep away from the news. A father who died in a year when dying was still an ordinary thing, or a grandmother who was spared this. We mentally visit them and say almost nothing true. Wherever you are reading this, you may have this dilemma too, about which parts of your life you would not say out loud to them.

I do not know what to believe anymore about an afterlife. Sometimes I believe it exists, and sometimes I refuse it entirely. I believe in good. I believe in generosity. Beyond that, there is little I believe automatically.

Today I am a father myself. Ukraine is a land of fathers. And you are also living, in some way, in the soul of someone you never had the chance to meet personally.

I needed two decades and a war to finally understand that you live inside my soul too. You might not recognize the boy 14 years old you saw for the last time, but do not worry too much about that. If I met the person I was five years ago, I would also have a hard time recognizing who I am today.

But we are here, every minute lived, every word written, trying to become a better person and a better citizen than we were the moment and the word before.

It was and is an honor to be your son and to live according to your principles. Please know that I am proud to carry you and your nation in everything I do with my life.

For yesterday, wherever you are, happy birthday, my father.

I missed you so much at that table in your village.

I miss you at every table where I sit.

—Viktor

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Books by Lyubov and Viktor Kravchuk