The Arithmetic of Absence

Sunday 21 June 2026

There are some forms of grief for which language feels obscenely inadequate. We speak because silence appears cowardly, yet every sentence sounds thinner than the reality it attempts to describe. We offer condolences, embrace those who mourn, search for words of comfort learned from religion, philosophy or custom. But there remain moments when the sheer weight of another person’s suffering leaves one standing helplessly before it, conscious that language itself has limits.

Such moments are not uncommon in Ukraine.

One encounters them in railway stations, in government offices, in cafés, in churches, and in the quiet spaces between ordinary conversations. A photograph on a telephone screen. A black ribbon tied around a sleeve. A pause in a sentence that stretches longer than it should. Behind each may lie a story too immense for casual retelling.

I remember sitting with a young woman whose uncle, father and brother had all been killed in the fighting. She was not dramatic. She did not weep continuously. Indeed, what was most striking was her composure. The catastrophe had passed beyond the stage of immediate anguish and entered that colder territory where grief becomes a permanent resident of the soul.

Outside, life continued with its customary indifference. Trams moved along their tracks. People queued for coffee. Children hurried across streets carrying schoolbags. The ordinary machinery of existence performed its daily functions as though nothing exceptional had happened.

Yet for her the world had been fundamentally altered.

One death changes a family. Three deaths remake it entirely.

As she spoke, I found myself searching for some consoling phrase. It is an instinctive human reaction. We feel compelled to offer something — wisdom, reassurance, perspective, faith. We cannot bear to leave suffering entirely unanswered.

But what could one honestly say?

That they had died for a cause? Perhaps they had.

That they had died defending their country? Certainly they had.

That their sacrifice would not be forgotten? One hopes so.

Yet none of these observations restores a father’s voice at the dinner table. None recreates the familiar sound of a brother entering a room. None returns an uncle whose stories and habits had become part of the architecture of family life.

The dead do not come back because their cause was noble.

War has always generated public language and private reality. Public language speaks of strategy, territory, national interest, historical necessity and military objectives. Private reality concerns an empty chair, an unanswered telephone number, a birthday that arrives carrying more pain than celebration.

The distance between these two languages can be vast.

Listening to her, I realised that consolation often consists not in finding the correct words but in accepting that there are no correct words. Perhaps the greatest discourtesy is to imagine that grief can be solved like a problem or diminished by a sufficiently eloquent sentence.

Sometimes the most honest response is simply to remain present.

Philip Larkin once possessed a remarkable ability to notice how mortality inhabits ordinary life. Death in his poetry rarely arrives accompanied by grand gestures. Instead it appears in railway journeys, hospital visits, empty churches and fading afternoons. It emerges quietly, as something woven into the fabric of existence rather than standing apart from it.

War accelerates this process. It forces the young to become acquainted with truths usually reserved for old age.

A young woman who has buried her father, brother and uncle has learned something about the world that many people spend decades avoiding. She knows how fragile permanence really is. She knows that the future, which once appeared expansive and indefinite, can suddenly narrow into a single unbearable moment.

Yet there is another truth that emerges from such encounters.

Human beings possess a resilience that is difficult to comprehend from a distance.

The young woman continued with her studies. She continued helping her family. She continued making plans. Not because her grief had diminished, but because life, stubbornly and mysteriously, continued demanding participation.

This is not triumph. It is something more modest and perhaps more admirable.

It is endurance.

One notices this quality throughout Ukraine. The capacity to carry sorrow without allowing it to extinguish one’s humanity. The ability to laugh while mourning. To celebrate a birthday while remembering a funeral. To plant flowers beside a grave and then return home to prepare supper.

Such acts appear small.

They are not.

Civilisation itself may ultimately consist of little more than this determination to continue behaving humanely in circumstances that encourage despair.

As our conversation ended, I remained uncertain whether I had offered any comfort at all. Perhaps comfort is too ambitious a goal. Perhaps consolation cannot be given. Perhaps it can only be shared.

What stayed with me afterwards was not what I had said, but what I had witnessed.

I had witnessed a young woman carrying an unimaginable burden with dignity.

I had witnessed the quiet courage required to wake each morning and continue living in the aftermath of immense loss.

And I had been reminded of something that war repeatedly teaches, yet humanity repeatedly forgets: that history is measured not only in victories and defeats, advances and retreats, but also in absences.

The absence of a father.

The absence of a brother.

The absence of an uncle.

The absence of voices that once filled rooms and now survive only in memory.

These absences become part of the landscape of a nation at war. They are invisible to military maps and statistical reports. Yet they endure long after front lines have shifted and politicians have departed.

One day the war will end.

The guns will fall silent. Borders will be negotiated. Monuments will be erected. Historians will debate causes and consequences.

But for countless families there will remain an arithmetic that cannot be balanced.

Three men gone.

One young woman left to remember them.

And those of us fortunate enough to stand beside her, however briefly, can do little except acknowledge the magnitude of her loss and admire the courage with which she continues forward — carrying love, memory and grief together into an uncertain future.