Guiding a lonely Ukrainian military wife and a Ukrainian Widow Through Grief

Lena Denman, ACHF President and Ukrainian Psychologist Dariia

Dariia is a psychologist that met with Lena twice in July of 2024. She’s one of 19 clinicians ACHF trained thanks to generous grant funding from the United Methodist Committee on Relief. Dariia specializes in working with women whose husbands are on the front fighting. She told Lena the story of a Ukrainian woman who was staying in Slovakia as a refugee. We will give this woman the pseudonym of Oksana for the purposes of protecting her privacy. Oksana’s husband had told her that she should bring herself and her child back from Slovakia and that they would spend a summer together in Ukraine. Oksana’s child was in kindergarten. She had to rent out her flat (apartment) and get her child removed from school to honor her husband’s wishes and to return to Ukraine.

While she was abroad, her husband made the choice to enlist in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, having felt a call to duty. When Oksana and her child arrived back in Kyiv, her husband was already sent to a military training school in a city in western Ukraine, preparing for the frontlines. There was no family reunion. Oksana was angry and felt a sense of betrayal. They had a common plan, hadn’t he agreed to it? She respected her husband’s choice to join the war, but she did not understand the timing of his decision. She was now in Kyiv with her child, and they were in danger from potential drone attacks.

Dariia helped Oksana process through her grief as a widow. Oksana felt an inner conflict. Dariia stated “In our culture, it is forbidden to be angry with the person who died. In our culture we only say good about the dead or we say nothing.” Oksana had been worried about the plan she and her husband had agreed upon. And then he died. Dariia says she helps women feel all the variety of their emotions.

A second woman Dariia counseled is now a widow because she and her husband were both abroad. Then her husband made the choice to go to the Ukrainian army. Within three weeks of him joining he died on the frontlines. He had been safe and abroad, but he felt like it was his duty to fight for Ukraine.

Dariia stated “Our men feel a call to duty and it seems to the family they are not cared for. Women try to understand but they feel angry, worried and neglected. They feel scared because of their children.” Dariia herself is a single mother and as a divorced woman, does not count on anyone’s help with her family. The women she counsels feel like their partners left them. They must manage with their children and take care of necessities.

The training ACHF has provided through grant funding from the United Methodist Committee on Relief has helped and is helping train clinicians on how to help their patients through the symptoms that occur from traumatic stressful events. Nearly all Ukrainians living in Ukraine experience trauma associated with war. We want you to learn their stories and help them move beyond survival to thriving again, living the abundant life spoken of in the gospel by Christ “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full,” John 10:10.