Why We Cannot Stop Thinking About the Pregnant Ukrainian Woman

May Ukraine’s tragic Pieta be the last.

I could not bring myself to share the haunting photo of the woman taken before her death, maybe out of a concern of exploitation, but she also deserves to be remembered, so to that end there is a link in the essay to an article about her death. This photo is by Grant Whitty on Unsplash

I was going to write about how in each of us is a creative spark. Hidden deep or worn on the skin glowing and luminous, depending on the day or hour.

But in the midst of war it feels like an obscene luxury to write about art and inner life, or how it takes work to cultivate a sense of quiet (no matter that those are the things that allows humans to emerge from war still human). It feels obscene to bemoan leafblowers and garbage trucks and Twitter addiction, when my tv screen shows a pregnant woman on a stretcher cradling her belly as she is carried out of a smoldering maternity hospital, and we are now being told that she and her baby have died.

What good are words on inner light and art to her, or the doctors who tried to save her, or her husband and father who went to retrieve her body?

See her in a different light, say three weeks ago, luminous. Stringing twinkle lights in the baby’s room, hanging a mobile above the crib, pausing for a Braxton-Hicks, hands on her belly. Happy or nervous or hopeful for the life she is about to be born into: long nights, sore nipples, wet diapers; softest skin, quietest longing, deepest eyes locking.