A Body Bag and a Sister in Denial

The body of the dead man, burned, mutilated and barely recognizable, was taken from the refrigerator and laid on a metal gurney.

Oksana Pokhodenko, 34, gasped, blinking. That was not her brother, she told herself, that was not Oleksandr. That was barely a human.

Oleksandr had called his sister every day after the war started as he fled with his family to a village: "Hello, Little One. We’re good. How are you?” He had taught her how to ride a bike and had loved to watch cartoons for hours with his son.

Ms. Pokhodenko struggled to keep looking. Half of the man’s skull was gone, and his chest cavity was splayed open. “How is it possible to recognize anything here?” she cried.

This was Ms. Pokhodenko’s task, to identify the unidentifiable, to reconcile the unreconcilable, to put a name on a blackened corpse, to fill out the paperwork and to move on. A war so big that it has shaken the world was suddenly just a body bag holding the remnants of a man. Read more

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