The Unfiltered · Monday · No. 15
March 2022. I’m sitting there scrolling through photos of Mariupol getting turned into rubble, and I’m not watching the news like some detached asshole watching a war happen to strangers. I’m looking for one specific building. My grandmother’s building. And then I find the photo and there’s a hole in the wall exactly where her window used to be, and my stomach just drops straight through the floor.
A fucking rocket doesn’t check who’s home first.
I spent days trying to get through to anyone. Neighbors, eventually, the ones who’d survived long enough to still have a signal. Every single one of them said the same thing. She’d been inside. She didn’t get out.
So I grieved her. All the way. The real thing. This was a woman who at eighty-three walked twenty kilometers a day — not as a nice little stroll, twice a day, 10am and 10pm, on a leg that was actively injured, because she’d apparently decided that healing was something you out-discipline rather than wait for. Sharper than people a third her age. Funnier too. That’s the woman I buried in my head that spring with no body, no funeral, nothing except a hole in a wall and a chorus of neighbors telling me she was gone.
Six months later, someone sends me a video.
She’s in it. Alive. Talking. Still her, still sharp, and I’m sitting there like an absolute lunatic watching a ghost move and blink and complain about something, and I genuinely did not have the internal hardware for this. You process a death. You do the work. You let the person go, piece by piece, over months. And then they just show up on your phone screen mid-sentence like the six months you spent grieving were a prank somebody forgot to tell you about.
We scrambled like maniacs. Found contacts, established actual communication with her, started arranging transport, real logistics, hope with steps attached to it.
Then she vanished again. Not confirmed dead this time — just gone. Whatever that war was doing to the ground it was also apparently doing to her mind, and somewhere in that mess she disappeared from wherever she’d been. And the neighbors, again, same script: she didn’t make it.
So I buried her again. Same woman. Second funeral in my head, and let me tell you, grief does not build a callus. It’s not a muscle. The second time was worse, not better, because some part of me now knew the last time I was “sure,” I was wrong, and grief you can’t fully trust just sits in you like undigested food.
Good year after that — a year after we’d actually found her the second time, gotten her on video, established real contact, started actually planning — my phone rings. Unknown international number. I almost don’t answer it because who the hell calls from a number like that.
It’s a hospital director. In Mariupol. Telling me my grandmother had died. For real this time. No rumor, no neighbor’s guess. And in her things, they found a slip of paper with a phone number on it — my number, a landline in Slovenia — and instead of just filing her as an unclaimed death, this woman decided to dial a foreign country off a scrap of paper to see if it meant something to somebody.
It meant everything.
She died three times. I want to say that again because it’s genuinely unhinged and I need you to sit in the absurdity of it with me for a second: three times. Once by rumor in March. Once again by rumor six months later. And once for real, a year after we’d found her again, confirmed by a total stranger who cared enough to dial a number off a dead woman’s note. Jesus Christ himself only managed to die once, and he had a whole team, a script, and a guaranteed follow-up. She beat his record by two deaths and got no resurrection, no parade, no third act. Just me, alone, doing the same grief math over and over like a fucking idiot, trying to figure out how many times a person’s allowed to lose the same woman before the universe lets it actually stick.
I don’t have some clean bow to put on this. I looked for one out of habit and there isn’t one at the bottom. There’s just a woman who walked twenty kilometers a day out of pure spite toward her own bad leg, who died in a war she never asked for, who I buried in my head three separate times before reality finally caught up with me, and a scrap of paper with my number on it that meant I got to actually know, instead of wondering forever.
I’ll take that. Bizarre as all of this is, I’ll take that over never knowing.
The Unfiltered runs every Monday — no lessons, no answers. Just what’s true.
