Pasha keeps an old photo of her younger self with her two sons beside her. It typically acts as a bookmark in her old Cyrillic-written Orthodox bible. She loves talking about her children and misses them terribly.
February 4th is her son, Vitali’s, birthday, two days before my own and as I visit her she is very sad. Her son died a few years earlier. “My most precious Vitali died in 2004.” She says.
She said she would try not to cry about her son on his birthday, but that it is difficult to think of the loved ones she has lost in her life, her brother, her younger sister, her mother and her son. She regularly kisses the old photograph as if trying to kiss the people within them.
