It was an unusually warm spring evening when Iryna Nakonetchna and her husband were walking past a large hotel in the central part of the city of Kryvyi Rih. A Russian missile suddenly hit the building and in a huge explosion, the couple were thrown in different directions.
Her ears were ringing. Her husband was screaming somewhere far away. Bones in her body were cracking. Nakonetchna reached for her left leg but felt nothing there.
That was the last time they saw each other, on March 5th of last year. They were taken to different hospitals and her husband died of his injuries the following day.
"I never got to say goodbye," Iryna Nakonetchna tells AP just over a year later.
I wasn't even at the funeral.
Thrown away almost everything
During a couple of months in the hospital, Nakonetchna underwent several operations. It was not until the end of May that she managed to sit up in the hospital bed. Shortly after that, she made a decision.
She cut off her long hair and emptied the apartment. All the furniture, clothes, gadgets and photos were thrown away. She kept only one, a portrait of herself with her husband Serhiy.
Reinventing herself was absolutely necessary to move forward with all the injuries, she says. Both the physical ones - her entire left leg was replaced by a prosthesis - and the psychological ones, with the loss of a life partner.
I needed to let go of everything from the past. And focus on living my life, even if it's half the life I had before.
Part of a movement
Tens of thousands of people in Ukraine, both civilians and soldiers, have been forced to undergo amputations after injuries sustained during more than four years of raging war.
A little over a year after the attack, Iryna Nakonetchna limps with her prosthetic leg. She needs a cane to walk, but is undergoing rehab to gain more control over her new body.
Iryna Nakonetchna’s two-year-old grandson, Tymofij, one day put a sticker on his grandmother’s new leg - a cartoon capybara with a prosthesis. The rodent has become a symbol for all veterans and war victims in Ukraine, where prosthetics are becoming an increasingly common part of the street scene.
Since then, Nakonetchna has spent several hours a day crocheting little capybaras. She crochets them piece by piece and then sews them together to make whole toy animals.
When I count the stitches, I only think about the stitches. Not about the life that could have been and that unfortunately wasn't.
