Like many Ukrainians of her age, she worked without taking time for herself, determined to give her children an education and a better life than her own. "Those were my plans," she said, agitated. "What plans do you want me to have now? How do I make new plans if one of my sons is lying there in Bucha?"
The cemetery where she wants to place her son can be seen from Vadym's old room, where his canes are still propped against the door.
On Thursday, she waited outside the Bucha morgue again. After another long day without progress, she sat on a bench in the sun. "I just wanted to sit in nice weather," she said. "I'm going to go home. Tomorrow I'll come again."
Across town was the kind of closure that Trubchaninova wants so badly. At a cemetery, two 82-year-old women rose from a bench and crossed themselves as the now-familiar white van arrived carrying another casket.
The women, Neonyla and Helena, sing at funerals. They have performed at 10 since the Russians withdrew. "The biggest pain for a mother is to lose her son," Neonyla said. "There is no word to describe it."
Like Trubchaninova, they hadn't fled ahead of the Russians. This is our land, they said.
They joined the priest at the foot of the grave. Two men with handfuls of tulips attended, along with a man with cap in hand.
"That's it," a gravedigger said when the exhausted-looking priest was finished.
Another man with a gold-ink pen wrote basic details on a temporary cross. It was for a woman who had been killed by shelling as she cooked outside. She was 69.
