As I touch the little box shrubs, violets, and marigolds and look at the surprisingly living photo of a smiling man, which is attached near the cross on the grave of my late husband, in spite of the never-ending pain and bitterness I still feel a shimmer of hope deep in my heart: a sudden rain has given way to warm sunshine and the flowers brighten — this must be a sign from him. The snow is knee-deep, but I stand looking for evergreen wreaths decorated with the guilder rose. Somebody has tenderly laid a white rose and someone else, a handful of rye.
Someone, perhaps one of his female students, has strung multicolored ribbons on the cross. Suddenly I come across a beautifully crafted pot with forget- me-nots. Fall, spring, summer, and winter, the winds, sunrises, and sunsets pass without you, Jim, without you...But nothing has ended, everything is just beginning for you and me in some different dimension, under a different sun and moon, as long as people will remember and keep coming and bowing to you.
Meanwhile, Baikova Hill is growing with marble and granite monuments. In the past 18 months I have been feeling some unthinkable guilt about you, Jim, because no matter how highly I value this scrap of ground, it is still our Ukrainian tradition to put up a commemorative sign that will forever bear the name of one’s beloved.
Thanks to the sculptor Volodymyr Koren, there was one more flash of granite energy on Baikova Hill at the place where my Jim, our Professor James Mace, is resting. This tombstone was nurtured for so long and so arduously, was created out of such moral and financial torments and in such inhumane solitude that when I finally saw it, my heart contracted in pain, because now almost every periodical mentions his name and his publications. The newspaper Den/The Day published the book Day and Eternity of James Mace; the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy is studying his archives and library; and through the efforts of the president and the government one more part of his priceless archive on the Holodomor and genocide will at last be published in Ukraine. Somehow I feel that we will manage to surmount the formal obstacles, such as customs clearance, transportation, and the sorting process. His literary legacy will inevitably produce new young scholars and thinkers for whom the history of their native land will be a matter of honor and conscience. The new historians will find answers to the thorny questions of today.
James Mace was posthumously awarded the Order of Yaroslav the Wise. There have been many offers from publishers, which I did not exactly hurry to accept. Everything else remained in the background until I managed to fulfill my duty as a widow and beautify the gravesite. No one else, no state, and no sponsor can do this, for it is a private matter. Many conferences, symposiums, and campaigns, such as “Light a Candle!” are taking place, and the nations of the world are gradually beginning to understand that Ukraine lived through the hell of genocide. After James’s death someone said that Ukraine had already overcome all the medical, psychological, and sociopolitical consequences of the Holodomor. Meanwhile, the communists are issuing calls simply to forget it because, as they claim, it is a dubious fact of bygone days. Here I would like to draw the readers’ attention to James’s article “Ukraine as a Post-Genocidal Society,” in which he established a cause-and-effect relationship between almost all our failures and Ukraine’s nationwide cataclysms of the 1930s. This article also applies to the present, and I believe that the president of Ukraine will succeed in getting the UN to recognize the 1932-1933 manmade famine as genocide, as a crime against humanity that is not subject to any statutes of limitation. And even though there will be no Stalins, Molotovs, Kaganoviches, and Khataeviches, and the never-ending numbers of other barbarians and vandals in the prisoner’s dock, there is bound to be a trial of the system and ideology that defiled the name of the Lord on earth.
I tremblingly touch the granite tombstone. There is no more room here for flowers. Only green grass spirals its way around the meteorite-like bust. This stone dropped like a bitter tear from the sky. There is nothing more depressing than this petrifaction and inevitability. There is only a name, and years, and these words:
Farewell, beloved person, and forgive us.
I flow to you as a tear.
Ukraine, light an eternal candle for widows, and orphans!
Light a candle!
