When Someone Great Is Gone
Some songs stop being music and start becoming memory
At some point in Ukraine’s war for independence, listening to LCD Soundsystem’s “Someone Great” began to trigger wells of emotion in me; tears prompted by the loss of those brave enough to fight with their lives. The song, with its restrained crescendo and quiet climax, points to the steady continuation of life regardless of the loss it invokes. The cycle of life and death marches on.
On a recent volunteering trip to Ukraine, I witnessed the “flag cemetery” near Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv. Each flag represents someone lost to Russian aggression: an entire life, with hopes and dreams, fears and mistakes, all symbolized in a small piece of fabric planted among thousands.
Husbands, fathers, brothers, wives, mothers, sisters, cousins, friends, coworkers, colleagues. Each was Someone Great.
The cemetery has grown crowded and even generated controversy as space runs tight and the losses grow heavier. Who deserves a flag? A framed portrait? A gravesite? These are the kinds of questions war forces onto the living.
During the trip, we handed over vehicles for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, donated by the international community and organized by Help99, the 69th Sniffing Brigade, and the North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO). There I met a soldier from the Kherson region with a watermelon patch on his arm. It symbolized his grandfather’s farm, now within Russian-occupied territory.
A patch to remember that Someone Great enabled his life today, and that same Someone Great is gone, his life’s work now held by foreign aggressors. It was in the shape of the US flag, but I didn’t get the chance to ask why.
It is not just the loss of people that weighs heavily, but the loss of their potential, futures robbed and the living compressed by the absence. A flag for each name. A patch for an occupied farm. What Russia forgets is that memory no longer fades the way it once did, because it is being recorded in ever greater detail.
