KRYVYI RIH, Ukraine (AP) — After Iryna Nakonechna lost her left leg last year in a Russian missile attack that also killed her husband, the Ukrainian woman decided everything tied to her former self had to go.She cut off her dark wavy hair and removed furniture, clothes, trinkets and photographs from her home. Just one reminder of her previous life remained: a portrait of herself and her husband, Serhii Nakonechnyi. Shedding her old identity was necessary, she said, to endure the painful reinvention required to build a life with a prosthetic.Today, Nakonechna is quick-witted and effervescent, her laughter loud and sudden. She wears a pixie haircut and bold red cat-eye glasses, and knits small toy capybaras — an animal that has become an unofficial symbol among amputees in Ukraine. But beneath the sparkle in her eyes lies a grief woven into the painful process of becoming someone new. It’s an often unspoken reality beneath the narratives of resilience surrounding the tens of thousands of people in Ukraine who have lost limbs in the war that began more than four years ago when Russia launched a full-scale invasion.
“The hardest thing was accepting myself with these injuries, wounds that are not only physical,” she said. “Coming to terms with how much my life has changed has been very difficult.”
