Yuliia’s son Vitalii Kulyk is a Hero of Ukraine. When he was a young man, two years before the full-scale invasion, he chose to devote his life to serving his homeland. He was one of the first to defend the Chernihiv region. For Yuliia, since then, her life has been reduced to waiting for two purple ticks on her phone – a sign that her son is alive and has read the message. But one day those ticks never came. Vitalii was seriously injured. While he was fighting for his life in a coma, his mother read Lina Kostenko to him, sang “Red Viburnum” and prayed. The doctors said: he needs to hold on for 28 days. On the twenty-eighth, Vitalii’s heart stopped. The hardest thing for Yuliia is still talking about her son in the past tense. Because her love and gratitude are forever in the present.