When my mother proudly announced in response to a request to sit with her grandson that she would be busy. It was clear that something extraordinary had happened. My father was taken to the hospital, which he was scared to death of visiting.

A trip to the former Zilovsky hospital, a conversation with the surgeon who operated, showed that everything was fine. Dad didn't give himself a chance. Extensive sepsis and removal of part of the small intestine. 10 percent chance of survival.

Then I had to take care of my mother.

The topic of death is absolutely taboo in society.

They don't discuss death, they don't prepare for it.

As an 18-year-old, I was surprised in the late ' 90s that a grandmother with a hip fracture was most worried about her death bundle, prepared for her by her mother.

My grandmother was born in 1924 and my mother lost her in 1929.

But the family had such an attitude that they were ready. Old Believers. And death was part of life in the remote taiga of the Far East, where even before 1936 they managed to fight off Soviet power.

Grandma left quietly. Unexpected and expected . Right in front of me. I was alone and as a Soviet pioneer I was not ready for this.

Then my mother cried for the first time in my memory. She's a bulldozer person. And I hugged her for the first time.

Mom had two feelings back then.

Feelings of guilt and shame.

Guilt and shame that I failed to take care of a 72-year-old man. Although my grandmother lived thanks to her for the last year and a half.

But the funeral was held from home. All the rituals were human. In three days, the acceptance of the fact that the person is no longer there has come. The shell — here it is. But this is no longer my grandmother. In those three days, it had somehow become clear that she was no longer there. And there won't be any more.

It didn't work out that way with my father. He died in the hospital and the whole family was caught in the conveyor belt.

My mother was told late at night, she called me in the early morning, making sure that I got home.

My mother started making a big fuss, afraid of being late for the funeral thresher. She just didn't understand that she couldn't be late right now.

My mother was pushed aside, placed in the care of her sisters and began to solve problems with the cemetery. When they found a place, they made a deposit, brought my mother to approve. Everything became somehow more human.

Then she was worried and ashamed that they came to the hospital on the second day. She blamed herself for not insisting on being hospitalized a month earlier. But the decision not to be treated was my father's decision. And the consequences of this decision were not her mother's fault. Somehow managed it.

And then it turned out to be a little easier. On the list of those who died that day, my father was 122. He died after 13 days in intensive care the night after Easter.

The fact that there were 126 names on the list reassured her mother. So many people couldn't be punished at the same time.

The acceptance stage has started. We bustled around, giving her the appearance of making decisions.

And then it was necessary to learn how to live with a car under the window, which was recently bought and which was not driven, with a dacha on the Oka. Which I dreamed of, but never went fishing.

She found herself alone in the apartment with stupid questions from the neighbors: “Where is Boris?”

They lived in the house for more than 40 years. And the neighbors changed little.

And then they set about making concrete plans for life without their father.

It turned out that there are neighbors-theatergoers, neighbors-athletes, neighbors cooks. My grandson was 4 years old and began to be brought more often.

My father was never spoken of as alive.

Two scourges of the Soviet man were uttered – a sense of guilt and a sense of shame.

Shame that he died. But he died at the age of 72, of his own free will. Refusing to be examined and treated. This was dealt with. The mother is 9 years younger and the fact that the father died earlier is a law of nature. When I got married, the scenario that my father would die earlier was obvious.

Guilt was harder to deal with. But here my brother and I worked out clearly. My father was an adult and made his own decisions. I took responsibility for them myself.

We talked about how everyone's life is like a flower. The flower sprouts, blooms, and dies. And the role of the flower is to live and bloom. Just because it lives and blooms. And just such a flower will never be again.

But its own life is still there-here it is blooming. And there are no questions about why, or for what. There is a flower, it blooms.

So we managed. My father isn't here