The night before I left, one of the patches containing painkiller came off, and Mev was in a lot of pain. She wet the bed twice, vomited once. For some reason, the alarm on the house went off twice in the middle of the night. But the thing I remember most is that sleeping in the other room with the door closed and earplugs in, I could hear Mev wailing. I’ve never heard wails like that before. Mev never really came back after that. She stopped eating, became blind, and eventually lost even the ability to swallow water. When people would come by the house and ask what they could do that last week, Mark would say, “Come sit over here and be powerless like the rest of us.”
—Sheri Hostetler, fromThe Book of Mev
I remember an old woman janitor, who taught me: “There are sicknesses that can’t be cured. You just have to sit and watch them.”
—Lyudmilla Ignatenko, from Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
