Yulia Navalnaya & the tears of young widows

Nothing breaks the heart so much as the tears of a young woman suddenly bereft of her husband. Nothing leaves a gash in the soul as much as the repressed suffering of a woman who loses her partner in a bad working out of nature or the malevolence of individuals.

A few weeks ago, Yulia Navalnaya lost her husband Alexei Navalny in the cold, forbidding loneliness of prison in Siberia. Navalny was a brave fighter for freedom to underpin politics in Russia. He was young, not yet fifty. In his court appearances, always in a cage, he appeared confident and defiant. And when he died in Siberia, it was news the world did not take lightly.

Within days of Navalny's death, Yulia Navalnaya spoke before the European parliament. You could feel the heart cracking in her as she spoke of the bravery of her husband. She was composed and dignified and would not let the tears flow. In that address in Brussels, she won everyone's sympathy for the resilience she demonstrated in her ability to speak of the future Navalny had dreamed of.

When young women lose their husbands to a sudden twist of circumstances, not many among us have the time to reflect on the agony which consumes them from within. Every year, in Bangladesh, hundreds of young women come by news of the death of their partners in ferry capsizes and train accidents and, away from home, in the Middle East. As many as eight to twelve coffins containing the remains of poor Bangladeshi workers who die abroad arrive in Dhaka every day.

Those coffins speak of the calamity which befall the young wives, many with children, these dead men have left behind. You can imagine the wail of these women in their village homes, the despair and darkness which suddenly envelop their lives. Their husbands had ventured abroad in search of happiness for their families --- wives, children, parents, siblings. They have now come home for the last time. The lights have now gone out, for that old hope of happiness goes into the grave with the dead.

Some weeks after the massacre of fifty-seven military officers by mutineers at the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) in 2009, many of the widows of the dead came together in a commemoration of the husbands they had lost. It was a place where the tears flowed freely, where not a single eye was dry. These young women, individuals who certainly had looked forward to long years of happiness with their spouses and their children, were suddenly without the wherewithal to hold on to life.

The criminals who had so brutally murdered those officers --- and some of the officers were bachelors for whom their parents and their siblings wept --- had no place in their hearts for their victims. These sepoys were expected to man the nation's frontiers. Instead they took the lives of their officers.

There are legions of women in this land who lost their husbands to the predatory instincts of villainous men. During the War of Liberation, innumerable women saw their husbands picked up by the occupation army and its local collaborators. Those gentle people, all of them reputed as patriotic Bengalis, never came back.

And in all these decades, their widows have passed into old age through a lifetime of supervising the education and upkeep of their fathers-deprived children. These widows looked out the window every day, in the hope that the men in their lives would return in a miracle. Of course that miracle did not happen.

Post-liberation, to the list of Bengali widows was added the names of women whose husbands perished in the many coups and counter-coups in the country. When the four national leaders were eliminated through vile conspiracy in prison on a November night, it was four women who suddenly found themselves forced into widowhood.

In Bangladesh, if you close your eyes and focus on its history, you will hear the sad waterfall of the tears of all its women whose husbands were marched or bayoneted to quick death by the forces of evil. These women have struggled to bring up their children. Alone in their rooms they have wept.

Widows are forever lonely people. The tears of the lonely, as a song goes, keep falling all the time. When Jacqueline Kennedy stepped off the presidential aircraft with her husband on a bright November day in Dallas, she smiled beautifully at the adoring crowd welcoming the couple.

A few minutes later, she was a widow, bullets having shattered President Kennedy's skull. It was a grief-stricken, heart-broken young woman, her clothes sprayed with her husband's brain matter, who accompanied him in a coffin back to Washington.

The widows of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr have wept away from the crowds. And the widows of Sanjay and Rajiv Gandhi have shed tears when their husbands had their lives draw to a sudden end in India. Sanjay Gandhi crashed to earth; and Rajiv Gandhi had the ground pulled from under him in Sriperumbudur.

Their widows have grieved, and grieve even today. But they have come into their own in Indian politics. Corazon Aquino saw her husband Benigno die on the tarmac minutes after his return to Manila. She would pick up the pieces and, despite her pain, take charge of the Philippines.

An old photograph of a yet young Nusrat Bhutto illustrates the collapse of her world at the execution of her husband. The image depicts a broken, shocked woman who, despite the predicament her husband was in, did not expect him to die on the gallows. It was the beginning of a tragedy that would in subsequent years snatch the lives of her two sons and a daughter.

Nusrat Bhutto never spoke of her broken heart as long as she was alive, but one who understands the nature of tragedy, who knows that the gods are often unjust, that villains often strut around us, will know of the tears she shed till she passed into the grave.

Yulia Navalnaya remains resolute in her determination to remind people of the dreams her husband had for his country. But that loneliness which descends on women whose fate it is to see their husbands pass from the scene suddenly and without any last words spoken will loom large over her life.

All women who have suffered through tragedy putting an end to the lives of the men they once married will grow old in silent grief, will watch the sunset every day, will know that the souls of the husbands they have lost float out there in the heavens.

These widows will live on, in expectation of linking up with their loved and loving husbands, somewhere and sometime in the hereafter.

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