An Elegy for Vadym

He was just 33 when he died.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.

---

The night before I left Ukraine, Vadym and I shared a raucous meal at a Crimean restaurant.

When I first met Vadym Mitsyk (Вадим Міцик), he’d just pulled up to my apartment in Kyiv in an orange Hyundai that used to be a cab in Korea. He was my driver for the length of my reporting trip there. That day, and every day after that, he jumped out of the car and grabbed my heavy body armor and backpack, even as I protested that I was fine.

Having Vadym as my driver meant singing duets to “New York, New York” and laughing even as we were stopped at checkpoints and drove past burned-out homes.

One day, he told me that his real job was not as a driver. In fact, he was a pediatric neurosurgeon. Smack me with a wet towel and call me skippy because what in the actual hell?! It turns out that performing exacting surgery on children’s brains doesn’t pay much in Ukraine, so driving for journalists was a bit of a side gig; besides, he would later confide in me, he liked his client. (He was a charmer.) From then on, I would call him “Mr. Dr. Driver,” which he quite enjoyed.

The morning I left Ukraine, I had to catch a bus to get to the border with Poland. Vadym insisted on driving me to the bus. He brought me breakfast and got out to help me find the right one, which turned out to involve him running among dozens of buses in the terminal. Without his help, I’d likely still be in Ukraine. We, unfortunately, had a quick goodbye, and I was off.

Somehow though, between that morning and the evening before, in which we’d had a raucous dinner in a Crimean restaurant, we’d formed a deep connection. When I got home, we started talking. And talking — and lying, apparently.

Because he’d told me he had a benign brain tumor. He’d said as much when I was in Ukraine because he would get terrible headaches. But I called around to a couple doctor friends here who told me his descriptions of his symptoms and the tumor didn’t make sense, that it had to be malign, aka cancer. Vadym eventually admitted as much. He hadn’t wanted to worry me, he said.

Today, with the news of his death, I discovered he lied to me about something else. A few years ago, I remember him telling me he was about 35. As I sat down to start writing this, I contacted a mutual friend to get his exact age. He sent me a copy of Vadym’s passport. He was just 33 when he died.

33.

I will not only miss talking to him weekly, if not daily, but I will miss knowing that this beautiful man was out there in the world. We often say that the world has lost someone wonderful, but in this case, it’s remarkably true. Here are a few reasons why:

Vadym could play multiple instruments and was fantastic at them. He could carve wood into delicate sculptures. He could make art deco-looking jewelry and made me two rings he was trying to figure out how to send to me. He helped anyone in any way, however he could; when he was no longer able to work as a medic at the frontlines because of his cancer, he ferried medicines from Kyiv to his comrades there.

Vadym (sixth from left) valued his comrades in war deeply.

He loved his family so much that he had tattoos of his mother and his father on his chest and saw nothing weird about that. He was angry, furious often, about the war, Putin, the orcs, and finally Donald Trump, and he wasn’t afraid to let that anger out while listening to music from bands like Nine Inch Nails. And he wrote beautifully.

The last text message he sent me was a couple days ago. It read: “My Dear. I congrats you with the ‘International women’s day" ! 💐You are incredible...! Be happy, blossom and give your beauty to this world ...! ) Love U. XO 💖”

A week before he died, he’d come out of a 16-day coma. He wrote what he called a “story” of what it was like. I’ll leave you with this, if only because anything I can write feels utterly inadequate and will not truly express what we have lost with the death of Vadym, a man gone way, way too early from this troubled earth.

“I only remember the darkness.

It felt like everything around me was swallowed by deep silence, and I couldn’t move. But I was... here. A feeling of total helplessness, like my body didn’t belong to me anymore. Then I heard whispers: doctors...nurses, voices, but it all seemed distant, blurry. Sometimes I caught bits of what they were saying — about my ‘condition,’ ‘little chance,’ ‘we're doing everything we can’....

I had no idea how much time had passed. Was it days? Months? It was just silence and the cold light that sometimes broke through the window. I could feel the layers of sleep covering me, and I couldn’t find a way out.

And then, suddenly, I heard a voice...my Mom’s. She was saying, ‘You’ll come back. I believe in you.’

Those words cut through the fog, like a lifeline. And I felt my fingers twitch. At first, it was barely noticeable, but then I realized I was alive. I was breathing. I was here.

Slowly, very slowly, I began to come out of the darkness. Each breath felt like a victory. I remembered sounds, light, smells. Even that first look in the mirror when I saw my face, not quite the same as before, but still mine.

I was brought back to life, but I was different. Maybe a little stronger, but also incredibly fragile. And I knew — now, every single day matters.”

---

Chills is self-funded, without ads. If you want to be a part of this effort, of revealing how difficult reporting is made — of sending me to places like Ukraine to report for you — I hope you will consider subscribing for $50/year or $7/month.