Friends, meet Grandma Shushana. And the illnesses she mentioned, unfortunately, are not all from the long list of her severe diagnoses. Three years ago, her left leg was amputated entirely. – “Since then, I can barely move even around the house! My daughter, who is suffering from cancer, takes me out to the yard for a walk once a month!” She is 72 years old, the same age as the founder of our Fund, Leonid Chernovetskyi, who personally became acquainted with this dreadful story! And here’s what he said: “A mother is dying, and her daughter is dying too! And both are enduring inhuman sufferings! I want to try to convey to my followers what I personally experience due to another illness at this age… As soon as you fall ill, you feel an intense fear! Here it is, you think, the end has come! But what’s next?! Meeting with the cold earth, worms, or with God?! If with God, then did you manage to repent for all the sins you committed in your youth? Did you do everything you could according

Gulo has already cried her eyes out – she sees nothing and no one. But when someone comes to the nursing home, she asks them to take out three portraits from the shelf case and look at her children and grandson. And says – are they beautiful, are they good? That’s how she buried all three of them, the good and beautiful ones, and laid them in the ground. And she herself lives just to cry. Without eyes, without a home, without documents. Abandoned by the dead and the only living daughter but found by kind people.

“I feel neither good, nor bad. I feel nothing. My only son and husband lie motionless in the cold earth of the cemetery… and here I am within these four walls,” whispers Grandma Lamara barely audibly, wiping her dry eyes. Not a single tear has been left in 17 years – she’s cried it all out. She cries, crying from within, shrouded in darkness. She wants to die, to be near those she has lost, but death seems to avoid her, and condemns her to endless torment.

It’s total darkness around her. 89-year-old, lonely Clara cannot open her eyes. She sits by the table and waits for someone to come in and carry her to her bed. She cannot navigate in the darkness without help. She can’t find her bed, which is quite close by, but she doesn’t understand how to get to it. She is lost. She sits and waits.

“There is such a Georgian proverb where one dead person asks the second to bring him to the grave – this is about me and my wife,” Akaki says and looks sadly at Dali. They cut off her leg due to diabetes, she is blind and feels unwell, and Akaki had an open heart surgery – bypass surgery after a heart attack, and his leg is broken. They operated on his leg two times, but his bone has not healed yet. They did not take the risk to operate on for the third time – they said his heart could not stand it. He barely hobbles on crutches, and his wife moves on a wheelchair, but she doesn’t even know where she can roll – she doesn’t see anything. They have no one but each other, and it’s hard to say which one of them suffers more.

When there is no money even to buy bread, Iuza takes the most valuable thing he has – The Order of Honor – and looks at it with annoyance. What if you sell it? For how many days there will be money to buy bread or medications? But people like Iuza don’t sell the honor. “There are things, that are not for sale. And since they are not for sale, then they are no longer things – but the meaning of life,” – says Iuza.