Yelyzaveta Lyskonoh was 25 when she came to stay with us in July 2022 as part of the Scottish government’s Homes for Ukraine scheme.
“Ee-liz-a-veta,” I wrote conscientiously in my notebook when the council told me who was coming. I practised saying it: Ee. Liz. A. Veta.
My husband, Marcello, and I were introduced to her at an Edinburgh airport hotel, although she had been staying in a hostel since her arrival two months before.
She said to call her Lisa.
After some chit-chat, the lady from the council asked if we would all like time to think about it. We looked at Lisa, and Lisa looked at us, and in unison we said: “No.” We didn’t need time to think about it.
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We were happy to have Lisa, and Lisa was happy to have us.
She fitted in straight away. She had not spoken any English before arriving in the country, but she was a fast learner. On our first evening she told us her mother and younger brother were safe in Germany but her father was a farmer near Kharkiv. I asked what he grew, and she consulted Google Translate, holding up her phone, on which it said “wheat”. “But,” she added, with a sweep of her hand, “now just bombs.”
Kharkiv has been hit especially hard by the war, with large parts to the northeast taken by Russian forces early in the conflict, but gradually taken back, at considerable cost, by Ukraine’s troops. Earlier this month, Russia began a fresh offensive in the region, placing it again on the front line.
The effects of the war on Ukraine and its youth were clear immediately. Lisa told us that she had been training as a medic but the “boys” she had been training with had been in Mariupol, a city devastated by Russian occupation, and were “now all dead”. Tears welled up in her eyes, but she lowered her head to hide them. Marcello and I glanced at each other, both silently praying that nothing happened to her father back home.
The greatest challenge for me was stopping her eating raw meat. On her first day I found her tucking into a packet of uncooked Lawsons Scottish skinless sausages.
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“I think they need cooking,” I suggested, tentatively, not wanting to appear to boss her about. “Cooking? No,” she declared, showing me the empty packet of ten she had already eaten. “Mmm, tasted like chicken.”
She waved a bottle of brown sauce at me. “You try? It say, tasty with sausage.” She tried it, delicately. “They lie,” she grimaced. “It not tasty.”
The next day she sent me a photograph of a packet of boiled ham: “I cook?”
When Marcello made meatballs with minced beef, Lisa would materialise in the kitchen. “I eat raw!” Marcello would try to dissuade her, pretending to gag, but she shrugged: “I get worming tablets at home.”
Within days of her arrival, she was cooking bortsch and baking apple cake for us. She sent me a message: “There is fish party in ashtray in kitchen,” to alert me to fish pâté in a dish in the kitchen. I discovered a pan full of chicken feet simmering on the hob. Where had she even got them? The Polish shop, apparently. “They delicious,” Lisa declared.
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She did my nails to a professional standard — glossy, red shellac — a skill she had used to earn a little money in the refugee hostel, and I took her to the cinema to watch the biopic Elvis. “You sleep,” she teased me. I had in fact not been sleeping at all, I assured her, but had been merely resting my eyes during a long film. She looked at me sidelong and repeated: “You sleeeeeep.”
For a young woman in a strange land, she was surprisingly confident about teasing both me and Marcello straight away. She adored our cat, Cleo, and would photograph herself cuddling Cleo and send it to Marcello, who prided himself on being the cat’s favourite: “She love meeee more!”
The sun blazed briefly that summer and a friend took us to the seaside at Portobello in her open-topped car. We paddled, then stretched out on the sand. It was, I realised later, only the second time Lisa had ever seen the sea.
After our evening meal, Lisa would sit silently mouthing English words from her homemade flash cards, holding up the odd card — “enough”, “either”, “brought” — with a baffled look on her face. One day she announced she had learnt a bad word at English class. She looked mischievous: “Izzy pizzy lemon squizzy,” she declared in a rush, blushing slightly with satisfaction.
She arrived around the 25th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death, close to the publication of Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, shortly followed by another season of The Crown, and she began to suspect that British families watched nothing on television except endless stuff about the royal family. She would pop her head around the living room door: “You watch about Princess Diana? Again?”
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She was irrepressibly cheerful, even about getting up at 4am to go cleaning at Waitrose, despite having been a medical student in Kiev. She recounted the experience of traversing the city before dawn: “I see cat behind bin. ‘Here kitty, kitty,’ I say. ‘Here kitty, kitty.’ But I get close and it not kitty but great big rrrrrat!’
My relationship with Lisa was easy and uncomplicated, as possibly only relationships outside of family can be — although she felt like family. I already had two daughters, and now I had a third aged between them. I enjoyed her company, and she enjoyed mine.
Sometimes I mistook her resilience and bravery for insouciance and on one occasion I stupidly tried to show her a video which demonstrated the difference six months had made to Mariupol, turning it from a fantasy of twinkling Christmas lights to a horror show of a lifeless bomb site. She covered her eyes and turned away: “No, I cannot.”
We took her to Marcello’s ancestral village in southern Italy and imagined taking her on many more holidays.
After a year with us, Lisa returned to Kyiv to take up her medical studies. She seemed excited and optimistic about the future despite the continuance of the war. We messaged all the time. She was loving and kind and always had an encouraging word, even though it was her living in the war zone, not me.
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If I heard that Kyiv had come under heavy rocket fire in the night I would message: “All well with you?” And she would reply: “I slept through, didn’t even hear it!” Or: “I got capricious! Refused to go to bomb shelter. Slept on bathroom floor.”
A fortnight ago, I was on the tram floating down Leith Walk when I received an Instagram message from Irina, a name I did not know. “Hello, I am a friend of Lisa and I have something to tell you.”
“Is all well?” I asked, although my heart lurched, and I stopped breathing as I watched the flashing dots. “No unfortunately I have bad news … I just don’t know how to say … Lisa is dead.”
I started to sob. The lady on the next seat asked if I was all right, but I couldn’t speak. I blindly messaged Lisa.
Irina came to our flat. She was from Odesa and was a friend of Lisa’s best friend Anna, who now lives in Paris — all young women scattered by the war.
Irina explained that Lisa had taken her own life by overdose, leaving no note. Irina said both her parents were doctors in Ukraine, and “this thing is increasingly common now”.
In years to come, we might have some idea of how many Ukrainians died as a result of bombs and bullets. A devastating increase in deaths by suicide is likely to be harder to count. Clergy sent to support frontline troops have heard from surviving troops of the many soldiers who have chosen to die.
Stigma surrounding suicide in Ukraine remains strong. Those who managed to escape the conflict hear about many deaths not connected to military action among their peer group when they call friends and family. They doubt whether the hidden toll of the conflict will ever be known.
After Lisa’s death, I exchanged anguished, heartbroken messages with her partner, Den, in Kyiv, her mother, Olesya, in Germany, and her best friend Anna in Paris, but with no funeral to go to I spent days crying, lighting candles and writing about her.
I re-read our messages to each other, the last being two days before she died when she messaged to congratulate me on the republication of my novel Truestory. “Dearest Lisa, you are THE BEST,” I had replied.
Below that were only the messages I had sent from the tram: “Lisa, are you OK?” Then: “Please let me know.” They are the only messages I ever sent to her that weren’t immediately answered with kisses and hearts.
Lisa was a young woman of courage, full of humour, hopes, dreams and plans. She felt like a gift from the heavens, and I loved her so very much.
People had kept telling me at the time that I was doing a good and kind thing welcoming Lisa into my home, but the privilege was all mine and the person it had helped most, by far, was me.
Catherine Simpson is a novelist and memoirist. Her first volume of memoir, When I Had a Little Sister, dealt with the death by suicide of her sister
