Mila Rubinchik – about Mikhail Zelensky: he was strong and energetic, but did not spare himself

The story you will read below is a first-person account. Mila Rubinchik exclusively shares it with the readers of “Championship”. She admits that she has not fully accepted the fact of her husband’s death, but she is ready to talk about it to help others. How to survive a heavy loss and not to break down? What lessons should be learned to prevent her?

Mikhail Zelensky died on January 11, 2022. He was only 46 years old. It happened during a vacation in the Dominican Republic. The reason – a heart attack. Details are still few people know, because Mikhail’s wife, who was with him next to him, still did not find the strength and desire to comment on something.

Probably, it is impossible to prepare for such a thing. Even if a person has a terrible disease and doctors said: “You have six months left”… Even in this case, it seems to me, you will not be ready when everything happens. Plus you don’t expect anything like that on vacation. You go to gain strength, to strengthen your health – physical and mental. And in the end.

How it happened

The first reaction was such a strong shock that virtually all emotions were blocked. There are several stages of grief acceptance, and you just get stuck on the first one. In denial. You can’t believe it even happened, you just act mechanically, like a machine.

Because besides the fact that it’s a terrible tragedy, there are tons of issues that immediately arise that need to be addressed and as soon as possible. When you are in another country, with a small child, it will take a whole operation to get the body to Moscow …

The Russian consul in the Dominican Republic told me at the time that this was not the only case of sudden death that day. He was touring hotels and hospitals in a row. I understand that this happens a lot in tropical countries. There’s just zero medical care. No one’s trained in resuscitation.

Although Misha’s case was such that even if we had been in Moscow or Switzerland at that moment, right at the entrance to the best clinic in the world, he still would not have been saved… It happened in a few minutes. A clot breaks off, that’s a second.

You have to be very careful about your health from the start, check regularly with doctors, limit yourself in something. But at the age of 46, when you are full of energy, of course, you don’t think about it. Nothing particularly bothers you. Well, it stings somewhere. Well, we all have a stab somewhere. You get a little stab, you get a little stab, and then you let it go. You’d think it’d be bad cholesterol.

What happened next

I was sitting in a hotel room. The phone was ringing off the hook 24 hours a day. After all, when it’s day in the Dominican Republic, it’s night in Moscow, and when it’s night there, it’s day in Moscow. There was no sleep. You lie down and stare at the ceiling.

And there was no time to sleep. At night I was always answering the phone, and during the day I was dealing with questions about repatriation and documents. In the Dominican Republic, all of this is left to commercial companies and is very complicated. To be honest, if it wasn’t for the support of VGTRK, I wouldn’t have been able to cope. They have their own arrangements there, thanks to which we were able to quickly find direct contacts. In general, they helped in all matters.

They respected and loved Misha very much. For them it was a tragedy and a great loss. That’s why they were instantly involved in all the processes.

At that moment I was also gone. I just sat in my room, I didn’t want anything: neither to eat, nor to drink, nor to sleep. I didn’t even want to talk. My friends called me and asked me: “Just say whatever comes into your head. The main thing is not to be silent. Talk as much as possible, and if you want to cry, cry.” But I couldn’t even cry.

If it weren’t for my daughter.

Milana brought me food and almost force-fed me. She said: “We still have to fly home. So at least start eating fruit. I read on the Internet that it’s important to eat a lot of sweets. It helps the brain to work.” Kids are just so smart nowadays.

It’s important to have someone close to you at a time like this. Even if it’s an 11-year-old child who holds your hand, hugs you or just keeps quiet when you don’t need any words.

You have to be very careful about your health from the beginning, check regularly with doctors, limit yourself in something. But at the age of 46, when you are full of energy, of course, you don’t think about it.

Fortunately, Milana wasn’t present when it happened. She was waiting for us in the hotel lobby. Understandably, it all happened quickly, but it was very scary, and it’s impossible to forget something like that. It seemed like only two or three minutes… But those were minutes of real hell. And the worst part is that there’s nothing you can do to help. I wouldn’t want my daughter to see that.

There’s no acceptance

In situations like this, they usually talk about life before and after. But I wouldn’t say I’ve had that separation. There was no “after.” I guess the story here is that you will stay in this state until you live your grief fully. Until you go through all the stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, humility. They are all known and have long been described.

I’ve worked with psychologists. This was the first resource I turned to. But classical psychology is a little bit not my case, because there you have to go into the emotional sphere.

They’re always asking you, “How do you feel?” And you don’t feel anything, or you get angry because they force you into the territory of feelings. And now… A year has passed, and the acceptance phase hasn’t happened. And it’s not just me. I’m talking to a close friend of Mischa’s, and she still can’t believe what happened. It seems like some kind of mistake. Even after the funeral, where you have said goodbye and now you have to accept the fact that the person is gone, acceptance doesn’t happen.

At that moment, I was gone too. I just sat in the room. Didn’t want anything – not to eat, not to drink, not to sleep. I didn’t even want to talk.

So strong is this block in your soul, in your heart or in your head. I still dream about telling him: “Can you imagine, Misha, it was such a terrible situation… We thought you were dead. I still dream that he’s alive. So there is no acceptance – neither for me, nor for my relatives.

How to move on

Partly work has helped. A year before all this, we started preparing a large-scale project – a psychological support service. It was a big team effort. Programmers, designers, marketers, copywriters, psychologists and many others. The work makes us switch gears, reminds us that we are needed here. That’s important, but not only that.

Elementary care of yourself, your health, your body, physical activity are important components for a full recovery. A healthy body has a healthy spirit. This is always the main resource to continue to live on.

Working with the psyche is a very delicate moment. You can not forcefully treat or save anyone. Therefore, if a person comes to a psychologist with distrust, as if he was forced, persuaded, asked to go to therapy, then it is unlikely that anything good will come out of it.

Classical psychology did not suit me very well. Theta hiling turned out to be closer. I am not advocating this approach in any way, I am just sharing my personal experience. Of course, there were results from classical psychotherapy too. They at least made me cry, got my emotions out. I may not have wanted to speak this language, but nevertheless, crying is also important.

Elementary care of yourself, your health, your body, physical activity are important components for a full recovery. A healthy body is a healthy spirit.

Hoarding thoughts and emotions is not a good story. Then everything goes into the body and fires not mental, but quite physical ailments.

The outside view is important, because we always defend and justify ourselves. We feel sorry for ourselves. We don’t want to admit many things to ourselves, we don’t want to humiliate ourselves and so on. Only the right and necessary questions from a competent psychologist can push us to other, often uncomfortable, thoughts. That’s why you need a specialist who asks you those questions that you don’t want to ask yourself. The brain simply excludes them. It is always looking for reinforcement of already established strategies and schemes.

You need a psychologist just to have that courage – to break the old programs. Then comes the realization of why we act this way and not the other, and what our personal gain is.

Haters will always heckle

Of course, publicity adds to the problem. You feel bad enough, and you have to prove something to someone else… Sometimes the conclusions of the press about your actions just don’t fit in your head, sometimes they make you laugh. Most of the time it’s something in between.

For example, the story with the deletion of photos from social networks. It so happened that two days before Misha’s death, I archived my entire feed and wrote to a girl photographer I knew that I wanted to completely change my page. On January 9, there were no photos there at all. But when everything happened, people found out about me from the news and rushed to social networks, and there was nothing there….

Of course, they thought I deleted everything on purpose. But why? What’s the point? The last thing you think about at a time like this is your social networks. And I still had a lot of actual “storizas” with Misha from our trips on my page. I didn’t see the point in making excuses or explaining why it happened. And I don’t see it now.

Hoarding thoughts and emotions in yourself is not the best story. Then everything goes into the body and fires not mental, but quite physical ailments.

The channels of hatemail need to be shut down decisively. My constituency on my YouTube channel Procrastinator is 98% guys. I have no problem with them. If there are any haters there, they are random characters, often strongly offended by women. But I didn’t post anything on social networks for a long time, I didn’t want people to write me nonsense. I removed the possibility of personal messages, turned off comments on photos, deleted the “storiz” actual.

My memory, our history will always stay with me. And I don’t want to give someone the opportunity to talk on my social networks. They write these nasty things not only to me, but to everyone. It’s a dialog with themselves. By blaming someone, they feel better, kinder, fairer at that moment. By judging others, they give their self-esteem a chance to grow a little.

If I don’t post pictures from the cemetery, people who know how to suffer properly will come: “Cry on the grave! Or don’t you care?”. If I take a photo in a black scarf with black eyes, those same people will post, “You’re a hypocrite. Why are you doing all this? Grief should be lived alone!” No matter what you do, the urge to criticize is bound to arise.

They write all sorts of things

Articles analyzing my behavior are a separate story. Of course, in fact, no one reads them. They only target my acquaintances who read that terrible news and searched for details. It is friends and relatives who get caught up in all this nonsense. This is unpleasant, because my relatives can’t ask me directly or gently discuss things like: “Mila is such a bastard: she is looking for a husband on dating sites, and already in April she celebrated her birthday.

I wouldn’t call it a celebration. Opening a bottle of champagne on the beach to take a sip, taking a picture and leaving it for the local marginalized…. Is that bad? Okay, let it be bad.

With a dating site, it’s the same story. In fact, I did reviews on Tinder and a course on it long before all this. Misha was aware of it, he looked at the profiles with me and laughed at the nonsense people wrote about themselves there.

That’s why, when I arrived in Miami, I immediately made a review of what was happening on Tinder. It was just the usual “storizas.” By the way, I wrote right away that I wasn’t going on a date. Even if I wanted to, to build a relationship with a person who is 16 hours away from you by airplane – it’s a complete nonsense. Anyway, I just entertained the girls, showed them the guys. They laughed and that’s it, we closed the subject. But for someone it remained open and became a reason to write an article.

Life goes on

Now I am in a relationship with a man whom I have known for 15 years. It so happened that this tragedy somehow reunited us. We kept in touch, we communicated, and now on the backdrop of friendship, a relationship has begun to form. And I am grateful that this person is in my life, because it is really important.

I wouldn’t advise someone to go down this path – to rush into new stories, because it’s easy to make a mess of things. If you start looking for some artificial support, you risk getting into co-dependent relationships, for example.

My memory, our history will always stay with me. That’s why I try not to give those who want to talk at my expense in my social networks.

I believe that there are no rules – who, how and how much grief to live through. If a person is ready for a relationship in a month, let them try. It’s a scary situation, and God forbid someone should be in it. If you’re able to find support, that’s great. Someone, on the contrary, needs years to work through this situation, endlessly analyze something. A person is simply not ready for a new relationship. And he also has the right to it.

Everyone has his own way. It is necessary to treat him with respect and understanding, without imposing your ideas about the norm and morality.