LVIV, Ukraine – The tiny wails of newborn babies echo from incubators and cribs along a small room with mint green walls in a maternity hospital in Lviv.
Twenty-seven years ago, Liliya Myronovych, chief pediatrician in the neonatology department, gave birth here to a baby boy, Artemiy Dymyd. Last week, she looked out the front window as his funeral was being held in the cemetery across the road, the lamentation of the military band mixed with the cries of the newborns.
“It was my boy,” said Dr. Myronovych, 64, about Mr. Dymyd, who was killed in action in eastern Ukraine in mid-June. “It was my baby.”
In the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, dissonant images of life and death play side by side. They can be grim, such as when babies are born a stone’s throw from the now-crowded military cemetery where the young Ukrainian soldiers lie to rest.
But they can also be subtle.
At the front of the maternity hospital, windows are also decorated with paper storks covered with tape to prevent them from breaking in an explosion.
The sirens of the air strikes that once caused Lviv residents to clamber to basements no longer raise the same level of alarm as they did in February and March – although concerns increased last week when a barrage of rockets was unleashed from Belarusian airspace a short distance from the city.
Lviv has remained relatively peaceful and has become a center for humanitarian aid and a refuge for those fleeing the fighting in the east. Yet death still comes, evident in the steady stream of fallen soldiers whose funerals are held here, sometimes several times in one day.
The funerals catch up with the daily rhythm of city life. Tram stops. Bus passengers wipe the tears from their eyes.
“Every time we say goodbye to them as if it were the first time,” said Khrystyna Kutzir, 35, who stood on a street in Lviv one afternoon in late June, waiting for the passage of the last funeral along the route to the military cemetery.
Across the street, 10 medical students in black and red robes had gathered in the square in front of their university to celebrate their graduation.
As the funeral procession passed, the students knelt along the sidewalk to honor the fallen soldier. They picked themselves up, wiped their legs, and headed back to college to pose for photos.
One graduate, Ihor Puriy, 23, said he had mixed feelings about the much anticipated day.
“In a moment you will be happy to graduate from university, and new horizons will open up for you,” he said. “And at the same time, situations happen that bring you back to reality and the time in which we live.”
Understanding the war between Russia and Ukraine better
All the usual graduations were canceled during the war, but the friends had tried to find a way to celebrate the occasion. But, said Mr Puriy, it was very inconvenient to know that soldiers his age were dying on the front lines, never to see their own future realized. He and his fellow graduates are exempt from military service because of their studies and their future profession as doctors.
“We try to hold on to our hopes for the best, to avoid the negative thoughts that each of us has,” he said. Still, it’s impossible to get used to the daily reminders of death, he said.
Honoring fallen soldiers has become a grim ritual for medical school staff, as well as a few other colleges and office buildings along the road between the center of town and the cemetery. Sometimes there are five funerals in one day, says Anna Yatsynyk, 58, who works as a toxicologist at the city’s morgue and gets up from her desk every day to go outside with her colleagues to watch the gloomy processions.
Ms Yatsynyk said she and her colleagues have started organizing their working days to watch the processions.
“It has become a sad routine,” Ms Yatsynyk said. “But we always come. We feel it is our responsibility to show our gratitude and pay tribute.”
At midday in June, they knelt to honor the dead as a minibus carrying the coffin rolled by. In the summer heat, many of the women wore sundresses and the rough cement dug into their bare knees.
As a black car drove by, an elderly relative of the fallen soldier looked out from the window, clasped his hands together, shook them, and nodded gratefully to those who had come.
Everyone knows someone who fights in this war. And increasingly, everyone knows someone who has died as war reaches even the most peaceful of communities.
But as the conflict has turned from weeks to months and the frigid cold days of the winter invasion have given way to the heat of summer, so too the initial sense of terror in this city has given way to a milder turmoil.
Lviv’s parks and green spaces, cafes and terraces look like any other European city in summer. Outside the opera house, children run giggling through a fountain to escape the heat, their wet clothes and hair clinging to them as they dodge the water currents.
And then you look a little closer. With the statues packed in protective materials. With the buskers singing patriotic songs that speak of war and death.
In the naked halls of the National Gallery, the faded squares on the ornate wallpaper signaling works of art were left for safekeeping. To men in military uniforms who hold their partners’ hands tightly.
Twenty-somethings note that they only reunite with large groups of friends if they attend the funeral of one of their peers.
Such was the case for many of the friends of Mr Dymyd, the young man who was born in Lviv hospital and buried across the street. But still, life goes on.
It has to be, said Roman Lozynskyi, 28, who was a friend of Mr Dymyd’s for two decades.
“That’s why we’re there,” he said. “It’s what we protect.”
Mr Lozynskyi, a marine and member of the Ukrainian parliament, volunteered for the army three months ago and served in the same unit as Mr Dymyd. It is important to him that Ukrainians live their lives, even if it can be shocking to return home from the front lines.
“It’s mentally difficult, because it resembles parallel realities,” he said of the time he spent in Lviv with friends and family during his brief reprieve from the war to attend the funeral.
Back at the maternity hospital, new mothers give birth daily, and amid all the chaos, they find hope.
“If you talk to the mothers, there is no war,” said Dr. Myronovych, the pediatrician.
Khrystyna Mnykh, 28, gave birth to her first child on June 28, Ukraine’s Constitution Day. While she was in labour, the air raid siren went off. She had just received an epidural and so could not go down to the shelter.
Weeks earlier, a rocket attack just a kilometer from her home had shattered her neighbor’s windows. But when she held her daughter Roksolana, those memories seemed to fade.
“You look at your little baby in your arms,” said Mrs. Mnykh, “and you understand that sooner or later life will go on.”