A Song Never Sung

In this deeply personal episode, Jim reflects on the life and loss of Iryna Zarutska — a young Ukrainian woman whose final moments shocked the world, and him to his core.

The episode is dedicated to the memory of Iryna Zarutska and to those who knew and loved her.
 She will not be forgotten.

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Transcript

When this story first broke, I’ll be honest — I was shocked.

Watching that video, seeing her face, hearing her sobs — it hit me in a way I wasn’t ready for. And that’s saying something.

Because in over thirty years of military and law enforcement, I’ve seen things that would make the average man vomit violently. Things that stay with you long after the reports are filed and the uniforms come off.

But this… this was different.

This reached a level I didn’t even know existed. It wasn’t metaphorical when I say I was shocked to my core. I mean that literally. For a while, I couldn’t even speak. My mind just froze, trying to process the level of horror I had just witnessed.

Then came the sadness. The grief. And finally…the anger.

Because as I learned more — who she was, why she was there, what she had just discovered about her life and her child — that sadness turned to fire.

And I knew something had to be done. My voice had to be heard. And I wasn’t the only one. Social media lit up like a storm.

But here’s the problem with storms… They pass.

And when the dust settles and the world moves on, injustice is allowed to live another day.

I can’t let that happen. And I won’t.

I have a platform. I have a voice. And I fully intend to use it.

The video was everywhere. Shared, reposted, replayed — until it became another piece of digital noise.

But it wasn’t noise. It was a human life ending right in front of us.

Iryna Zarutska. Young. Ukrainian. Expectant mother. In a place she never should have been, surrounded by a world that had already taken too much from her.

There were no words. No pleas. No time.

From the moment it began to the moment her heart stopped — fifteen seconds.

Fifteen seconds to strip away any illusion of safety, any sense of order. Fifteen seconds to remind us how fragile we truly are — and how quickly cruelty can erase a future.

I’ve seen things in my career that most people couldn’t stomach. But this — this wasn’t the kind of violence you can rationalize. It was senseless. Cold. Final.

And the worst part is… we watched it happen. The world watched it happen.

Then, as the timeline kept scrolling, life moved on.

But for me — and maybe for you — something changed that day. Because once you’ve seen a life end like that, you can’t unsee it.

Fifteen seconds. That’s all it took.

Fifteen seconds to end a life and remind the rest of us just how fragile it all really is.

And then, like clockwork, the cycle began. The outrage. The hashtags. The armchair justice that burns bright… and burns out.

Because once the algorithm moves on, so do most people. But the pain doesn’t. It stays. It lingers — in the minds of those who saw it, and in the souls of those who’ve lived their own quiet versions of that same horror.

That’s what nobody talks about — the aftermath.

Every image, every sound, every loss we scroll past leaves a mark. And little by little, those marks start to add up, until the world begins to look tired… and heavy.

This isn’t just about one video or one woman. It’s about the cracks forming in all of us.

Anxiety. Depression. Anger. Apathy.

We’re watching a global mental health crisis unfold in real time, and most of us are trying to survive it silently.

It doesn’t matter if you’re in Kyiv, Kansas City, or Kolkata — the symptoms are the same. People are breaking under the weight of things the human mind was never built to carry: constant fear, endless conflict, and the feeling that our voices don’t matter anymore.

But they do.

Every voice matters. Every story matters. Your story matters.

So I’m asking you — not as a host, but as a fellow human being — to join me in this.

Tell me what you’ve seen. Tell me what you feel. If you can’t speak yet, that’s okay. Let me be your voice until you can.

Because maybe the only way to heal… is to start talking about the hurt together.

When you’ve seen something that dark, you don’t just move on. You carry it — whether you want to or not.

That’s the cost of being a witness. It changes you. It forces you to look at the world differently.

And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Because what good are eyes if they refuse to see? What good is a voice if we’re too afraid to use it?

We can’t unsee what happened to Iryna Zarutska. And we shouldn’t. Because her story — those fifteen seconds — should haunt us just enough to care.

Not out of pity. But out of purpose.

Maybe that’s what being human is supposed to mean. Not turning away when it hurts. Not pretending we didn’t hear the silence that followed. But choosing to stand in it — together — and say, “No more.”

In the weeks ahead, we’re going to talk about that silence. About the toll it takes — on the mind, the heart, and the soul. And we’re going to talk about the weight the world is carrying right now, and what we can do — each of us — to lighten it.

Because acknowledging the problem is the first step to solving it.

So if you’ve felt that weight — if you’ve seen what can’t be unseen — you’re not alone. You’re part of this conversation now.

And together… maybe we can start to turn fifteen seconds of horror into something that lasts a lifetime — something called hope.

This is How Did We Get Here? — a podcast about the choices, cracks, and crossroads that shape us.

I’m Jim Richmond. And I’m still here for a reason. Maybe you are too.