Notes on Grief

The Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is hugely celebrated and successful: author of three fine novels, as well as shorter fiction, she gave one of the most-watched TED talks ever in 2009, and three years ago when I went to hear her talk to Sinéad Gleeson, Dublin’s Convention Centre was packed to the rafters with her excited fans.

Her new, very short book (originally an essay in the New Yorker) is about how all of that mattered naught in the face of the sudden death of her beloved father on June 10th 2020 (he was 88, but it came as a shock, and in any case age is irrelevant in grief). She came undone, her four-year-old daughter scared by her mother’s unravelling. Grief hit her full on like a bus: this book is raw (but still controlled), a crying out loud that makes me think of one of the most heart-rending moments in literature, when King Lear carries in the dead body of his darling Cordelia and can only say one word, over and over again in his helplessness:

Never, never, never, never, never.

Adichie takes this from the daughter’s rather than the father’s perspective, with a 21st century family scene from an online Caravaggio:

Our Zoom call is beyond surreal, all of us weeping and weeping and weeping, in different parts of the world, looking in disbelief at the father we adore now lying still on a hospital bed.

This is Cordelia wailing for Lear instead of the familiar way around:

I am unprepared for my wretched, roaring and rage. In the face of this inferno that is sorrow, I am callow and unformed. But how can it be that in the morning he is joking and talking, and at night he is gone forever?

Lear in the final scene:

Howl, howl, howl, howl! Oh, you are men of stones.

Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so

That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone forever.

And later Adichie echoes that famous line from Lear:

I will never see my father again. Never again.

She is physically shattered following ‘the worst day of my life’: 

Enemies beware. The worst has happened. My father is gone. My madness will now bare itself.

Like so many, too many, in the last year she and her family have to cope with the additional distresses of the pandemic, scattered as they are around the world, with the author herself stuck in the US, wracked with anxiety about Nigerian airports re-opening.

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.

She realises how unthinkingly she herself has talked previously to others when they have lost a loved one. She is emotionally ambushed by objects which trigger memories (old photographs, videos, her father’s cold-weather clothes in her American house, his Sudoko books). She draws a portrait of how lovable he was, how loved, but all this (see Section 18, for instance) is more for the reader, because it is too early for these things to console her. She is a little girl again, and her own little girl seems more stable than her. Two more deaths, of aunts, follow and it is all

An erosion, a vile rushing of floods, leaving our family forever misshapen. The layers of loss make life feel papery thin.

Near the end, she realises why people get tattoos of those they have lost:

The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.