Notes on Grief

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I feel myself breathing air that is bittersweet with my own conspiracies.

How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?

A thing like this, dreaded for so long, finally arrives and among the avalanche of emotions there is a bitter and unbearable relief. It comes as a form of aggression, this relief, bringing with it strangely pugnacious thoughts. Enemies beware: the worst has happened. My father is gone. My madness will now bare itself.

“Find peace in your memories,” I used to say. To have love snatched from you, especially unexpectedly, and then to be told to turn to memories. Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, “This is what you will never again have.” Sometimes they bring laughter, but laughter like glowing coals that soon burst aflame in pain. I hope that it is a question of time—that it is just too soon, too terribly soon, to expect memories to serve only as salve.

“The man is not a good teacher, not because he didn’t know how to solve it, but because he didn’t say he didn’t know.” Is that how I became a person confident enough to say I don’t know when I don’t know? My father taught me that learning is never-ending.

This is an archetypal image of my father, his face bent to his watch, checking the time, a hyper-punctual man; for him, being on time was almost a moral imperative.

There was something in his nature that was capacious, a spirit that could stretch; he absorbed bad news; he negotiated, compromised, made decisions, laid down rules, held relatives together.

“You have a particular laugh when you’re with Daddy,” my husband tells me, “even when what he says isn’t funny.” I recognize the high-pitched cackle he mimics, and I know it is not so much about what my father says as it is about being with him. A laugh that I will never laugh again. “Never” has come to stay. “Never” feels so unfairly punitive. For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.