Notes on Grief

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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.

Another revelation: how much laughter is a part of grief. Laughter is tightly braided into our family argot, and now we laugh remembering my father, but somewhere in the background there is a haze of disbelief. The laughter trails off. The laughter becomes tears and becomes sadness and becomes rage. I am unprepared for my wretched, roaring rage. In the face of this inferno that is sorrow, I am callow and unformed.

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

I have mourned in the past, but only now have I touched grief’s core.

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.

“He is in a better place” is startling in its presumptuousness, and has a taint of the inapt. How would you know—and shouldn’t I, the bereaved, be privy to this information first? Should I really be learning this from you?

Grief is not gauzy; it is substantial, oppressive, a thing opaque. The weight is heaviest in the mornings, post-sleep: a leaden heart, a stubborn reality that refuses to budge. I will never see my father again. Never again. It feels as if I wake up only to sink and sink. In those moments, I am sure that I do not ever want to face the world again.

For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.

For now, I want soberness. A friend sends me a line from my novel: “Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.” How odd to find it so exquisitely painful to read my own words.

Until now, grief belonged to other people. Does love bring, even if unconsciously, the delusional arrogance of expecting never to be touched by grief?

We don’t know how we will grieve until we grieve.

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.

I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense.