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 cannot think too much, I dare not think too deeply, or else I will be defeated, not merely by pain but by a drowning nihilism, a cycle of thinking there’s no point, what’s the point, there’s no point to anything. I want there to be a point, even if I do not know, for now, what that point is.

How do people walk around functioning in the world after losing a beloved father?

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.

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.

There is value in that Igbo way, that African way, of grappling with grief: the performative, expressive outward mourning, where you take every call and you tell and retell the story of what happened, where isolation is anathema and “stop crying” a refrain.

Is it possible to be possessive of one’s pain? I want to become known to it, I want it known to me.

My father taught me that learning is never-ending.

Part of grief’s tyranny is that it robs you of remembering the things that matter.

To sit with him and talk about the past was like reclaiming gorgeous treasure that was always mine anyway.

I liked his sense of duty. 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. Much of it was the result of being born the first son in an Igbo family and having risen to its mesh of expectations and dispensations. He infused meaning into the simplest of descriptions: a good man, a good father. I liked to call him “a gentle man and a gentleman.”

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.

“Mama is sad because Grandpa died,” my four-year-old daughter says to her cousin. “Died.” She knows the word “died.” She pulls tissues out of a box and hands them to me. Her emotional alertness moves, surprises, impresses me. A few days later she asks, “When will Grandpa wake up again?”

“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.

The waiting, the not knowing.

The layers of loss make life feel papery thin.

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.

It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed. A new voice is pushing itself out of my writing, full of the closeness I feel to death, the awareness of my own mortality, so finely threaded, so acute. A new urgency. An impermanence in the air. I must write everything now, because who knows how long I have?

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