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.

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

Does it comfort me to hear this? Only to the extent that it must have comforted my father.

“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?

“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.”

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

I liked that his response to power was a shrug. He worshipped integrity. He was indifferent to, if not distrustful of, grand flourishes.

I weep and weep, and wish that her understanding of the world were real. That grief was not about the utter impossibility of return.

Grief has, as one of its many egregious components, the onset of doubt. No, I am not imagining it. Yes, my father truly was lovely.