***** Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2021)
Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2021)
3
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 (4).
4
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. But how can it be that in the morning he is joking and talking, and at night he is gone forever (7)?
6
I have mourned in the past, but only now have I touched grief’s core. Only now do I learn, while feeling for its porous edges, that there is no way through. I am in the center of this churning, and I have become a maker of boxes, and inside their unbending walls I cage my thoughts. I torque my mind firmly to its shallow surface alone. 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. There is a grace in denial, Chuks says, words that I repeat to myself. A refuge, this denial, this refusal to look. Of course, the effort is its own grieving, and so I am un-looking in the oblique shadow of looking, but imagine the catastrophe of a direct, unswerving stare. Often, too, there is the urge to run and run, to hide. But I cannot always run, and each time I am forced to squarely confront my grief-when I read the death certificate, when I draft a death announcement-I feel a shimmering panic. In such moments, I notice a curious physical reaction: my body begins to shake, fingers tap uncontrollably, one leg bobbing. I am unable to quiet myself until I look away. How do people walk around functioning in the world after losing a beloved father? For the first time in my life, I am enamored of sleeping pills, and, in the middle of a shower or a meal, I burst into tears.
7
My wariness of superlatives is forever stripped away: 10 June 2020 was the worst day of my life. There is such a thing as the worst day of a life, and please, dear universe, I do not want anything ever to top it (12-13).
8
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 (19).
10
...age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved. Yes, he was eighty-eight, but a cataclysmic hole now suddenly gapes open in your life, a part of you snatched away forever. “It has happened, so just celebrate his life,” an old friend wrote, and it incensed me. How facile to preach about the permanence of death, when it is, in fact, the very permanence of death that is the source of anguish. I wince now at the words I said in the past to grieving friends. “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.
What does not feel like the deliberate prodding of wounds is a simple “I’m sorry,” because in its banality it presumes nothing (23-4).
11
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 (25).
Is it possible to be possessive of one’s pain? I want to become known to it, I want it known to me. So precious was my bond with my father that I cannot lay open my suffering until I have discerned its contours. One day I am in the bathroom, completely alone, and I call my father by my fond nickname for him-“the original dada”-and a brief blanket of peace enfolds me. Too brief. I am a person wary of the maudlin, but I am certain of this moment filled with my father. If it is a hallucination, then I want more of it, but it hasn’t happened again (27).
14
Often I hailed him by his title “Odelu-Ora Abba,” whose literal translation is “One Who Writes for Our Community.” And he would hail me too, and his hailing me was a love-drenched litany of affirmation. “Ome Ife Ukwu” was the most common. “The One Who Does Great Things.” I find the others difficult to translate: “Nwoke Neli” is roughly “The Equivalent of Many Men,” and “Ogbata Ogu Ebie” is “The One Whose Arrival Ends the Battle.” Is he the reason I have never been afraid of the disapproval of men? I think so (38).
17
My best friend, Uju, tells me how my father turned to her at the end of my Harvard Class Day speech, in 2018, and, in a voice more powerful for being muted, said, “Look, they are all standing for her.” I weep at this. Part of grief’s tyranny is that it robs you of remembering the things that matter. His pride in me mattered, more than anyone else’s. He read everything I wrote, and his comments ranged from “this isn’t coherent at all” to “you have outdone yourself.” Each time I traveled for speaking events, I would send him my itinerary and he would send texts to follow my progress. “You must be about to go onstage,” he would write. “Go and shine. Ome ife ukwu!” Once, I was traveling to Denmark and, after wishing me a safe journey, he added, in his deadpan way, “And when you get to Denmark, look for Hamlet’s house” (46).
18
“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 (51).
21
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 (61).
29
I must spare my loved ones my endless roiling thoughts. I must conceal just how hard grief’s iron clamp is. I finally understand 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 (81-2).
3
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 (4).
4
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. But how can it be that in the morning he is joking and talking, and at night he is gone forever (7)?
6
I have mourned in the past, but only now have I touched grief’s core. Only now do I learn, while feeling for its porous edges, that there is no way through. I am in the center of this churning, and I have become a maker of boxes, and inside their unbending walls I cage my thoughts. I torque my mind firmly to its shallow surface alone. 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. There is a grace in denial, Chuks says, words that I repeat to myself. A refuge, this denial, this refusal to look. Of course, the effort is its own grieving, and so I am un-looking in the oblique shadow of looking, but imagine the catastrophe of a direct, unswerving stare. Often, too, there is the urge to run and run, to hide. But I cannot always run, and each time I am forced to squarely confront my grief-when I read the death certificate, when I draft a death announcement-I feel a shimmering panic. In such moments, I notice a curious physical reaction: my body begins to shake, fingers tap uncontrollably, one leg bobbing. I am unable to quiet myself until I look away. How do people walk around functioning in the world after losing a beloved father? For the first time in my life, I am enamored of sleeping pills, and, in the middle of a shower or a meal, I burst into tears.
7
My wariness of superlatives is forever stripped away: 10 June 2020 was the worst day of my life. There is such a thing as the worst day of a life, and please, dear universe, I do not want anything ever to top it (12-13).
8
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 (19).
10
...age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved. Yes, he was eighty-eight, but a cataclysmic hole now suddenly gapes open in your life, a part of you snatched away forever. “It has happened, so just celebrate his life,” an old friend wrote, and it incensed me. How facile to preach about the permanence of death, when it is, in fact, the very permanence of death that is the source of anguish. I wince now at the words I said in the past to grieving friends. “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.
What does not feel like the deliberate prodding of wounds is a simple “I’m sorry,” because in its banality it presumes nothing (23-4).
11
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 (25).
Is it possible to be possessive of one’s pain? I want to become known to it, I want it known to me. So precious was my bond with my father that I cannot lay open my suffering until I have discerned its contours. One day I am in the bathroom, completely alone, and I call my father by my fond nickname for him-“the original dada”-and a brief blanket of peace enfolds me. Too brief. I am a person wary of the maudlin, but I am certain of this moment filled with my father. If it is a hallucination, then I want more of it, but it hasn’t happened again (27).
14
Often I hailed him by his title “Odelu-Ora Abba,” whose literal translation is “One Who Writes for Our Community.” And he would hail me too, and his hailing me was a love-drenched litany of affirmation. “Ome Ife Ukwu” was the most common. “The One Who Does Great Things.” I find the others difficult to translate: “Nwoke Neli” is roughly “The Equivalent of Many Men,” and “Ogbata Ogu Ebie” is “The One Whose Arrival Ends the Battle.” Is he the reason I have never been afraid of the disapproval of men? I think so (38).
17
My best friend, Uju, tells me how my father turned to her at the end of my Harvard Class Day speech, in 2018, and, in a voice more powerful for being muted, said, “Look, they are all standing for her.” I weep at this. Part of grief’s tyranny is that it robs you of remembering the things that matter. His pride in me mattered, more than anyone else’s. He read everything I wrote, and his comments ranged from “this isn’t coherent at all” to “you have outdone yourself.” Each time I traveled for speaking events, I would send him my itinerary and he would send texts to follow my progress. “You must be about to go onstage,” he would write. “Go and shine. Ome ife ukwu!” Once, I was traveling to Denmark and, after wishing me a safe journey, he added, in his deadpan way, “And when you get to Denmark, look for Hamlet’s house” (46).
18
“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 (51).
21
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 (61).
29
I must spare my loved ones my endless roiling thoughts. I must conceal just how hard grief’s iron clamp is. I finally understand 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 (81-2).