1 From England, my brother set up the Zoom calls every Sunday, our boisterous lockdown ritual: two siblings joining from Lagos, three of us from the United States, and my parents, sometimes echoing and crackly, from Abba, our ancestral hometown in southeastern Nigeria. On 7 June, there was my father, only his forehead on the screen, as usual, because he never quite knew how to hold his phone during video calls. "Move your phone a bit, Daddy," one of us would say. My father was teasing my brother Okey about a new nickname, then he was saying he hadn't had dinner because they'd had a late lunch, then he was talking about the billionaire from the next town who wanted to claim our village's ancestral land. He felt a bit unwell, had been sleeping poorly, but we were not to worry. On 8 June, Okey went to Abba to see him and said he looked tired. On 9 June, I kept our chat brief, so that he could rest. He laughed quietly when I did my playful imitation of a relative. "Ka chi fo," he said. Good night. His last words to me. On 10 June, he was gone. My brother Chuks called to tell me, and I came undone. 2 My four-year-old daughter says I scared her. She gets down on her knees to demonstrate, her small clenched fist rising and falling, and her mimicry makes me see myself as I was: utterly unraveling, screaming and pounding the floor. The news is like a vicious uprooting. I am yanked away from the world I have known since childhood. And I am resistant: my father read the newspaper that afternoon, he joked with Okey about shaving before his appointment with the kidney specialist in Onitsha the next day, he discussed his hospital test results on the phone with my sister Ijeoma, who is a doctor--and so how can this be? But there he is. Okey is holding a phone over my father's face, and my father looks asleep, his face relaxed, beautiful in repose. Our Zoom call is beyond surreal, all of us weeping and weeping and weeping, in different parts of the world, looking in disbelief at the father we adore now lying still on a hospital bed. It happened a few minutes before midnight, Nigerian time, with Okey by his side and Chuks on speakerphone. I stare and stare at my father. My breathing is difficult. Is this what shock means, that the air turns to glue? My sister Uche says she has just told a family friend by text, and I almost scream, "No! Don't tell anyone, because if we tell people, then it becomes true." My husband is saying, "Breathe slowly, drink some of this water." My housecoat, my lockdown staple, is lying crumpled on the floor. Later my brother Kene will jokingly say, "You better not get any shocking news in public, since you react to shock by tearing off your clothes." 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. Why are my sides so sore and achy? It's from crying, I'm told. I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is: my tongue unbearably bitter, as though I ate a loathed meal and forgot to clean my teeth; on my chest, a heavy, awful weight; and inside my body, a sensation of eternal dissolving. My heart--my actual physical heart, nothing figurative here--is running away from me, has become its own separate thing, beating too fast, its rhythms at odds with mine. This is an affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body, of aches and lagging strength. Flesh, muscles, organs are all compromised. No physical position is comfortable. For weeks, my stomach is in turmoil, tense and tight with foreboding, the ever-present certainty that somebody else will die, that more will be lost. One morning, Okey calls me a little earlier than usual and I think, Just tell me, tell me immediately, who has died now. Is it Mummy? 4 In my American home, I like to have National Public Radio on as background noise, and whenever my father was staying he would turn it off if nobody was there listening to it. "I just thought about how Daddy was always turning off the radio and I was always turning it back on. He probably thought it was wasteful in some way," I tell Okey. "Like he always wanted to turn off the generator too early in Abba. I'd so happily let him now if he'll just come back," Okey says, and we laugh. "And I will start to wake up early and I'll start to eat garri and I'll go to Mass every Sunday," I say, and we laugh. I retell the story of my parents visiting me in my graduate-student apartment at Yale, when I say, "Daddy, will you have some pomegranate juice?" and he says, "No, thank you, whatever that is." Pomegranate juice became a standing joke. All those standing jokes we had, frequently told and retold, my father's expression one minute utterly deadpan and, the next, wide open with delighted laughter. 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? It was so fast, too fast. It was not supposed to happen like this, not like a malicious surprise, not during a pandemic that has shut down the world. Throughout the lockdown, my father and I talked about how strange it all was, how scary, and he told me often not to worry about my doctor husband. "You actually drink warm water, Daddy?" I asked one day, surprised, laughing at him, after he said, with sheepish humor, that he'd read somewhere that drinking warm water might prevent coronavirus. He laughed at himself and told me warm water was harmless, after all. It was not like the nonsense that went around during the Ebola scare, when people were bathing in saline before dawn. To my "How are you, Daddy?" he would always respond, "Enwerom nsogbu chacha." I have no problems at all. I'm perfectly fine. And he really was. Until he wasn't. 5 Messages pour in and I look at them as through a mist. Who is this message for? "On the loss of your father," one says. Whose father? My sister forwards a message from her friend that says my father was humble despite his accomplishments. My fingers start to tremble and I push my phone away. He was not; he is. There is a video of people trooping into our house for mgbalu, to give condolences, and I want to reach in and wrench them away from our living room, where already my mother is settled on the sofa in placid widow pose. A table is in front of her like a barrier, to maintain social distance. Already friends and relatives are saying this must be done and that must be done. A condolence register must be placed by the front door, so my sister goes off to buy a bolt of white lace to cover the table and my brother buys a hardcover notebook and soon people are bending to write in the book. I think, Go home! Why are you coming to our house to write in that alien notebook? How dare you make this thing true? Somehow, these well-wishers have become complicit. I feel myself breathing air that is bittersweet with my own conspiracies. Needle-pricks of resentment flood through me at the thought of people who are more than eighty-eight years old, older than my father and alive and well. My anger scares me, my fear scares me, and somewhere in there is shame, too--why am I so enraged and so scared? I am afraid of going to bed and of waking up; afraid of tomorrow and of all the tomorrows after. I am filled with disbelieving astonishment that the mailman comes as usual and that people are inviting me to speak somewhere and that regular news alerts appear on my phone screen. How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering? 6 Grief is forcing new skins on me, scraping scales from my eyes. I regret my past certainties: Surely you should mourn, talk through it, face it, go through it. The smug certainties of a person yet unacquainted with grief. 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. In the week before 10 June, while running around playing with my daughter, I fell and hit my head and suffered a concussion. For days, I felt unmoored, sensitive to sound and light. I did not call my parents daily as usual. When I finally called, my father wanted to talk, not about his feeling unwell but about my head. Concussions can be slow to heal, he told me. "You just said 'concoction.' The word is 'concussion,' " my mother said from the background. I wish I had not missed those few days of calling them, because I would have seen that he wasn't just mildly unwell--or I would have sensed it if it wasn't obvious--and I would have insisted on hospital much sooner. I wish, I wish. The guilt gnaws at my soul. I think of all the things that could have happened and all the ways the world could be reshaped, to prevent what happened on 10 June, to make it un-happen. I worry about Okey, a stalwart, sensitive soul, whose burden weighs differently from ours because he is the one who was there. He agonizes about what else he could have done that night when my father started to show discomfort, telling him, "Help me sit up," and then saying, no, he would rather lie back down. He says my father prayed, calmly, quietly--what sounded like bits of the rosary in Igbo. Does it comfort me to hear this? Only to the extent that it must have comforted my father. The cause was complications from kidney failure. An infection, the doctor said, had exacerbated his long-term kidney disease. But what infection? I wonder about the coronavirus, of course. Some journalists had come to our house to interview him a few weeks before, about the case of the billionaire who wanted to take our hometown's land--a dispute that consumed my father these past two years. Might he have been exposed then? The doctor doesn't think so, even though he was not tested, because he would have had symptoms, and nobody else around him had symptoms. He needed hydration, and so he was admitted to the hospital and put on IV fluids. Okey stripped the tatty hospital bedsheets and replaced them with sheets he'd brought from home. The next day, 11 June, was my father's appointment with the kidney specialist. 8 Because I loved my father so much, so fiercely, so tenderly, I always, at the back of my mind, feared this day. But, lulled by his relative good health, I thought we had time. I thought it was not yet time. "I was so sure Daddy was nineties material," my brother Kene says. We all were. Perhaps we also unreasonably thought that his goodness, his being so decent, would keep him with us into his nineties. But did I sense a truth that I also fully denied? Did my spirit know--the way anxiety sat sharp like claws in my stomach once I heard he was unwell; my sleeplessness for two days; and the hovering darkening pall I could neither name nor shake off? I am the Family Worrier, but even for me it was extreme, how desperately I wished that Nigerian airports were open, so I could get a flight to Lagos and then to Asaba and drive the hour to my hometown to see my father for myself. So, I knew. I was so close to my father that I knew, without wanting to know, without fully knowing that I knew. 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. Excerpted from Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
