Notes on Grief

In memoriam: James Nwoye Adichie, 1932-2020

1.

From England, my brother set up the Zoom calls every Sunday, our boisterous lockdown ritual, two siblings joining from Lagos, three from the United States, and my parents, sometimes echoing and crackly, from Abba, our ancestral home town, in southeastern Nigeria. On June 7th, 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 that 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 June 8th, Okey went to Abba to see him and said that he looked tired. On June 9th, I kept our chat brief so that he could rest. He laughed quietly when I did my usual playful imitation of a relative. “Ka chi fo,” he said. (“Good night.”) His last words to me. On June 10th, 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 unravelling, 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 that 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. 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, where 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 this minute utterly deadpan and, in 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 of the laughter 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 is it that in the morning he was joking and talking, and at night he was 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, after he said with sheepish humor that he’d read somewhere that drinking warm water might prevent the coronavirus infection. He laughed at himself and told me that warm water was harmless, after all, 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, saying that 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 that this must be done and that must be done. A condolence register must be placed by the front door, and my sister goes off to buy a bolt of white lace to cover the table, and my brother buys a hardcover notebook, and already 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 all the tomorrows after. I am filled with disbelieving astonishment that the mailman comes as usual and people are inviting me to speak somewhere and 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. 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, my fingers tap uncontrollably, one leg bobs. 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: June 10, 2020, was the worst day of my life. The week before June 10th, 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 sensed that he wasn’t only mildly unwell, and I would have insisted that he go to the 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 that the world could be reshaped, to prevent what happened on June 10th, to make it un-happen. I worry about Okey, a stalwart, sensitive soul, whose burden is different from ours because he is the one who was there. He agonizes about what else he could have done when my father that night started to show discomfort, telling him, “Help me sit up” and then saying, no, he would rather lie back down. Okey says that my father prayed, calmly, quietly, what sounded like lines from the rosary in Igbo. Does it comfort me to hear this? Only in the sense that it must have comforted my father.

The cause was complications from kidney failure. An infection, the doctor said, exacerbated his long-term kidney disease. But what infection? Of course, I wonder about the coronavirus. 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 home town’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 I.V. fluids. Okey stripped the tatty hospital bedsheets and brought sheets from home.

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 did. 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 that he was unwell, the hovering, darkening pall that 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 on a flight to Lagos, and then on a flight to Asaba and drive the hour to my home town 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, comes at last, 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.

9.

How quickly my life has become another life, how pitiless this becoming is, and yet how slow I am to adapt. Okey sends me a video of an elderly woman who walks through our front door, crying, and I think, I have to ask Daddy who she is. In that small moment, what has been true for the forty-two years of my life is still true—that my father is tactile, inhaling, exhaling, reachable to talk to and to watch the twinkle of his eyes behind his glasses. Then, with a horrible lurch, I remember again. That brief forgetting feels like both a betrayal and a blessing. Do I forget because I am not there? I think so. My brother and sister are there, face to face with the desolation of a house without my father. They can see that he is not at the dining table for breakfast, on his chair backing the window’s light, and that after breakfast he is not settled on the sofa in his midmorning ritual of napping, reading, and napping again. If only I could be there, too, but I am stuck in America, my frustration like a blister, scouring for news on when the Nigerian airports will open. Even the Nigerian authorities don’t seem to know. A report says July, then August, then we hear it might be in October, but the aviation minister tweets to say “may be earlier than October.” Maybe, maybe not, like playing yo-yo with a cat.

10.

I back away from condolences. People are kind, people mean well, but knowing this does not make their words rankle less. “On the demise of your father.” Demise. A favorite of Nigerians, it conjures for me dark distortions. “He is resting” brings not comfort but a scoff that trails its way to pain. He could very well be resting in his room in our house in Abba, fan whirring warm air, his bed strewn with folded newspapers, a sudoku book, an old brochure from a funeral, a Knights of St. Mulumba calendar, a bag filled with his bottles of medicine, and his notebooks with the carefully lined pages, where he recorded every single thing he ate, a diabetic’s account-taking. “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? “He was eighty-eight” so deeply riles because age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved. “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 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. Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, “This is what you will never again have.”

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