“We
don’t know how we will grieve until we grieve.”
People exhibit great grief
at the death of their loved ones. Grief plunges one into darkness, clogging the
thoughts with sadness, worry, and uncertainties. It is a reminder of the
shortness of this world and the limited time we have to spend with our loved
ones.
Life is characterised
by happiness, sadness, worry, laughter, tears, and a host of others. And what makes
it somewhat bearable are the moments we spend with our loved ones. We get to
express our feeling without being judged or ridiculed and are aware that we are
not alone…that there are people always willing to stand by us. So, life comes
crashing when the unthinkable happens- when we lose our loved ones.
We feel like the world
is crashing right in front of us. We find our breathing ragged. We struggle to
gasp for air. We cry until our eyes get swollen and red.
Life is filled with
enough sorrows, and the worst that could happen to someone is losing a loved
one.
In Chimamanda Adichie’s
latest release, Notes on Grief, she processes the unexpected death of her
beloved father, James Nwoye Adichie. In her slim memoir, Adichie gives account
of the wonderful life her father, the first professor of Statistics in Nigeria,
lived.
Any reader would relate
to the sadness that engulfed her heart. She explains how she felt after
receiving the dreadful news…how heart-wrenching the news was, and how it came
at a moment she least expected.
Notes on Grief will
leave you in tears and make you reflect on the brevity of human life. It is a
reminder to spend memorable moments with the ones we love and ensure that every
single moment counts.
Some notable quotes
from Chimamanda’s Notes on Grief include:
“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.”
“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.”
“How do people walk around functioning in the
world after losing a beloved father?”
“…10
June 2020 was the worst day of my life. There is such things as the worst day
of a life, and please, dear universe, I do not want anything ever to top it.”
“What does not feel like the deliberate
prodding of wounds is a simple ‘I’m sorry’, because in its banality it presumes
nothing.”
“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, geld relatives together.”
“My
siblings and I were raised with a strong sense of who we were as Igbo, and if
it was pride, then it was a pride so organic, so inevitable, that it felt no
need to call itself pride.”
“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.”
“Does
love bring, even if unconsciously, the delusional arrogance of expecting never
to be touched by grief?”
“Happiness
becomes a weakness because it leaves you defenceless in the face of grief.”
“Death
could just come hurtling at you on any day and at any time…”
“Why
does the image of two red butterflies on a T-shirt make me cry?”
“We
don’t know how we will grieve until we grieve.”
“It does not matter whether I want to be
changed, because I am changed.”
“I
am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing
about my father in the past tense.”
The thing about grief
is that we never can tell how it would feel until we experience it. It is agonising
and gut-wrenching, and depressing. We are still alive, but it seems like our
world has come to an end. We think of how to survive without seeing that bright
eyes and charming smile again. We are scared that we would slowly forget the
face of the person we’ve loved deeply.
Our hands twitch when we
start to use ‘was’ instead of ‘is.’
We try to wrap our
heads around the fact that this person is gone forever. It is not a two-week
journey with the expectation of seeing the person again…or a five-year visit to
another continent with the promise of returning. This person has left us in
this world, and the pain is excruciating.
‘Notes on Grief’ also
highlights the achievements of Chimamanda Adichie’s father and how much of a
great father he was to his children and a remarkable man to his community.
The age of the demise
doesn’t translate to the level of hurt. Forty, seventy, ninety years. It
doesn’t matter. Once a loved one dies, our world crashes.
If you haven’t read
Notes on Grief, I’d advise that you get a copy. However, be warned that it is
an emotional read.
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