Lessons from Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
When the Language Breaks, Let Grief Speak
“Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You can learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.”
~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief
On 10 June 2020 at the height of covid, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria.
The irony is: I this week(same day)…happens to be the first year anniversary of the day my grandmother(My Mother’s Mother) died.
Her death is still lodged in me like a stubborn grain of sand that grief hasn’t managed to turn into a pearl. But on June 10th this year, I woke up and went about my day. Emails, errands, idle scrolling. Nothing sacred. Just the mess of modern life.
Lies. I should have known better from history. There is nothing normal about ordinary days, sembuse(what about) a special day such as this. Suffice to say the day OVER DELIVERED. To the point of the last(emphasis on the last part) magical thing being the catalyst of this review. Another whisper.
How it happened? How we are here?
Basically, as if the algorithm was in on some cosmic joke, I opened Instagram at the end of my day. And I am not making this up but the first story on my feed I shit youy not was by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who had made a singular post marking the death anniversary of her father. Same day. June 10th. My chest paused. Time paused. And suddenly the mundane became memorial. Added to the powerful moment in the already saturated with extraordinary potency of the feeling already vibrating in my bones this being the denouement of the day. How? Mad oh!
Synchronicity? Algorithmic fluke? A whisper from the ancestors through the wires of Wi-Fi? I won’t pretend to know. But what I do know is that earlier; before Instagram, before the realisation, before the date clicked into place and a myriad of series of fortunate(mostly) and unfortunate(life is balance); I had decided to pick up this Notes on Grief as well as Powerful moments by Chip and Dan Heath, they were on my bed, way past my bed time. And I do this thing where I keep proving to myself that I really have mastered this art of ….grasping the flies in the air. In reading; I choose to open a random page to lean into intuition and synchronicity. I landed on page 50–51.
No bookmark. No reason. Just a moment of spiritual muscle memory. As if something in me knew before my mind caught up. The added spicy magic; Page 50–51 happens to be the exact pages where she writes most tenderly, most lovingly, about her father. The rhythms of his voice. The mannerisms. The small, sweet fragments of memory that make the absence even louder. I had underlined it months ago. But rereading it that morning, it felt like a new wound. And yet… also like balm.
Let me quote it below verbatim for you to see the wholesomeness(I cried…a bit):
If you expected my father to stay a weekend anywhere, you had to find the nearest Roman Catholic Church. When I first moved to Maryland, I worried that St John the Evangelist, in an inter-faith centre in Columbia, with a guitar-playing choir, would be off-putting to him, nothing like his stained-glass Catholicism, but he pronounced the priest ‘very good’ and happily went every Sunday. I liked that his response to power was a shrug. He worshipped integrity. He was indifferent to, if not distrustful of, grand flourishes.
‘I have eight cars’, my sister;s wealthy suitor once boasted, and my father replied, ‘Why?’
He was not materialistic, and this would not be so remarkable if he were not a Nigerian living in Nigeria, with its hard-nosed grasping ethos, its untrammelled acquisitiveness from bottom to top. We are all blighted to different degrees, but he alone was wholly unaffected. I liked his sense of duty. 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, held relatives together. Much of it was the result of being born the first son in an Igbo family and having risen to its mesh of expectations and dispensations. He infused meaning into the simplest of descriptions: a good man, a good father. I liked to call him ‘a gentle man and a gentleman’.
I liked, too, his appreciation for the proper-ness of things. His meticulous record-keeping, the rows of files in his cabinet. Each child had files for primary, secondary and university records, and every domestic helper who ever lived with us had a file. Once, in the middle of watching an American newscast, he turned to me and asked, ‘What does this word “nuke” mean?’ and when I told him, he said, ‘Nuclear weapons are too serious to be given nicknames.’
‘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.
Fair as an egret. That was my grandmother felt to me in her ability to be the beating heart of our larger clan(human, flaws and all. That is what I hope to be. The whole matrilineality nine yards. Gosh I miss her. The both of them Especially because I was her/their favorite. Grief has, as one of its many egregious components, the onset of doubt. No. I am not imagining it. Yes, my grandma, my mother, were truly lovely. And at some point with my grandma, I got heart-sick to see her look so brave and so drained after being sick for so long.
Every time, I catch myself. And I think(again), ‘I am writing about them in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about them in the past tense’.
The layers of loss make life feel papery thin.
Because here’s the thing: grief never really leaves. It just changes costume…colour. It starts out loud; ugly-crying, breathless sobs, a hunger you can’t feed. Then it becomes subtle. In the curve of handwriting on a recipe card. In the way you pause at a familiar scent. In the page you flip open without meaning to.
In Chimamanda’s prose, I found my own unnamed aches. She does not dress up her grief in metaphors or aphorisms. No. She lets it be unhinged. Impolite. Primal. Honest.
In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy's girl, remembers her beloved father. Notes on Grief is at once a tribute.
To a long life of grace and wisdom, the story of a daughter's fierce love for a parent, and a revealing examination of the layers of loss and the nature of grief.
There’s this moment where I had to close the book. Not out of sadness, but recognition. That uncanny sense of, Yes. That. Exactly that. And how rare it is to be seen in our most broken state.
I’ve always felt a kinship with writers who can infuse poetry into plain things. Who can turn silence into scripture. Chimamanda does this so effortlessly here, even as she wrestles with the very failure of language to hold loss.
What do you say when there are no right words? You write anyway. That’s what she teaches us. Giving words…form…feeling to obscure sorrows.
She reminds us that grief is not linear. It loops. It lingers. It shows up late. It texts you at 2:00am. It tags you in a memory you forgot to bookmark.
Reading Notes on Grief in the week/day of my grandmother’s anniversary was not planned. But somehow, it felt orchestrated. A quiet duet across time, place, and page. A sign from the yonder that…I am with you. I see you. You are not alone.
It’s not a long book. But it’s heavy. Dense with honesty. Every sentence feels like it’s been wept over, wiped down, then wept over again. And yet, it’s not indulgent. It’s generous. It gives us language when we are groping in the dark for even a syllable.
There’s a passage that made me realise: I don’t want to be remembered for what I accomplished. I want to be remembered in someone’s story, where my name interrupts a sentence with warmth.
And maybe that’s what grief gifts us. A renewed clarity about what kind of presence we want to leave behind. About the fingerprints we want to leave on the glass.
So yes, grief is a cruel kind of education. But it’s also a sacred one. It humbles you. It unearths you. It makes you see love backwards—and somehow, that gives you a better lens for the now.
Notes on Grief is not a how-to guide. It’s a how-I-survived manual. And reading it this week, I survived too. Again.
Grief, like literature, teaches us to pay attention. Not just to the loss, but to the living we forget we’re still doing. The only two things that are asuured are death and taxes.
A thing like this dreaded for so long, finally arrives and among the avalanche of emotions their is a bitter and unbearable relief, bringing with it strangely pugnacious thoughts. Enemies beware. The worst has happened. My [someone] is gone. My madness will now bare itself.
So here’s to remembering. Even when we forget.
To language, even when it fails.
To grief, in all its sacred mess.
And to books; thank God for books!…that break us open just enough to begin again.
The book is a delight. Truly. Here is the queen herself reading an excerpt.
#NotesOnGrief #ChimamandaNgoziAdichie #BookishInAfrica #AfricanLiterature #ReadingThroughGrief #GriefAndHealing #WordsThatHeal #BooksThatBreakYouOpen #MemoirOfLoss #LosingAndRemembering #AncestorWhispers #BlackGriefMatters #StorytellingAsHealing #SynchronicitySpeaks #GriefIsLoveWithNowhereToGo #SacredSadness #LossAndLanguage #StillGrievingStillGrowing #HealingInPages #WhenBooksFindYou #WritingThroughLoss #ReadAfrican #AfricanReaders #AfricanStorytellers #AfricanBookstagram #MemoryAndMeaning #LiteraryReflections