In her unsettling meditation on death, in the book Goodbye to All That , Ann Hood writes, “My five-year-old daughter (Grace) died suddenly from a virulent form of strep. Sparkles from Grace’s art projects still littered the floor. Her laundered clothes waited to be put away. The contents of her backpack — a perfectly filled-in Weekly Reader, a Ramona Quimby book, and a paper on which she’d counted by tens all the way to five hundred — and her shoes tossed by the door and her ballet bag and her lunchbox, all of it was out there.”
It is heartbreaking, this mother’s unbearable longing for her daughter.
I thought of this when I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s public letter that she posted on Instagram on June 13, 2026. It was her first public statement about the death of her 21‑month‑old son, Nkanu, who had died a few months earlier.
In the letter, Chimamanda writes: “Our twin boys were our precious and perfect gifts… Nkanu, the older twin was named after his grandfather… Nkanu’s emotional intelligence was unusual for his age. One day last December, he heard me complaining to my cousin about my knee pain after a workout and he hurried over to me and began to lovingly rub my knee, saying, ‘Mama, sorry.’ After his death, she continues, “We have two highchairs in the dining room, two car seats in the car, two toddler beds in the bedroom. And now only one toddler.”
“Sorry, mama,” Nkanu had said, as if knowing his life would be just the one short run for him. The empty chair, the empty car seat, the empty bed, and the homework books on the floor. The laundered clothes, folded and waiting, had been cleaned for a body that will never wear them again. These things are shocking reminders of a young life snuffed out.
The ancient Romans had a way of putting it. In the first book of Virgil, The Aeneid, when the character Aeneas, shipwrecked and far from his home of Troy, which had been burnt in war, comes upon a temple in Carthage and sees, painted on its walls, the very war that destroyed everything he loved. He weeps on seeing the murals and utters immortal words: “Sunt lacrimae rerum”—there are tears in things. There are tears in that empty chair, tears in that empty car seat, tears on the empty bed, and tears on the homework books. The backpack holds its small freight of an ordinary school week: the workbook filled in, the children’s book half-read, the column of figures counting upward by tens.
The shoes by the door are caught mid-stride, as though their owner has only just stepped out of them to come back again shortly.
The agony lives in the tense of these things. The child has slipped, in an instant, into the past tense — but their belongings are all still conjugated in the present, mid-sentence, waiting for a continuation that will not come. It is the end of promise: a future under construction, abruptly abandoned with the scaffolding still up. The child is gone, but the glitter of their things remains — impossible to sweep away, shining in the morning light for months, the bright residue of a joy turned into sorrow.
Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Photo credit: Reuters
From time immemorial, there have always been tears in things.
Grief has always known how to use everything, even furniture. In Shakespeare’s King John , his most searing portrait of maternal grief, the widow Constance, mourning her dead boy so much, says that sorrow has moved into the house in his place: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child” — it lies in his bed, walks beside her, wears his looks, and repeats his small sayings. She probably can’t remember the cadence of his laughter. She is describing exactly what Adichie describes. Four centuries apart, two mothers reach for the images of their departed children who will no longer be jumping up and down the corridors.
The Russians, who treat suffering as an almost ordinary thing in literature, went further still. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov , a peasant woman comes to the monastery tormented by the death of her three-year-old; she cannot stop hearing his footsteps or laying out his little belongings. Dostoevsky wrote that scene after burying his own boy, a child of three named Alyosha; he gave the saint of his great novel the dead child’s name, which is the only resurrection a writer is permitted to perform.
America keeps its own small graves. When Ralph Waldo Emerson lost his five-year-old son, Waldo, to scarlet fever, the great optimist of self-reliance — the man who had built a philosophy out of the soul’s sufficiency — found that philosophy useless, even after writing a long elegy, Threnody.
Adichie notes elsewhere that “the ultimate and utter loneliness of grief is that only you can know the true depth of your despair.”
The literature of tears exists because we cannot keep our dead and cannot bear to lose them entirely, and so we do the one thing left to us: we write them down, we say the names, and we leave the chair where it stood. The grief is hers alone, as she says, and no reader may trespass upon it. But the boy who rubbed his mother’s sore knee and told her he was sorry — he belongs now to the company of small, luminous, grieved-for children that literature has been keeping safe for centuries. It is poor comfort, but it is the only kind we have. “Mama, sorry,” Chimamanda’s departed boy had said. “Mama, sorry”. And the words echo still because there are tears even in things. The tears of things.
