Chimamanda recalls such seemingly unremarkable circumstances that tragically turned to be the last moments with her father.
The good writer she is, Chimamanda probes the colour of grief; its depths, twists and turns.
“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… I think, Go home! … How dare you make this thing true? Somehow, these well-wishers have become complicit... 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… 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… How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?”
These are the words of Chimamanda Adichie in her new book, Notes on Grief, which is an elegy to her father, James Nwoye Adichie. It’s a heartrending interplay of grief and memory. Chimamanda aptly describes her father’s death as “a permanent scattering”. As C.S Lewis observed, “…absence is like the sky, spread over everything.” And indeed, from personal experience as one who lost his father more than a decade ago, that’s how it still feels: a kind of scattering spread over everything.
