An elegy for a beloved father

Notes On Grief By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Hardcover, 80 pages Published by Knopf/Fourth Estate S$22.50

Reviewed by Helmi Yusof

TO LOSE a parent to death is to experience "a sensation of eternally dissolving," writes the great Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Notes On Grief, a new book recounting the aftermath of her father's death in June 2020.

She was in the United States, but her father died in Nigeria. Because of the global lockdown, she was unable to fly back immediately to be by his side.

Airports were closed. Mortuaries were full. Funeral arrangements were messy. The family has to mourn over Zoom.

But to Adichie, none of these aggravations mattered so much as the loss of her father, Professor James Nwoye Adichie.

Her description of grief is what takes up pages and pages of the book, and it is often so exquisitely rendered that the book is more compulsively readable than it has any right to be.

"For the rest of my life," she writes, "I will always live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there." How can one not admire the beauty of that sentence?

Because words matter a lot to a writer, Adichie is distressed by "how glib condolences can feel". She devotes an entire section to the many things people say that don't bring her comfort - and the few that do.

For instance, people who say "he's resting" upset her because it inaccurately suggests he's still alive. People who say "he's in a better place" riles her even more because, as she hits back, "How would you know?" (She does have a point.)

What works best, she says, is a simple "I'm sorry" - because it presumes nothing.

Strangely, reading a book on bereavement while Singapore is in Phase 2 (Heightened Alert) offers unlikely solace. Much has been written about how the coronavirus is making us "grieve collectively", whether or not we've lost someone to the pandemic.

The fact that over 3.5 million people in the world have died from Covid-19 and its complications is reason enough to grieve.

Adichie doesn't attempt to tackle the collective grief at all - the personal here is enough to move us. When she describes the surreal experience of the world carrying on ("the mailman comes as usual... and regular news alerts appear on my phone screen") while she is "in the centre of this churning", it's not hard for anyone living in these strange, disconcerting times to empathise.

Of course, grief literature has been with us for centuries. What is Shakespeare's Hamlet but the story of a son mourning his father in all manner of ways? What is The Oresteia from 5BC but stories of grieving men and women avenging the murder of their loved ones?

After the death of his wife, CS Lewis wrote A Grief Observed, still one of the best books on bereavement ever written.

Joan Didion wrote the extraordinary The Year Of Magical Thinking when both her husband and daughter died within a short space of time.

Closer to home, a colleague at The Business Times honoured the death of her husband by publishing a children's story he wrote but shelved years ago. Called Moonchild, by Leslie Sim, it's a splendid book.

Putting words in print is a way "to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity", as Adichie explains. "I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost."

Ultimately, the strength of Notes On Grief is not so much its observations of grief but the very sentences that Adichie crafts to describe grief and the grieving process, such as "the air turns to glue", "this inferno that is sorrow", "a desperation to shrug off this burden, and then a competing longing to hold it close". In a time when many of us struggle to describe this low-grade grief and depression we feel about the events around us, sentences like Adichie's are a salve - at least to people who love words.