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thisotherbookaccount 's review for:
Notes on Grief
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Love lures us into the false belief that grief is a thing that happens to other people. So we stow it in a closet, we put it away. We tell ourselves that we will cross the bridge when we get there, wherever — whenever — ‘there’ is. That is why, when grief hits, when it climbs out of the closet to announce itself, we lose our composures. We fall apart. There are no guidebooks through this forest. We are on our own now.
These are just some of the things that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie must have experienced when her father passed away in 2020 halfway across the world. Stuck in the US due to the pandemic, Adichie wrote this essay as a way to deal with the loss of her father. It’s raw, it’s unadulterated and it lays bare the crude emotions that assault those in bereavement. Similar to CS Lewis’ A Grief Observed, Adichie painstakingly — and you can feel every stab in every word — documents the first days/weeks of her grief, the way it ebbed and flowed, the way it gave relief in retreat, the way it crushed and pillaged upon its return.
Several passages spoke to me as the child of living parents. The false belief that your loved ones will be there for years yet; the want — no, the need — to absorb every story before even it loses its protagonist and first-person narrative; the strange sense of relief, once it happens, that yes, this is it, nothing can be worse than this. It gets better from here. It must.
The fact that I recently came close to losing a family member made this essay a truly poignant one. I only wished that, when grief emerges from the closet in my mind — in all of our minds, in fact — that I will have the same fortitude to mould it, to turn it into words, so that it will no longer have power over me.
Yet, doubt remains. Will I? Will it happen that way? I guess I will cross the bridge when I get there, wherever — whenever — ‘there’ is.
Love lures us into the false belief that grief is a thing that happens to other people. So we stow it in a closet, we put it away. We tell ourselves that we will cross the bridge when we get there, wherever — whenever — ‘there’ is. That is why, when grief hits, when it climbs out of the closet to announce itself, we lose our composures. We fall apart. There are no guidebooks through this forest. We are on our own now.
These are just some of the things that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie must have experienced when her father passed away in 2020 halfway across the world. Stuck in the US due to the pandemic, Adichie wrote this essay as a way to deal with the loss of her father. It’s raw, it’s unadulterated and it lays bare the crude emotions that assault those in bereavement. Similar to CS Lewis’ A Grief Observed, Adichie painstakingly — and you can feel every stab in every word — documents the first days/weeks of her grief, the way it ebbed and flowed, the way it gave relief in retreat, the way it crushed and pillaged upon its return.
Several passages spoke to me as the child of living parents. The false belief that your loved ones will be there for years yet; the want — no, the need — to absorb every story before even it loses its protagonist and first-person narrative; the strange sense of relief, once it happens, that yes, this is it, nothing can be worse than this. It gets better from here. It must.
The fact that I recently came close to losing a family member made this essay a truly poignant one. I only wished that, when grief emerges from the closet in my mind — in all of our minds, in fact — that I will have the same fortitude to mould it, to turn it into words, so that it will no longer have power over me.
Yet, doubt remains. Will I? Will it happen that way? I guess I will cross the bridge when I get there, wherever — whenever — ‘there’ is.