“Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language. Why are my sides so sore and achy? It’s from crying, I’m told. I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is, my tongue unbearably bitter, as though I ate a loathed meal and forgot to clean my teeth, on my chest a heavy, awful weight, and inside my body a sensation of eternal dissolving.”- Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Among many life lessons, this pandemic has taught us that life is too short and the pain of loss is eternal. In this pandemic, we have lost our loved ones; we have gone through the trauma of experiencing a near death situation and the constant fear of meeting death eye to eye.
This
book has touched me in so many levels. Notes on Grief is a beautiful work of loss, grief and hope, written in
the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s beloved father’s death in the summer of
2020. As the wrath of COVID-19 hit the world, and kept Adichie and her family
members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to
complications of kidney failure.
This book has been built on her original New
Yorker piece. Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. The
collection of notes is about her emotions and her experiences after she lost
her father and the fond memories of her father. Through her beautiful writing she
talks about her loss caused due to
her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival
during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into
the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and
grandchildren over zoom calls from the family home in Abba, Nigeria.
This book is profound and poetic. It bares the wounds of loss and yet acts as a balm which makes the fear and pain of loss bearable. Dealing with grief is a meditative process. The void remains but what it reminds us is that life is fleeting and we should treasure it till the time we can.
I will rate this book 4stars out of 5