A beautiful, elegiac love letter to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s father
Bought it at Kramer’s thinking I might gift it to L’hussen who just lost their mother… reached out but not replying. I hope they’re okay and I wonder if giving them this book would be helpful or a little bit overstepping
“Because I loved my father so much, so fiercely, so tenderly, I always, at the back of my mind, feared this day.”
Themes: the viscerally physical nature of grief, how it is ‘other’ and ‘intellectual’ until it happens to you, how everyone grieves differently and how you don’t know how you’ll grieve until you do, how you and your entirely world changes but the world at large goes on
“I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.”
“It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed. A new voice is pushing itself out of my writing, full of the closeness I feel to death, the awareness of my own mortality, so finely threaded, so acute. A new urgency. An impermanence in the air. I must write everything now, because who knows how long I have?
‘Next time’ is not guaranteed.
