From one day to another, Adichie’s father dies unexpectantly. It’s Covid time, no flights to Nigeria, she is isolated from part of her family. And for the first time, she has to go through grief. Condolences, denial, pain and souvenirs of childhood, of Nigeria, of tender words in Igbo. Quite touching.
“I have mourned in the past, but only now have I touched grief’s core. Only now do I learn, while feeling for its porous edges, that there is no way through. I am in the center of this churning, and I have become a maker of boxes, and inside their unbending walls I cage my thoughts. I torque my mind firmly to its shallow surface alone. I cannot think too much; I dare not think too deeply, or else I will be defeated, not merely by pain but by a drowning nihilism, a cycle of thinking there’s no point, what’s the point, there’s no point to anything. There is a grace in denial, Chuks says, words that I repeat to myself. A refuge, this denial, this refusal to look.”
