I will use the same summary as for the short story of the same name. One day, Adichie’s father dies unexpectedly. It is the time of the pandemic, and there are no flights to Nigeria, so she is isolated from part of her family. For the first time, she has to experience grief. Condolences, denial, pain, and memories of childhood, of Nigeria, and of tender words in Igbo. This version was released as a novel and is more thorough and just as touching as the short story. The loss of a father, difficult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHe is resting\u201d brings not comfort but a scoff that trails its way to pain. He could very well be resting in his room in our house in Abba, fan whirring warm air, his bed strewn with folded newspapers, a sudoku book, an old brochure from a funeral, a Knights of St. Mulumba calendar, a bag filled with his bottles of medicine, and his notebooks with the carefully lined pages on which he recorded every single thing he ate, a diabetic\u2019s account-taking. \u201cHe is in a better place\u201d is startling in its presumptuousness, and has a taint of the inapt. How would you know – and shouldn\u2019t I, the bereaved, be privy to this information first? Should I really be learning this from you? \u201cHe was eighty-eight\u201d so deeply riles because age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved. Yes, he was eighty-eight, but a cataclysmic hole now suddenly gapes open in your life, a part of you snatched away forever. \u201cIt has happened, so just celebrate his life,\u201d an old friend wrote, and it incensed me. How facile to preach about the permanence of death, when it is, in fact, the very permanence of death that is the source of anguish. I wince now at the words I said in the past to grieving friends. \u201cFind peace in your memories,\u201d I used to say. To have love snatched from you, especially unexpectedly, and then to be told to turn to memories. Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, \u201cThis is what you will never again have.\u201d Sometimes they bring laughter, but laughter like glowing coals that soon burst aflame in pain. I hope that it is a question of time – that it is just too soon, too terribly soon, to expect memories to serve only as salve.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I will use the same summary as for the short story of the same name. One day, Adichie’s father dies unexpectedly. It is the time of the pandemic, and there are no flights to Nigeria, so she is isolated from part of her family. For the first time, she has to experience grief. Condolences, denial, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18875,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[270],"tags":[126,82,124],"class_list":["post-18822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books-2025","tag-father","tag-grief","tag-loss"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/obinna-okerekeocha-fGd8paHzN98-unsplash-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1920&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18822"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18876,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18822\/revisions\/18876"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redheadwithabrain.ch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}