'Notes on Grief' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Gender matters. Men and Women experience the world differently. Gender colours the way we experience the world. But we can change that” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This words from her, made me look out for her, and then got hooked to her and 'Notes on Grief' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie became my 57th of 2021.

Regret is one of grief’s many tyrannies;⁣ thinking of what you could have done, thinking of what you didn't do. 

In the summer of 2020 when the Coronavirus pandemic had just begun, in a sudden turn of events, author-feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie lost her father to unexpected kidney failure. In this slim yet moving book, Adichie remembers her father as she tries to express her grief and cope with her loss.

'Notes of Grief' was originally written as an essay of the same title in the New Yorker which was later expanded into a book. The book starts with Adichie recalling the early days of the pandemic when connecting with her parents, who lived in their family home in Nigeria, and siblings, living in different countries, over a Zoom call every weekend was a family ritual. Her father had mentioned about not feeling well in one of those videos, and just a few days later Adichie gets the devastating news that he is no more. While words fall short to express the loss of losing one's parent(s), in this book Adichie tries to share how the news shattered her. In the next few pages as she tries to make sense of her life-altering loss, Adichie fondly remembers her father James Nwoye Adichie-- from the days when he survived the Biafran war to how he became a statistics professor. She also writes about the days after his death, when the siblings connected over Zoom calls to discuss the inevitable rituals of death which got delayed because of the uncertainties of the pandemic.

"I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense," Adichie writes in the book, as she tries to have a grip over her irreparable loss. While losing one's parent(s) is a very personal loss, each different from the other in its own way, readers who have experienced this grief or are going through it would find some solace in 'Notes of Grief'. This is a tribute to a father, by a self-proclaimed daddy's girl. Unfortunately, roughly a year later Adichie also lost her mother...