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Even here, even in the retrospective lament, to look directly at the grief is too much to bear. Adichie must construct the frame of her daughter's seeing in order to look at the manifestation of her own pain. Grief, Adichie tells us, is grounded in the body memory. "The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is," she writes early on, her sides achy from crying, her arms heavy with sorrow; understanding that mourning is an act of the whole body.

A daughter's love and respect for a father who was pivotal in her formation of self saturates these pages. Equally present is the need to create something out of that grief to honor the father so he will be remembered. But the question is how. As the pandemic rages on, the funeral is delayed; instead, mourners from their community come to sit and tell stories over and over. Adichie reckons with her discomfort with these aspects of Igbo mourning traditions:

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"There is value in that Igbo way, that African way, of grappling with grief: that performative, expressive mourning, where you take every call and you tell and retell the story of what happened, where isolation is anathema and 'stop crying' a refrain. But I am not ready."

For Adichie, this communal mourning is too much. While her mother must shave her head and sit and bear the grief of the community come to honor her dead husband with their words, both spoken and signed into the death notebook, Adichie thinks: ""Who are you coming into our house to write in that alien notebook? How dare you make this thing true?" She is troubled over the platitudes uttered that echo meaningless and empty, and humbly regrets times in the past when she too had uttered those same platitudes to friends who had lost a loved one, unaware of the painful banality of such language in the midst of the sharp haunting of grieving.

For Adichie, grief is private, held close. She does not want to speak to others. She wants to wrap herself in grief like a baby in a swaddled blanket and imagine it is her father's hands, still present, soothing her to sleep. It is only in the stillness of her own lament that she can understand grief. To Adichie, the only word that makes sense is the simple, authentic Ndo, the Igbo word for sorry.

In the closing pages, the body still looms large over the understanding of grief. Adichie, thinking of how to adorn the body for grief, is making T-shirts for her father's funeral. "I don't particularly like T-shirts, but I spend hours on a customization website, designing T-shirts to memorialize my father, trying out fonts and colors and images," she writes.

Notes on Grief is a 2021 memoir written by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.[1][2][3] Presented in 30 short sections, Notes on Grief was written following the death of her father James Nwoye Adichie in June 2020, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic,[4] and is expanded from an essay first published in The New Yorker.[5] As The New York Times notes: "What she narrates is not only father loss, but the ways Mr. Adichie endures in having made of her a writer."[4]

That unwanted conversation is more prescient in this Covid-stricken world. Adichie's father died of complications from kidney failure, but coronavirus looms grimly over Notes on Grief. It compounds grief's already claustrophobic nature by adding the traumatising physical distance of lockdowns and travel restrictions, preventing Adichie from immediately joining the rest of her family in Nigeria.

Grief is non-linear. One day, three years after a death, grief can return and feel as extreme as it did in the immediate aftermath of the loss. The ultimate difference between child grief and adult grief, she said, is how children will re-grieve throughout their lives.

This can look a million different ways: withdrawal, exhaustion, anger, fixation, depression, and distraction are all behaviours that grief counsellors like Warnick identify in kids. But these periods of negative reaction are often less prolonged than they would be for grown-ups.

I feel the presence of my son, all around, but he may not be there. I hear him talk to me, parent me, guide me, though he may not be there. He visits Susie in her sleep regularly, speaks to her, comforts her, but he may not be there. Dread grief trails bright phantoms in its wake. These spirits are ideas, essentially. They are our stunned imaginations reawakening after the calamity. Like ideas, these spirits speak of possibility. Follow your ideas, because on the other side of the idea is change and growth and redemption. Create your spirits. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed.

It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That\u2019s the deal. That\u2019s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves. We are tiny, trembling clusters of atoms subsumed within grief\u2019s awesome presence. It occupies the core of our being and extends through our fingers to the limits of the universe. Within that whirling gyre all manner of madnesses exist; ghosts and spirits and dream visitations, and everything else that we, in our anguish, will into existence. These are precious gifts that are as valid and as real as we need them to be. They are the spirit guides that lead us out of the darkness.

This slim volume contains the powerfully emotional thoughts of acclaimed novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as she contends with her raw grief following the death of her beloved father, James Nwoye Adichie. The chapters are each just a few pages long thereby allowing the reader time to reflect on every step of her journey as she examines her pain and tries to reconcile herself to her loss. Her notes on grief provide snapshots expressed in her uniquely elegant style which speak to the universal suffering felt by those of us who have lost parents or other deeply loved family members.

The second time I read it this past week, I clung to each word \u2014 all of which suddenly had a different, more nuanced meaning. Followed by a wave of envy: that she could so articulately talk about her loss and that she had the liberty. Mainly, I recognised two parts of grief: the loneliness of mourning and how it takes different shapes for different people; the universality: the need to tell and retell stories, the need to see, hear about the dead through new eyes, fresh ears.

In this essay, based on qualitative research with Latino and Irish-American caregivers of demented elders, we argue that spatially and culturally constituted definitions of personhood, the moral life, and justice shape perceptions of normative aging, the agency of the demented persons and their place in the community, the appropriate care of the aged and demented, as well as partially determine the concrete resources which will be available to elders and their families. We review how ties to homelands and neighborhood institutions act as mediators and shapers of anticipatory grief, caregiver burdens, and caregiver resources, serving as a buffer against exhaustion and despair for some families (primarily the Irish-American sample), and as an additional site of loss or stress for others (primarily the Latino sample).

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At the end of those long days filled with tears and laughter, Trevor would drive us home to our apartment in the city. The lights along the ocean twinkled in the dark blue night, and I would breathe deeply for the first time in hours as we crested the exit ramp from I93 to I90, flying high above the the city for a few special seconds. I spent the rest of the ride doubled over in grief stricken agony, silently sobbing as the reality of the loss began to hit me.

I have often felt that, for people in the depths of grief, enduring a funeral and its requisite trappings is tantamount to torture. How can society insist that the grieving suffer under the clumsy, thoughtless platitudes of the well-meaning or be drained by those overly emotive others who, in rushing to prove their own sorrow, demand the mourner comfort them?

Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie seems to agree that this is wrong. In the slender, personal Notes on Grief, she channels her resentment of such ceremonies, giving herself over to a bitter unwillingness to participate in the public sharing of grief or to endure it from others.

She has lost her 88-year-old father, who had kidney disease. But do not make the mistake of patting her arm and telling her that he had a good, full life and that she should be happy for the time they shared. Deeply felt grief bares its teeth and snarls at such sentiments.

And this immediately chimes. When I think of grief I think of a widow, silent, passive and tearful. But the reality within the therapy room is often rage. A rage at the unfairness of it all, a fury that life can be so unfair and anger that long held spiritual beliefs have let you down. Within my years of practice I have seen clients out of their chair, fists clenched in fury and pacing the room with the physicality of their anger. ff782bc1db