I retell the story of my parents visiting me in my graduate-student apartment at Yale, where I say, “Daddy, will you have some pomegranate juice? And he says, ‘No, thank you, whatever that is.’ ” “And I will start to wake up early, and I’ll start to eat garri, and I’ll go to Mass every Sunday,” I say, and we laugh. I’d so happily let him now if he’ll just come back,” Okey says, and we laugh.
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“Like he always wanted to turn off the generator too early in Abba.
In my American home, I like to have National Public Radio on as background noise, and whenever my father was staying he would turn it off if nobody was there listening to it. One morning, Okey calls me a little earlier than usual, and I think, Just tell me, tell me immediately, who has died now. For weeks, my stomach is in turmoil, tense and tight with foreboding, the ever-present certainty that somebody else will die, that more will be lost. Flesh, muscles, organs are all compromised. This is an affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body. My heart-my actual physical heart, nothing figurative here-is running away from me, has become its own separate thing, beating too fast, its rhythms at odds with mine. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is, my tongue unbearably bitter, as though I ate a loathed meal and forgot to clean my teeth, on my chest a heavy, awful weight, and inside my body a sensation of eternal dissolving. I did not know that we cry with our muscles. Why are my sides so sore and achy? It’s from crying, I’m told. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.
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You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. Later, my brother Kene will jokingly say, “You better not get any shocking news in public, since you react to shock by tearing off your clothes.” 3. Is this what shock means, that the air turns to glue? My sister Uche says that she has just told a family friend by text, and I almost scream, “No! Don’t tell anyone, because if we tell people, then it becomes true.” My husband is saying, “Breathe slowly drink some of this water.” My housecoat, my lockdown staple, is lying crumpled on the floor. It happened a few minutes before midnight, Nigerian time, with Okey by his side and Chuks on speakerphone. Our Zoom call is beyond surreal, all of us weeping and weeping and weeping, in different parts of the world, looking in disbelief at the father we adore now lying still on a hospital bed. Okey is holding a phone over my father’s face, and my father looks asleep, his face relaxed, beautiful in repose. And I am resistant: my father read the newspaper that afternoon he joked with Okey about shaving before his appointment with the kidney specialist in Onitsha the next day he discussed his hospital test results on the phone with my sister Ijeoma, who is a doctor, and so how can this be? But there he is. I am yanked away from the world I have known since childhood. She gets down on her knees to demonstrate, her small clenched fist rising and falling, and her mimicry makes me see myself as I was, utterly unravelling, screaming and pounding the floor. My four-year-old daughter says I scared her. My brother Chuks called to tell me, and I came undone. He laughed quietly when I did my usual playful imitation of a relative. On June 9th, I kept our chat brief so that he could rest. On June 8th, Okey went to Abba to see him and said that he looked tired. He felt a bit unwell, had been sleeping poorly, but we were not to worry. My father was teasing my brother Okey about a new nickname, then he was saying that he hadn’t had dinner because they’d had a late lunch, then he was talking about the billionaire from the next town who wanted to claim our village’s ancestral land. “Move your phone a bit, Daddy,” one of us would say.
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On June 7th, there was my father, only his forehead on the screen, as usual, because he never quite knew how to hold his phone during video calls. In memoriam: James Nwoye Adichie, 1932-2020 1.įrom England, my brother set up the Zoom calls every Sunday, our boisterous lockdown ritual, two siblings joining from Lagos, three from the United States, and my parents, sometimes echoing and crackly, from Abba, our ancestral home town, in southeastern Nigeria.
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