Notes on Grief

My wariness of superlatives is forever stripped away. That was the worst day of my life. There is such a thing as the worst day of a life, and please, dear universe, I do not want anything ever to top it.

Enemies beware the worst has happened: my father is gone, my madness will now bear itself.

Another revelation: how much laughter is a part of grief. Laughter is tightly braided into our family argot, and now we laugh remembering my father, but somewhere in the background there is a haze of disbelief. The laughter trails off. The laughter becomes tears and becomes sadness and becomes rage. I am unprepared for my wretched, roaring rage.

I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense.

I am my father’s daughter.

Why does the image of two red butterflies on a T-shirt make me cry? We don’t know how we will grieve until we grieve.

On 28 March, my favourite aunt, my mother’s younger sister Caroline, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm, in a British hospital that was already locked down because of the coronavirus. A joyous woman. We were stunned by sadness. The virus brought close the possibility of dying, the commonness of dying, but there was still a semblance of control, if you stayed home, if you washed your hands. With her death, the idea of control was gone. Death could just come hurtling at you on any day and at any time, as it had with her. She was perfectly fine one moment, the next she had a very bad headache and the next she was gone. A dark time inexorably darkened.

Imagine dreading a burial and yet longing for it to pass.

For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.

I want to protect– hide? hide from?– these foreign sensations, this bewildering series of hills and valleys. There is a desperation to shrug off this burden, and then a competing longing to cosset it, to hold it close. Is it possible to be possessive of one’s pain? I want to become known to it, I want it known to me. So precious was my bond with my father that I cannot lay open my suffering until I have discerned its contours.

I back away from condolences. People are kind, people mean well, but knowing this does not make their words rankle less.

Enemies beware: the worst has happened. My father is gone. My madness will now bare itself.

How do people walk around functioning in the world after losing a beloved father? For the first time in my life, I am enamoured of sleeping pills, and, in the middle of a shower or a meal, I burst into tears.

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.

It feels as if I wake up only to sink and sink. In those moments, I am sure that I do not ever want to face the world again.

What does not feel like the deliberate prodding of wounds is a simple "Im sorry," because in its banality it presumes nothing. Ndo, in Igbo, comforts more, a word that is "sorry" with a meta-physical heft, a word with borders wider than mere “sorry."

I back away from condolences. People are kind, people mean well, but knowing this does not make their words rankle less. "Demise."

Enemies beware: the worst has happened. My father is gone. My madness will now bare itself.

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. I want there to be a point, even if I do not know, for now, what that point is.

I am flled with disbelieving astonishment that the mailman comes as usual and that people are inviting me to speak somewhere and that regular news alerts appear on my phone screen. How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?

Another revelation: how much laughter is a part of grief. Laughter is tightly braided into pur family argot, and now we laugh remember- ing my father, but somewhere in the background there is a haze of disbelief. The laughter trails off. The laughter becomes tears and becomes sad- ness and becomes rage. I am unprepared tor my wretched., roaring rage. In the face of this inferno that is sorrow, I am callow and unformed. But how can it be that in the morning he is joking and talking, and at night he is gone forever?

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.

My breathing is difficult. Is this what shock means, that the air turns to glue?

On 7 June, 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. "Move your phone a bit, Daddy," one of us would say.