Chimamanda loses mom 9 months after losing dad and her reaction is just HEARTBREAKING.

So sad.

I read this news story and when I tell you just reading the headline alone, I felt myself completely go weak and my heart shattered!

I am a huge Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie fan. I adore everything she's ever written - every novel, short story collection, short story, manifesto, essay, everything.

On the 10th of June, 2020, her father Professor James Nwoye Adichie passed away. His death was very hard on Chimamanda.

He was buried on the 9th of October and Chimamanda in an interview with her very good friend Ebuka opened up about how after the burial people just expected her to move on, but she simply could not. She mourned her father, wearing nothing but shirts that celebrated his life with inscriptions on them which read ‘Omekannia’, ‘Nwa James’, and ‘Nnam Mulu M’, and more.

Doing what she does best, Chimamanda wrote a very heartbreaking and honest piece about his death and the grief she felt about it. It is so good yet so heartbreaking and I just have to show it to you. It reads:

And just like that my life has changed forever. June 7, there was Daddy on our weekly family zoom call, talking and laughing. June 8, he felt unwell. Still, when we spoke he was more concerned about my concussion (I’d fallen while playing with my daughter).

June 9, we spoke briefly, my brother Okey with him. “Ka chi fo,” he said. His last words to me. June 10, he was gone.

Because I loved my father so much, so fiercely, so tenderly, I always at the back of my mind feared this day. But he was in good health. I thought we had time. I thought it wasn’t yet time. I have come undone. I have screamed, shouted, rolled on the floor, pounded things. I have shut down parts of myself.

“The children and I adore him,” my mother wrote in a tribute when he was made professor emeritus. We are broken. We are bereft, holding on to one another, planning a burial in these COVID-scarred times. I am stuck in the US, waiting. The Nigerian airports are closed. Everything is confusing, uncertain, bewildering.

Sleep is the only respite. On waking, the enormity, the finality, strikes – I will never see my father again. Never again. I crash and go under. The urge to run and run, to hide from this. The shallow surface of my mind feels safest because to go deeper is to face unbearable pain. All the tomorrows without him, his wisdom, his grace.

We talked almost daily. I sent him my travel itineraries. He would text me just before I got on a stage: Ome ife ukwu! Nothing else mattered to me as much as the pride in his eyes.

I saw him last on March 5th in Abba. I had planned to be back in May. We planned to record his stories of my great grandmother.

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn that your side muscles will ache painfully from days of crying. You learn how glib condolences can feel.

My father was Nigeria’s first professor of Statistics. He studied Mathematics at Ibadan and got his PhD in Statistics from Berkeley, returning to Nigeria shortly before the Biafran War. A titled Igbo man – Odelu Ora Abba – deeply committed to our hometown. A Roman Catholic with a humane and luminous faith. A gentle man and a gentleman. For those who knew him, these words recur: honest, calm, kind, strong, quiet, integrity.

I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe that I am writing about my father in the past tense. My heart is broken.

Now, in a horrible unimaginable unfolding of events, on March 1st, 2021 barely 9 months after the loss of her father, news broke that Chimamanda’s mother, Mrs. Grace Ifeoma Adichie passed away in Awka, Anambra State, aged 78 years old.

Since the news broke, Chimamanda has been understandably absent from social media.

Her good friend, Ebuka Obi-Uchendu with whom she spoke about grief from her father’s death a couple of months ago, did actually tweet out some hours after the news broke saying:

Man, death will never not be heartbreaking

It is completely heartbreaking! I cannot imagine what she’s going through.

My heart is shattered. I send heartfelt condolences from the bottom of my heart to Chimamanda and the entire Adichie family.

That’s All.

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