As the title indicates, Adichie’s Notes on Grief is a bereavement memoir that uses a confessional and vulnerable tone to explore the impact of loss, yet the opening pages introduce a tension in this respect. Adichie asserts that “grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language” (6). Here, she implies that unexpected loss and the subsequent weight of grief render language useless. Herself a world-renowned writer, Adichie experiences this failure of language after James dies, which suggests that her attempts to capture grief on the page are futile from the start. She cannot emotionally or intellectually reconcile with this reality and thus struggles to describe what she is experiencing. What was real one day (James’s health, well-being, and animacy) is not real the next (James is no longer alive or accessible to Adichie). 

Adichie’s task thus becomes capturing this sense of disorientation as much as capturing her grief itself. In Chapter 4, for instance, Adichie incorporates rhetorical questions to enact her disbelief and disorientation: “But how can it be that in the morning he is joking and talking, and at night he is gone forever?” (9). Adichie responds in a similar manner when she begins to receive bereavement messages from her friends and family. In one message, a loved one alludes to “the loss of [her] father” (10), and Adichie reflexively wonders, “Whose father?” Questions such as these create a bewildered tone that echoes Adichie’s state of mind in the wake of James’s passing. Her grief is so encompassing that the parameters of what she once knew have entirely changed, thrusting her into an unrecognizable state of existence that she refers to as “this churning.” Grief, she thus finds, is a powerful transformative force that challenges human certainty and hubris.

Her use of metaphors, similes, sensory detail, and vivid description similarly works to linguistically make sense of the senseless. For example, she uses phrases such as an “avalanche of emotions” (18), “bitter and unbearable” (18), “glowing coals that soon burst aflame in pain” (22), or “substantial, oppressive, a thing opaque” (24). In moments such as these, Adichie is mining her linguistic storehouse to capture the breadth of her sorrow. “I cannot,” she explains in Chapter 11, “lay open my suffering until I have discerned its contours” (25). Writing becomes a tool, albeit an imperfect one, for discerning the shape and meaning of James’s passing. 

In undertaking this project, Adichie focuses particularly on Grief as a Physical State, describing how her sorrow manifested somatically: “My breathing is difficult. Is this what shock means, that the air turns to glue?” (5). The metaphor suggests that her despair is thick and viscous as well as stifling. In her new physical state of mourning, Adichie finds that her environmental surroundings change, further altering her sense of her own body: “Flesh, muscles, organs are all compromised. No physical position is comfortable. For weeks, my stomach is in turmoil” (7). Diction like “compromised” and “turmoil” conjures notions of a malfunctioning machine or a turbulent storm. Adichie cannot intellectually reconcile with James’s passing, but she also struggles to orient physically and physiologically to this new world where James no longer exists. 

Adichie’s fragmented structure enacts her theme of Separation, Loss, and Mourning During the Pandemic. Because James dies during the COVID-19 global pandemic and lockdowns, Adichie’s shocking loss redoubles; the pandemic has already distorted what she understood as the reliable governing principles of society and daily life prior to James’s destabilizing death. After James’s death, Adichie thus fears that she “will be defeated [...] by a drowning nihilism, a cycle of thinking there's no point, what’s the point, there’s no point to anything” (13). This despairing moment captures the mood of the pandemic lockdown—an era defined by social alienation and increased depression and death by suicide rates. For Adichie, the lack of human connection and familial proximity aggravates her despair. 

To rise above this, Adichie becomes what she calls “a maker of boxes” (13)—she tries to impose order on her suffering to maintain internal stability. In particular, the allusion to “boxes” recalls the box-shaped physical appearance of many of the essay’s fragments on the page. Mimicking chapter divisions, these structural divisions impose a neat numerical scaffolding onto Adichie’s otherwise senseless experience of loss. These neat, organizing geometries become Adichie’s means of navigating this foreign era of her life. 

At the same time, the prose fragments mirror Adichie’s fractured emotional, physical, and psychological experiences after losing James. The disjointed narrative structure formally enacts the intersection of Adichie’s physical separation from her family and the internal rupture she’s experienced because of loss. Because she is living in the United States and James died in Nigeria, Adichie cannot travel overseas to mourn with her family. Every aspect of her mourning is mediated by screens, and thus by time and distance. Adichie can reminisce with her siblings, but she cannot physically touch them. Adichie can study an image of James’s watch, but she cannot hold this memento in her hand. Her prose fragments are similarly separated from each other by white space on the page. Further, Adichie cannot write the memoir of her loss in a fluid, linear manner because she feels that “in [her] soul there is a permanent scattering” (12). The gaps that mark her account suggest the divisions and absences that now characterize her inner world.

Despite Adichie’s heavy emphasis on sorrow, she also incorporates positive, laudatory memories of James into her account to explore Fatherhood as Legacy-Making and Identity Inheritance. Throughout Notes on Grief, Adichie alternates between elegiac and eulogistic passages. The former represent her emotional reaction to losing James, while the latter express her adoration for her late father and desire to commemorate who he was, how he influenced her, and the legacy he left behind. For example, in one passage from Chapter 10, Adichie describes James via a string of adjectives: “‘honest,’ ‘calm,’ ‘kind,’ ‘strong,’ ‘quiet,’ ‘simple,’ ‘peaceful’ ‘integrity’” (23). Although decontextualized, these descriptors distill James’s personality and capture the essence of who he was to those who loved him. In other passages, Adichie offers personal anecdotes and memories of James to illustrate more explicitly his intellectual, emotional, and spiritual legacy. As her mother was quoted as saying of James in Biography of Nigeria’s Foremost Professor of Statistics, Prof. James Nwoye Adichie, “[T]he children and I adore him” (28). This simple remark on James’s character provides the ultimate comfort to Adichie. James was at his best lovable and constant, a compass by which Adichie understood herself and her place in her family. 

The evolution of Adichie’s authorial tone across the essay enacts her grief journey. In the first half of the essay, Adichie employs an incensed, stubborn tone to evoke her reluctance to accept that James—a decent and loving man—is gone. Even in writing Notes on Grief, Adichie suggests, it still feels inconceivable and unjust that a person as wonderful as James could be gone, and so rapidly. However, by the essay’s end, Adichie finds herself more capable of coping with this cognitive dissonance: “No, I am not imagining it. Yes, my father truly was lovely. I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense” (67). In these concluding lines of the essay, Adichie employs a more certain, resolved tone. She is accepting what cannot be and yet what is. She is acknowledging James’s simultaneous goodness and absence. By ending the essay in this manner, Adichie implies that while death remains unfathomable, it has the power to lead the human heart through unexpected transformations.