“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.”

Adichie’s use of figurative language, anaphora, and the second person develops the theme of Grief as a Physical State. The repetition of “you learn” captures the relentless, oppressive nature of grief, which constantly reminds the individual that they have no choice but to orient to a world without their lost loved one. The use of diction like “ungentle,” “glib,” and “failure” conveys the devastating nature of loss, while the use of the second person enacts the self-estranging impact of grief.

“Somehow, these well-wishers have become complicit. I feel myself breathing air that is bittersweet with my own conspiracies. Needle-pricks of resentment flood through me at the thought of people who are more than eighty-eight years old, older than my father and alive and well.”

Adichie illustrates her theme of grief as a physical state by offering detailed descriptions of her bodily experience. She describes how difficult it was to breathe and how she felt as if needles were flooding her body. These images and metaphors capture how Adichie felt the emotional pain of James’s death as physical anguish.

“I wish I had not missed those few days of calling them, because I would have seen that he wasn’t just mildly unwell—or I would have sensed it if it wasn’t obvious—and I would have insisted on hospital much sooner. I wish, I wish. The guilt gnaws at my soul.”

In this passage, Adichie explores the regret associated with grief. Her belief that she might have been able to save James conveys her struggle to reconcile with his death, though her parenthetical insistence that she “would have sensed [his illness] if it wasn’t obvious” hints that she is fooling herself. The repetition of “I wish” further conveys this idea; its weary, resigned tone suggests that she recognizes the futility of such fantasies, but this does not mitigate her sense of “guilt.”

“Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, ‘This is what you will never again have.’ Sometimes they bring laughter, but laughter like glowing coals that soon burst aflame in pain.”

Adichie uses a confessional, honest tone to admit that when loved ones told her to find comfort in her memories, she could not. Even when she could laugh, her laughter soon “burst aflame in pain,” figurative language that conjures heat and discomfort. The personification of her memories as “eloquent” deepens the sense of grief as an active force while contrasting with Adichie’s prior remarks bout how inadequate language is in the face of loss; only pain “speaks” fluently.

“I will never see my father again. Never again. 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.”

Adichie’s use of descriptive, metaphoric language and repetition captures the intensity and inescapability of her grief, again rendered in bodily imagery. She repeats “never” and “sink,” words that underscore the finality of James’s death and the hold her sorrow has over her. In particular, the implicit contrast between Adichie waking “up” and “sinking [down]” creates an atmosphere of futility—a sense that forward movement is impossible—while communicating how grief has restructured her daily life.

“Scenes from my father’s last visit: he is walking up and down the driveway, his daily morning exercise, no longer as briskly as before […] He is getting cookies in the pantry, blithely unaware of his trail of crumbs. He is standing right in front of the television […] watching Rachel Maddow, whom he calls ‘bright,’ while shaking his head at the imbroglio America has become.”

Adichie presents these memories of James in list form to impose order onto her recollections. She distills his characterization into small imagistic fragments, compelling the reader to sit with her as she remembers James but also hinting that no amount of description could convey who he was in his totality. The passage has a bittersweet tone that communicates Adichie’s simultaneous longing to reunite with James and to preserve her memories of him.

“I called him DOS, Defender of Spouse, for how quick he always was to support my mother. One afternoon, when she was a deputy registrar […] he came home gleeful, chortling while loosening his tie, swollen with pride about her speech at the university senate meeting. ‘Mummy was fantastic,’ he told my brothers and me.”

Adichie’s personal anecdotes concerning James explore the theme of Fatherhood as Legacy-Making and Identity Inheritance. In this memory, Adichie recalls James being sweet toward and proud of her mother. Although fleeting, the moment captures James’s humility and delight in his loved ones’ accomplishments.

“I keep looking at the photo of the watch, day after day, as if in pilgrimage. I remember it resting on my father’s wrist, and my father often looking at it. This is an archetypal image of my father […] for him, being on time was almost a moral imperative.”

In the wake of James’s death, Adichie takes comfort in studying old photographs. The image of the watch allows Adichie to remember an essential part of James, offering her a portal into the past and a throughway to memorializing James. Her comparison of her actions to a “pilgrimage”—a religious journey—conveys both her need for the rituals of mourning and her reverence for her father. The watch also figuratively conveys the brevity and rapidity of time, which Adichie realizes after James dies.

“‘You should just go and marry your father!’ my cousin Oge said often, with mock exasperation, perhaps because one of my favorite things in the world was just to hang out with my father. To sit with him and talk about the past was like reclaiming gorgeous treasure that was always mine anyway.”

Adichie’s cousin’s joking remark about Adichie and James captures the indelible nature of their father-daughter bond and reiterates the theme of fatherhood as legacy-making and identity inheritance. While Adichie cannot bring James back, she can treasure her memories of their time together and the legacy he left behind, including the “gorgeous treasure” of the history he shared with her.

“She pulls tissues out of a box and hands them to me. Her emotional alertness moves, surprises, impresses me. A few days later she asks, ‘When will Grandpa wake up again?’ I weep and weep, and wish that her understanding of the world were real. That grief was not about the utter impossibility of return.”

Adichie reflects on her daughter’s response to James’s death, which adds nuance to her explorations of grief. Adichie’s daughter is just a child and thus does not fully comprehend the permanence of death. Her question makes Adichie cry because Adichie longs for the same thing but recognizes its impossibility—a tension she identifies as the crux of grief itself.

“We have been so fortunate, to be happy, to be enclosed in a safe, intact family unit, and so we do not know what to do with this rupture. Until now, grief belonged to other people.”

Adichie’s forthcoming tone in this passage conveys her unfamiliarity with loss and death prior to losing James. Adichie is humanizing herself in this moment, admitting that she never fully understood what it meant to lose a loved one until 2020.

“Nigerian airports will no longer open in August. The news is haphazard—even basic information is uncoordinated—and it is all the more confounding because in neighboring countries the airports are open. Nigeria, as usual, making everything more difficult than it should be.”

Adichie’s references to airport closures and Nigerian policies underscore the theme of Separation, Loss, and Mourning During the Pandemic. Losing James would have been difficult no matter when it happened, but the COVID-19 pandemic intensified Adichie’s sorrow because she could not be with her family.

“I am ecstatic, but worried it might be a dream, and so, in the dream, I slap my arm to make sure it is not a dream, and still my father is sitting there talking quietly. I wake up with a pain so confounding that it fills up my lungs. How can your unconscious turn on you with such cruelty?”

Adichie’s dream of James’s reappearance intensifies her grief. She again describes the experience of remembering that James is gone via her physical sensations: She feels as if her lungs are “filling up,” an image that conjures notions of suffocation and breathlessness. The passage reiterates the theme of grief as a physical state.