Notes on Grief
27 pages • 54-minute read
Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieNotes on Grief
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death.
Grief as a Physical State
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s reflections on James Nwoye Adichie’s unexpected death suggest an attempt to better understand the intense physiological experience of grief. Using a vulnerable, raw tone, Adichie shares the intimate details of her grieving process to convey how profound sorrow can overcome the body and senses while simultaneously destabilizing the mourner’s perception of reality.
Adichie’s attention to her physical body and somatic symptoms throughout Notes on Grief immerses the reader in her corporeal experience of loss. At the start of the essay, Adichie declares grief “an affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body, of aches and lagging strength” (7). To support this claim, she incorporates exacting details and visceral descriptions of her body’s response to losing James. Her sides are “sore and achy,” her muscles are in pain, her “tongue unbearably bitter,” and she feels “a heavy, awful weight” on her chest and “a sensation of eternal dissolving” inside her body (7). This figurative language and metaphoric diction enact the physical sensations associated with Adichie’s loss, locating her despair in her organs, skin, and limbs. This attention to the body personifies grief—making it appear as a tangible mass, entity, or phenomenon overcoming Adichie and thus conveying how immobilizing and destabilizing the loss feels.
Adichie broadens her examinations of grief by detailing her psychological and emotional disorientation in the wake of James’s death. While grief weighs down her body, it also estranges her from space and time, truth and reality: “How quickly my life has become another life,” Adichie remarks in Chapter 9, “how pitiless this becoming is, and yet how slow I am to adapt” (19). Adichie’s inability to “adapt” suggests that James’s death has transported her to another version of reality where he does not exist and where she “will live with [her] hands outstretched for things that are no longer there” (42). Because a world without James is impossible to imagine, Adichie finds herself stumbling through a foreign emotional terrain. She cannot communicate, think, or express herself in ways typical to her. She cannot accept what is. Grief is therefore physical in more than a bodily sense: It also transforms bereaved people’s relationship to external physical reality.
The narrative form mirrors this meandering, fractured reality that Adichie experiences as a result of her loss: Her grief is disruptive and nonlinear, much like her essay’s structure. Grief, her reflections imply, is a powerful force capable of altering the human mind, body, and spirit.
Separation, Loss, and Mourning During the Pandemic
The geographical, cultural, and temporal context of James’s death intensifies Adichie’s grieving process. Throughout Notes on Grief, Adichie incorporates allusions to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown because these circumstances dictated her ability to process James’s passing. When she first learns that James has died suddenly of kidney failure, she asserts, “It was not supposed to happen like this, not like a malicious surprise, not during a pandemic that has shut down the world” (9). The pandemic has already distorted Adichie’s—as well as global society’s—sense of regularity and normalcy; for Adichie, losing James amid this already disorienting global crisis intensifies her denial. She cannot believe the injustice of it all—that a man as good and loving as James could be taken from her during an already “strange” and “scary” time.
In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic was an era defined by social alienation, which Adichie underscores to explore how physical separation from her family aggravated her loss. Adichie is moored in the United States while her siblings are back in Nigeria with her mother. “If only I could be there too,” she laments, “but I am stuck in America, my frustration like a blister, scouring for news of when the Nigerian airports will open” (20). Adichie keeps in touch with her family online, but Zoom offers only a simulacrum of nearness and comfort while also inhibiting her acceptance of James’s death. On the one hand, she finds herself forgetting James is dead because she is “not there.” By way of contrast, her siblings “are there, face to face with the desolation of a house without [their] father” (21). Adichie longs to be present with them because she longs for communal mourning, as well as a more tangible confirmation of James’s absence.
The pandemic context also heightens Adichie’s sense of powerlessness and uncertainty with respect to the future. COVID-related circumstances beyond her control render Adichie unable to experience James’s absence, to grieve his passing, and to plan for his burial. “The waiting, the not knowing” when she and her family will be able to bury and remember James together intensifies Adichie’s despair (56). Without a funeral service and burial, she and her family find it difficult to move toward healing. The unprecedented pandemic circumstances, Adichie implies, exacerbated the common experiences of death and grief because the lockdown literally and figuratively barred families like Adichie’s from creating a life after loss.
Fatherhood as Legacy-Making and Identity Inheritance
Notes on Grief can be read as Adichie’s eulogy for her late father, James Nwoye Adichie. Because Adichie was unable to be present in Nigeria after James’s death due to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, she uses her personal essay to commemorate her relationship with him and to memorialize him as a person. Adichie marries vulnerable, laudatory, bittersweet, and nostalgic tonalities to evoke her multifaceted connection with James and the rich legacy he left behind.
Adichie’s use of personal anecdotes and vivid memories brings her connection with James to life and immerses the reader in James’s memory. Over the course of the essay, Adichie renders descriptive scenes of James doing everything from eating eggs, to solving sudoku, to walking in the driveway, to caring for his granddaughter, to joking with his children, to working at the university. The scope of these memories—and their tonal range from the witty to the endearing—seeks to encompass who James was as a person. Adichie mourns him because he was her father but also because he was a man she deeply admired. By describing herself in relation to him—the time they spent simply talking and laughing—she illustrates how much he taught her about life, love, intimacy, and herself.
To underscore this, Adichie couples her anecdotal passages with reflective passages on James’s overarching influence, a formal choice that guides the reader’s understanding of James’s legacy. For example, after describing James’s response to a funny situation with a teacher at her school, Adichie pivots to a more contemplative tone: “My father taught me that learning is never-ending. He didn’t have the entitlement that many Igbo parents of his generation have, that claim to their children’s time and money and effort [...] [H]e was so respectful of our boundaries, and so grateful for the smallest things” (32). Adichie here suggests that James’s humility gave her space to grow into her own person. Conversely, she later remarks on overt similarities between herself and James, which suggest that Adichie understood herself in the context of her relationship with James: “In my later teenage years, I began to see him, to see how alike we were in our curiosity and our homebodyness, and to talk to him, and to adore him. How exclusively he paid attention, how present he was, how well he listened” (37). In this passage, Adichie’s use of repetition, parallel structure, and anaphora enacts James’s constancy—a trait that offered Adichie grounding and stability throughout her life.
Ultimately, James’s legacy fulfills a similar function. The latter chapters of the text lean toward a more resolved tone, which reflects Adichie’s work to accept that James is gone but that what he has left behind is everlasting.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence