Notes on Grief

1

From England, my brother set up the Zoom calls every Sunday, our boisterous lockdown ritual: two siblings joining from Lagos, three of us from the United States, and my parents, sometimes echoing and crackly, from Abba, our ancestral hometown in southeastern Nigeria. 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. My father was teasing my brother Okey about a new nickname, then he was saying he hadn’t had dinner because they’d had a late lunch, then he was talking about the billionaire from the next town who wanted to claim our village’s ancestral land. He felt a bit unwell, had been sleeping poorly, but we were not to worry. On 8 June, Okey went to Abba to see him and said he looked tired. On 9 June, I kept our chat brief, so that he could rest. He laughed quietly when I did my playful imitation of a relative. “Ka chi fo,” he said. Good night. His last words to me. On 10 June, he was gone. My brother Chuks called to tell me, and I came undone.

2

My four-year-old daughter says I scared her. She gets down on her knees to demonstrate, her small clenched fist rising and falling, and her mimicry makes me see myself as I was: utterly unraveling, screaming and pounding the floor. The news is like a vicious uprooting. I am yanked away from the world I have known since childhood. And I am resistant: my father read the newspaper that afternoon, he joked with Okey about shaving before his appointment with the kidney specialist in Onitsha the next day, he discussed his hospital test results on the phone with my sister Ijeoma, who is a doctor—and so how can this be? But there he is. Okey is holding a phone over my father’s face, and my father looks asleep, his face relaxed, beautiful in repose. Our Zoom call is beyond surreal, all of us weeping and weeping and weeping, in different parts of the world, looking in disbelief at the father we adore now lying still on a hospital bed. It happened a few minutes before midnight, Nigerian time, with Okey by his side and Chuks on speakerphone. I stare and stare at my father. My breathing is difficult. Is this what shock means, that the air turns to glue? My sister Uche says she has just told a family friend by text, and I almost scream, “No! Don’t tell anyone, because if we tell people, then it becomes true.” My husband is saying, “Breathe slowly, drink some of this water.” My housecoat, my lockdown staple, is lying crumpled on the floor. Later my brother Kene will jokingly say, “You better not get any shocking news in public, since you react to shock by tearing off your clothes.”