Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Why does it have to be pain that brings out the most exquisite art from us? Chimamanda's Notes on Grief are drenched in her pain on losing her father. If you follow her on social media, you might know that less than a year after her father's death, she has also lost her mother. It is clear that these notes were written while her mother was still alive. It is eerie to be reading how heartbroken she is/was, how afraid she was that she was going to lose someone else when she writes "... Okey calls me a little earlier than usual and I think, Just tell me, tell me immediately, who has died now. Is it Mummy?", while you know she is about to lose her mother too, and she doesn't yet know it. It makes you as a reader feel almost culpable in the immense pain she is about to be drowned in all over again. In her post on losing her mother she wrote, "How does a heart break twice? ...Times make memories. And now that is what is brutally left. The shock. The sense of sinking, of surfaces giving way, of falling through forever. The world feels wrapped in gauze. Everything is hazy and unclear.This is how a heart breaks twice, this feeling of being utterly lost."
Chimamanda's words and her sentences are crisp, even more crisp than usual. She gives words to the shapeless chaos of grief with ruthless economy, and yet with such cutting clarity that she inevitably pulls you in to mourn with her. I do not know what she will write after the recent death of her second parent, and I feel guilty for even thinking about it. But it is true, there is a beauty, a depth in art that can only come from a place of pain. The only downside to this slim publication is its disproportionately high price.