3.
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. Why are my sides so sore and achy? It’s from crying, I’m told. I did not know that we cry with our muscles. The pain is not surprising, but its physicality is, my tongue unbearably bitter, as though I ate a loathed meal and forgot to clean my teeth, on my chest a heavy, awful weight, and inside my body a sensation of eternal dissolving. My heart—my actual physical heart, nothing figurative here—is running away from me, has become its own separate thing, beating too fast, its rhythms at odds with mine. This is an affliction not merely of the spirit but of the body. Flesh, muscles, organs are all compromised. No physical position is comfortable. For weeks, my stomach is in turmoil, tense and tight with foreboding, the ever-present certainty that somebody else will die, that more will be lost. One morning, Okey calls me a little earlier than usual, and I think, Just tell me, tell me immediately, who has died now. Is it Mummy?
4.
In my American home, I like to have National Public Radio on as background noise, and whenever my father was staying he would turn it off if nobody was there listening to it.
“I just thought about how Daddy was always turning off the radio and I was always turning it back on. He probably thought it was wasteful in some way,” I tell Okey.
“Like he always wanted to turn off the generator too early in Abba. I’d so happily let him now if he’ll just come back,” Okey says, and we laugh.
“And I will start to wake up early, and I’ll start to eat garri, and I’ll go to Mass every Sunday,” I say, and we laugh.
I retell the story of my parents visiting me in my graduate-student apartment at Yale, where I say, “Daddy, will you have some pomegranate juice? And he says, ‘No, thank you, whatever that is.’ ”
Pomegranate juice became a standing joke. All those standing jokes we had, frequently told and retold, my father’s expression this minute utterly deadpan and, in the next, wide open with delighted laughter. Another revelation: how much laughter is a part of grief. Laughter is tightly braided into our family argot, and now we laugh, remembering my father, but somewhere in the background of the laughter there is a haze of disbelief. The laughter trails off. The laughter becomes tears and becomes sadness and becomes rage. I am unprepared for my wretched, roaring rage. In the face of this inferno that is sorrow, I am callow and unformed. But how is it that in the morning he was joking and talking, and at night he was gone forever? It was so fast, too fast. It was not supposed to happen like this, not like a malicious surprise, not during a pandemic that has shut down the world. Throughout the lockdown, my father and I talked about how strange it all was, how scary, and he told me often not to worry about my doctor husband. “You actually drink warm water, Daddy?” I asked one day, surprised, after he said with sheepish humor that he’d read somewhere that drinking warm water might prevent the coronavirus infection. He laughed at himself and told me that warm water was harmless, after all, not like the nonsense that went around during the Ebola scare, when people were bathing in saline before dawn. To my “How are you, Daddy?,” he would always respond, “Enwerom nsogbu chacha.” (“I have no problems at all. I’m perfectly fine.”) And he really was, until he wasn’t.