Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's mother passed away on March 1. (Source: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | Facebook) Acclaimed writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave words to mourning as she wrote about the sudden passing of her mother on March 1, 2021. In the past, the acclaimed Nigerian writer wrote on the devastating grief post her father’s death. “How Does A Heart Break Twice?” she writes, as she took to social media to share news of her mother’s demise.
“To still be immersed in grief, barely breathing again, and then to be plunged callously back into a sorrow you cannot even articulate. How can my mother be gone forever, and so soon after my father?”. She then went on to remember her mother, Grace Ifeoma as “warm, loving, funny, kind, quick-witted, beautiful mother. Unconditional supporter and cheerleader of her children, fun and funny, source of delicious sarcasm, style icon, so sharply observant she never missed a thing.” Her list of achievements went long.
“She made history as the first female registrar of the University of Nigeria. She was a permanent board member of the Anambra State Basic Education Board ASUBEB.”
She keeps returning to the refrain: “How does a heart break twice?” She writes further, “You discover emotions you cannot name. There is an emotion more hollow than sorrow. There is an acceptance drenched in disbelief. Language fails. Clichés come startlingly alive: the heart is truly heavy, it is no mere metaphor. The mornings so dark you cannot get up from bed, the erratic pulse, the anger, the surprise, the tiny moments of forgetting, the regrets, the doomed attempts at escape. But the pain is waiting. The pain is inescapable. The desperate longing to turn back time, just to see her again, hear her laugh one more time, hug and kiss her. Even if just to say goodbye, even if just to have the chance to say goodbye, to say thank you for everything you did for me and everything you were to me, to say I love you, again.”
Her father James Nwoye Adichie passed away last summer.
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