Ciara

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“It has happened, so just celebrate his life,’ an old friend wrote, and it incensed me. How facile to preach about the permanence of death, when it is, in fact, the very permanence of death that is the source of anguish. I wince now at the words I said in the past to grieving friends. ‘Find peace in your memories,’ I used to say. To have love snatched from you, especially unexpectedly, and then to be told to turn to memories. Rather than succour, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, ‘This is what you will never again have.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“But I cannot always run, and each time I am forced to squarely confront my grief – when I read the death certificate, when I draft a death announcement – I feel a shimmering panic. In such moments, I notice a curious physical reaction: my body begins to shake, fingers tap uncontrollably, one leg bobbing. I am unable to quiet myself until I look away. How do people walk around functioning in the world after losing a beloved father?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“One night, in a vivid dream, my father comes back... I am ecstatic, but worried it might be a dream, and so, in the dream, I slap my arm to make sure it is not a dream, and still my father is sitting there talking quietly. I wake up with a pain so confounding that it fills up my lungs.

How can your unconscious turn on you with such cruelty?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie