Chimamanda Adichie Mourns Deceased Father

Chimamanda Adichie Mourns Deceased Father

by AnaedoOnline
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Celebrated author, Chimamanda Adichie, says she is stuck in the United States awaiting Nigeria’s airspace to reopen for international flights.

Adichie stated this on Saturday in a Tribute to her late father who died on June 10.

The author said planning a burial “in these COVID-scarred times” could be “bewildering” due to the subsisting closure of Nigerian airports to international flights.

Narrating her experience, the author wrote on her verified Facebook page, “Because I loved my father so much, so fiercely, so tenderly, I always at the back of my mind feared this day. But he was in good health. I thought we had time. I thought it wasn’t yet time. I have come undone. I have screamed, shouted, rolled on the floor, pounded things. I have shut down parts of myself.

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“The children and I adore him,” my mother wrote in a tribute when he was made professor emeritus. We are broken. We are bereft, holding on to one another, planning a burial in these COVID-scarred times. I am stuck in the US, waiting. The Nigerian airports are closed. Everything is confusing, uncertain, bewildering.

“Sleep is the only respite. On waking, the enormity, the finality, strikes – I will never see my father again. Never again. I crash and go under. The urge to run and run, to hide from this. The shallow surface of my mind feels safest because to go deeper is to face unbearable pain. All the tomorrows without him, his wisdom, his grace.”

Adichie said she talked almost daily with her late father and often sent him her travel itineraries, adding that his words before any of her stage appearances lifted her soul.

In a tone that conveyed grief, the author further wrote, “I saw him last on March 5th in Abba. I had planned to be back in May. We planned to record his stories of my great grandmother.

Biography Of Chimamanda Adichie, Award Winning Author

“Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn that your side muscles will ache painfully from days of crying. You learn how glib condolences can feel.”

“My father was Nigeria’s first professor of Statistics who studied Mathematics at Ibadan and got his PhD in Statistics from Berkeley, returning to Nigeria shortly before the Biafran War…I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe that I am writing about my father in the past tense. My heart is broken,” she added.

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