World renowned Novelist, Ms Adichie, better known as Chimamada Ngozi-Adichie, has finally broken her silence about her father’s death.
Speaking for the first time since the sad news of the death of her father, the beautiful multiple award winning novelist, said her heart is broken. She said:
“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 said, kicking off her lovely tribute to her late father which she shared with her fans, on social media.
Ms Adichie taking to her Instagram on Saturday 4th July 2020, posted a short video which she said was prepared by her brother Chuks Adichie. The video recording which lasted for just 60-seconds, showed some memorable moments she shared with her father, from his youthful days to their last meeting in Nigeria, we suspect.
This was the full tribute by Ms Adichie to her late father. She had this to say:
June 9th, we spoke briefly, my brother Okey with him. “ka chi fo”. He said. His last words to me June 10th he was gone.
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, pounding things. I have shut down parts of myself.
“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 crashed 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 unbreakable pain. All the tomorrows without him, his wisdom, his grace.
We talked almost daily. I sent him my travel itineraries.
He would text me just before I got on a stage. Ome ife Ukwu! Nothing else mattered to me as much as the pride in his eyes.
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.
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. He studied Mathematics at Ibadan and got his PhD in Statistics from Berkeley, returning to Nigeria shortly before the War. A titled Igbo man-Odelu Ora Abba Deeply committed to our hometown.
A Roman Catholic with a humane and luminous faith. A man and a gentleman. For those who knew him, these words recur: honest, calm, kind, strong, quiet, integrity,” Ms Adichie added.