"How Does A Heart Break Twice?"
Mrs Grace Adichie's died on the day that would have been her late husband's 89th birthday. She died 8 months after her husband, Prof. James Adichie, who passed on after a brief illness in June 2020. Chimamanda wrote; > "How Does A Heart Break Twice? The next morning, the doctor sent an update to say she was doing even better. But moments later, he took the sudden bewildering decision to transfer her to the Teaching Hospital, and she was hastily moved there. He claimed the Teaching Hospital had better facilities. “Do my children know I’m being transferred?” she is said to have asked. Two hours after she arrived at the Teaching Hospital, she died. It was March 1st, my father’s birthday. How does a heart break twice? As the days have passed my disbelief has grown. This perpetual astonishment of grief: Did it really happen? My mother is gone forever? How is it possible? We were planning for my father’s iyipu-akwa, to mark the end of the formal mourning period, and now I cannot believe that we are planning a funeral. Again. How does a heart break twice? 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. The questions. Why so soon? Why like this? Has the universe not given us our own fair share of pain for now? To have loving parents, an entire life propped up by them, and in months to have it all end, so abruptly, with such unbearable finality. O kwerom edi. So much laughter and teasing and jokes, the easy companionship, the stories told and retold, the time spent. Time. Times makes memories. And now that is what is brutally left. The shock. The sense of sinking, of surfaces giving way, of falling through forever. The world feels wrapped in gauze. Everything is hazy and unclear. This is how a heart breaks twice, this feeling of being utterly lost."
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