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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Notes on Grief | The New Yorker

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From England, my brother set up the Zoom calls every Sunday, our boisterous lockdown ritual, two siblings joining from Lagos, three from the United States, and my parents, sometimes echoing and crackly, from Abba, our ancestral home town, in southeastern Nigeria. On June 7th, there was my father, only his forehead on the screen, as usual, because he never quite knew how to hold his phone during video calls. “Move your phone a bit, Daddy,” one of us would say. My father was teasing my brother Okey about a new nickname, then he was saying that he hadn’t had dinner because they’d had a late lunch, then he was talking about the billionaire from the next town who wanted to claim our village’s ancestral land. He felt a bit unwell, had been sleeping poorly, but we were not to worry. On June 8th, Okey went to Abba to see him and said that he looked tired. On June 9th, I kept our chat brief so that he could rest. He laughed quietly when I did my usual playful imitation of a relative. “Ka chi fo

Save this story Save this story In memoriam: James Nwoye Adichie, 1932-2020 1. From England, my brother set up the Zoom calls every Sunday, our boisterous lockdown ritual, two siblings joining from Lagos, three from the United States, and my parents, sometimes echoing and crackly, from Abba, our ancestral home town, in southeastern Nigeria. On June 7th, there was my father, only his forehead on the screen, as usual, because he never quite knew how to hold his phone during video calls. “Move your phone a bit, Daddy,” one of us would say. My father was teasing my brother Okey about a new nicknam

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