“Do my children know that I am being transferred?” she asked, confused. She returned from work in Awka, the Anambra State capital where she sat on the state education board, and came here for Stations of the Cross on her last Friday, and on Sunday again for Mass, and that evening she was unwell, and she was driven back to Awka, to a private hospital, and she spoke to her children, and the following day, her recovery took a dip and she was moved to a teaching hospital. This church was the third-to-last place that Grace Adichie stepped foot in.
Then in March, on their father’s birthday, a day the family already anticipated in pain, their mother died, too. After he died, every Sunday, for months, their family got on Zoom to see each other, talk to each other, console each other. They’d spoken the night before he died, and his last words to her were “Ka chi fo.” Good night. His death changed everything and struck in her an unfillable gash. His stories of surviving the Biafran War inspired her monumental second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, the book that taught many young Nigerians about the tragedy and made her a household name. Last June, their father, Professor James Nwoye Adichie, died, from complications from kidney failure, and Chimamanda, in the public stare, threw herself into a full rite of grief, writing about places in her that she had never written about, her hurt, her rage at the world. It was May, and mourning was all she had written about in the previous twelve months. She walked with her elder sisters, Uche and Ijeoma, the trio in white lace and peach silk satin headbands, bearing bouquets of flowers, regal in mourning. If you never knew her face, you would not now, not because of her white nose mask but because here she moves not as the most famous Nigerian alive but as a daughter of the soil, someone you saw every day. Behind the white coffin, before relatives in uniform ankara and a long, long line of priests in violet chasubles, walked the family’s youngest daughter, Ngozi, the woman the world came to know as Chimamanda. The compound was packed with vehicles, in rows allowing for easy exit, because down the road, a seven-minute walk from the church, is the Adichie family house, where, after Mass, all must proceed.
On the wide porch sat people on pews, listening to the Mass in progress, the burial service of Grace Ifeoma Adichie, the matriarch of the town’s most respected family. Paul’s, is a big, angular building, pale yellow on the inside and unpainted on the outside.
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