Books: An unexpected family tragedy during the pandemic.

“I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense,” writes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in “Notes on Grief.”

When her book begins, Adichie had just spoken with her father the day before over FaceTime. She’d been joking with him then, asking him to put his face, rather than his ear, to the phone screen. A day later, she sees his face in full as her brother holds the phone up to allow her to see the man they’ve lost.

Adichie’s father died in June, a few months into the coronavirus pandemic. In this way, her story of loss is achingly of its time. The virus has kept so many from all those things that can lead to healing — in lockdown, there’s no handholding, no inperson visits, farewells or funerals, no hopping on a plane to comfort someone in their last moments or hug friends and relatives who have experienced loss.

The realities of quarantine have made any sort of true connection nearly impossible, something exacerbated not just by restrictions but also by space and time. Adichie struggles not only with the shock of her unexpected loss but also with the impossibility of distance and by extension, access.

For Igbo people of western Africa, Adichie explains, at least those of her father’s generation, “to be deprived of

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf; 80 pages; $16)

a proper funeral is an almost existential fear,” and so she and her family must figure out how to provide him with one, the formidable restrictions of the time notwithstanding. Though she also realizes that each step toward this official recognition of his passing will force her to accept that it has happened.

I really appreciated Adichie’s discomfort with the language of grief. I, too, bristled at assertions that my own mother, who died of breast cancer at 60, “was in a better place,” a wellmeaning phrase, says Adichie, that “is startling in its presumptuousness.” You learn, she continues, “just how much grief is about language” and the failure of it.

Books often come to you just when you need them, and it is unimaginable to think just how many people have, like the author, lost someone in this singularly strange period of our history. Adichie’s father didn’t die from COVID19, but that doesn’t make the aftermath of that loss any less relevant.

I think it is impossible to read a book about grief — Adichie’s or another — and not overlay your own feelings and experiences on it. When she writes of the revelation that laughter is such a big part of grief, for example, I am reminded of my late mother’s often irritating tendency to make light of everything as a survival tactic: Just before she died, when we met with her and a social worker at the hospital, she replied when asked if there was anything she wanted to tell me and my sister: “Well,

I guess this a good time to let you know you were adopted.” (We were not.)

A book on grief is not the kind of book you want to have to give to anyone. But here we are.

Manny Jefferson Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote “Notes on Grief ” after her father died. Though he didn’t die of COVID19, it was during the pandemic, with the pain of its distances and isolation.

“Notes on Grief”