Grief as Leftover Love in Onyi Nwabineli’s ‘Someday Maybe’
A review of Onyi Nwabineli’s Someday Maybe and how grief is perhaps one of the most crushing yet profoundly moving expressions of love.
Anna-Maria Poku
Love commands a certain amount of tunnel vision. You say to yourself that you love this person, and you make an active choice to channel all the affection and care you are humanly capable of toward them. You wake up in the morning, and they are what your thoughts occupy, and all the love you have for them is contained between you. So what happens when they’re not there anymore? This great big sensational love, no longer controlled, searches and searches for a place to land and when it finds nothing, it bounces right back to us. This is when, frustrated by our confusion over what to do with it, it twists. Contorts. Turns itself into anger and regret. The very depths of despair. Until it eventually settles into one lonely, crippling thing; grief - “a messenger of deep contrition and unspeakable love.”
Onyi Nwabineli’s debut novel Someday, Maybe is a careful exploration of a grief borne from radically simple love. It follows Eve Ezenwa-Morrow, someone whose life has been destroyed after her great love and husband, Quentin, kills himself in a horrific way. Eve is the one who finds him, bloodied body and all, and what ensues is a slow and painful unravelling. The book starts out on a high; readers meet Eve just after Quentin has died, and she doesn’t know what to do with it all. The feelings. They are overwhelming and scary, and what do you mean Quentin has died? This is “a time of dug-in heels, the refusal to process [a] new reality. A preamble to real Denial, which brings its falsehoods and proclamations of It’s not true and Not you, girl. Someone else.” Eve spends the first two days after Quentin dies “pacing the house, twitching the curtains” before she eventually decides to do nothing. In the most literal meaning of nothing, she lies in bed, her heart and mind shut out to the rest of the world for weeks, and she does nothing. Of course, as is the case with people who are loved, she is met with much resistance from her family and friends. They want to dig her out of the hole of grief, wrap her in love and joy, and hope it sticks. They fail. She goes from doing nothing to disappearing from her family and friends to be able to do nothing. The relationships crumble, and alongside, her career fades into oblivion. As all this happens, readers are transported to the start of the love story years before. It is told through a series of anecdotes and flashbacks, and by the end, readers come to understand why Eve is so broken.
For Eve, their love wasn’t ever complicated. They met at university in a crowded aisle in a supermarket, and she had liked him almost immediately; “[she] liked the way he looked at [her] face, like it was the only thing he could see” – they “fell in love without preamble”. This is one of the stories where the love itself came easily. They slipped and fell into it and simply decided never to stand up. After twelve weeks, they were engaged. Eve said yes “without blinking”, and the night Quentin proposed, they “drank lukewarm wine straight out of the bottle and had giggly, fumbling sex in a deserted train station on the outskirts of London”. A perfect whirlwind. They do all the things you do when you’re young and in love; they fight and kiss and make up, and they spend most of their time laughing, a thing that never stops. They are alive. That is why the first time Eve laughs after his death, there is a crisis. “Nobody tells you how the first time you laugh after a major bereavement will destroy you – just another thing on the itemized list of things grief steals from you”. Eve laughs, and she freezes. Her blood runs a little colder, and it dawns on her that this simple act, performed so routinely in the Before, feels like a betrayal. She stops immediately, “because why the hell should you be laughing when your husband is dead. Laughter should no longer exist”.
Even though the relationship is not without its challenges, the writing is so personal and impactful that Eve's love for Quentin bleeds into everything. Perhaps telling stories through grief-tinted glasses distorts everything because even when Eve tells a story of an argument or a fight or a moment when she or Quentin had been cruel, it is difficult to imagine anything but a comforting, sweet, everyday love that always was within reach. Quentin was Eve’s whole life, and his death meant she was now overflowing with an intense sort of love and no idea what to do with it. Where to put it. Who to give it to. Eve’s “pain is not dignified”. For her, this grief is “not neat”; it is an “ugly, visceral thing, ripping holes through you and bursting forth when it sees fit, disfiguring you internally and altering your existence so much that when you are lucid enough to look at yourself, at your life, you are astounded (and often disgusted) by what you find staring back at you”. She withdraws into herself and allows the hopelessness to destroy her. Much to the displeasure and discomfort of others, “there is nothing eloquent about [her] grief”.
There isn’t one particular point where Eve is at her lowest. The entire book feels like a lesson on a person’s lowest points. About halfway through the book, Eve finds out that on top of everything else going on with her family and friends and non-existent job and the grief that has become like an unwanted friend, she is pregnant. Grief had penetrated her life and made her a shell of herself, and now she would have a whole other person to think about. She could barely think about herself. It reminded us that we have so little control over what life decides happens to us. By the end of the book, Eve begins her journey to healing. It is a long, dark road, but her baby girl, Quinn, seems to be the light at the end of the tunnel. Quinn is a tangible result of the love she shared with Quentin, and it feels like having her makes Eve lean into the grief, not run away from it. She comes to accept that all this grief is the leftover love, finding a way to cling to life. It is bittersweet.
When we talk about expressions of love, it’s easy to list many; romantic acts, physical affection, caring words, unshakable belief in a person—it’s endless. But so rarely is grief remembered. And that is understandable. Grief is a mean thing. One of the unkinder manifestations of love, driven by pain and sadness. But if it really is love with nowhere to go, then is it not one of the greatest forms? An enduring kind that exists long after the object of affection has departed? It is a famously wicked and crushing state of being, but it is impossible to deny its sacredness; its power.
Work Cited:
Someday, Maybe by Onyi Nwabineli
