“True compassion takes courage,” writes the prize-winning author Yiyun Li in this excerpt from her astonishing new memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow. Here, she navigates the profound pain of losing her two sons, Vincent and James, to suicide; the inadequacies of language; and the relentless task of continuing to live with unanswerable questions.
Children die, and parents live, but it doesn’t mean they go on living like Humpty Dumpty or pathogens of infectious diseases. When Vincent died, some friendly people faded out of my life. “I don’t want to intrude on her” and “I don’t want to make her sadder by talking about Vincent with her” were, I was made to understand, how some people felt. As though any one of them could outshoot life to injure me; as though anything they said would make me sadder!
A father with whom I communicate once a year—he lost a fifteen-year-old son to suicide—told me that when, after a few years, some neighbors finally approached him and said something kind about his son, he found it meaningful. A neighbor of mine, after James died, saw me in our driveway, scooped up her little dog, and waved and scurried away. No doubt things felt difficult for that father’s neighbors in Boston, or for our neighbors. True compassion takes courage.
A few days after James died, a friend of my husband’s came from California to spend some time with us. A lawyer by profession and a dispassionate man by nature, he did not feel it necessary to sugarcoat life for us. (He also came to visit right after Vincent died, and was the first person to have raised the question whether James might consider suicide.)
When I told him that I sensed that our situation had spooked some people, he nodded. “Yes, I can tell you that there is general unease among people who know you,” he said, referring to our friends and acquaintances in California.
People sometimes feel awkward or apprehensive around grieving parents, particularly if the children died from suicide, perhaps infinitely so when a family lost two children to suicide. I wish people had the honesty and courage to say, I’m not capable of handling this difficult situation, or, I’m uncomfortable because I don’t know what to say, rather than telling themselves that they are absenting themselves out of respect for the bereaved parents.
Inevitably there were people who wrote that they understood our pain because, though they hadn’t lost a child or they didn’t have children, they had lost a parent or a beloved pet. Kindhearted and well-intentioned people: don’t make those comparisons. These messages are not compassionate; they are clueless, even egotistic.
The notes and letters coming in after both my children’s deaths: the most comforting ones were those that expressed shock, confusion, helplessness, and the pain of not having the right words. All those feelings were close to ours. I cannot think of a more consoling connection I felt after both boys’ deaths, than when I read those notes. Words may fall short, but they cast long shadows that sometimes can reach the unspeakable.
Inevitably there were people who wrote that they understood our pain because, though they hadn’t lost a child or they didn’t have children, they had lost a parent or a beloved pet. Kindhearted and well-intentioned people: don’t make those comparisons. These messages are not compassionate; they are clueless, even egotistic. It’s all right not to understand the situation—neither do the parents! And it’s more than all right to acknowledge that you cannot find the right words—I, a professional who has worked with words for twenty years, can’t either. It’s not quite all right when you make yourself the center of the message: no need to remember your own losses, and no need to provide advice about how to overcome grief from your own triumphant experience.
After James’s death, an overeager local news outlet rushed to publish a breaking news report about James, connecting his suicide to Vincent’s suicide and my past suicidal depression. (“Alas, not the kind of journalism that will win them a Pulitzer Prize,” a colleague said, though the reporter did reach out to me, asking me for a comment.) The news, picked up and amplified by the Chinese media, somehow made my personal life the center of an orgy.
Vincent would have been hurt, even enraged, by what I will write in the following paragraphs, but James, I suspect, would have been amused. He had a higher tolerance for people’s cluelessness, and in that respect James and I are similar.
That my private life could move strangers to rush in to express either sympathy or malice is not unexpected, but sometimes dark comedy arises precisely because what’s expected happens as predictably as one suspects it will.
A childhood friend, agonized by what she read in the Chinese media, wrote to me and said, baffled: “You’re not explaining yourself.” Explaining, wherefore?
To people who have written to offer your prayers, your goodwill, and the sorrow you have felt on my behalf: allow me to thank you here.
But strangers, more so than friends, sometimes have unrealistic expectations. People wrote to offer friendship, leaving their phone numbers for me to call, some venturing to tell me that their friendship was what I needed at this difficult time. To those who have written with your numbers and your wish to talk to me on the phone about my life: it was kind of you to offer, but friendship takes years to cultivate, and deep, mutual understanding, and a bereaved mother’s priority is not to start a friendship from scratch. (My husband, as logical as James was, did point out that such offers also reflected the fact that I am a public figure. No doubt there are people in worse situations than I, who don’t get these zealous offers from strangers.)
To the father who wrote with the proposal to drive your daughter to my house so she could play beautiful music on her violin: it was nice of you to come up with the idea; it was also unintelligible to me that you dedicated most of your long message to your daughter’s musical and academic achievements. I am a bereaved mother who happens to teach at an Ivy League university; I don’t work for the admissions office.
For the writer I haven’t met: it was flattering that you wrote and said you wanted to dedicate a book to me (I would have declined); but it was not quite right you would then send the whole manuscript to me, and it was beyond comprehension that you went on to ask me if I could help you find a publisher.
For an acquaintance of whom I once thought fondly: it wasn’t quite all right to send your colleague’s manuscript to me so that it could, in your words, provide me with a useful distraction from grief; and it went a little beyond the pale that it so happened that your colleague also needed to find a publisher, and you had offered up my help, despite the death of my child.
For the stranger who wrote to say your life was more tragic than mine, who asked me to call you—“at your earliest convenience”—so that you could tell me your story as an inspiration for my writing: I’m sorry to hear that you have experienced tragedies in your life, and I’m afraid that I won’t make the call.
And for those kindhearted people who were keen to offer silver linings on religious, spiritual, and other grounds: I’m afraid I must disappoint you. Sometimes there is no silver lining in life. Some consolations are strictly and purely for the consolers themselves. Please hold on to your silver linings, as I must decline.
Grief cheapened by cliché, by wishful thinking, and by self-centeredness of various kinds—this is another reason I never use the words “grief” or “grieving” when I think about my children. “Grief” is a word used often in those emails sent to me.
We like to set our hearts on a finish line, hoping to take the right actions so that we can reach that finish line fast and with the least hassle or pain. Perhaps this urge reflects a desire to mark time in a different way: to harness time for gain. And yet in life, time cannot be harnessed.
Marking time after a child’s death is not about overcoming grief or coming out of a dark tunnel—all those bad words sound to me as though bereaved parents are expected to put in a period of hard mental work and then clap their hands and say, I’m no longer heartbroken for my dead child, and I’m one of you normal people again, so now we can go on living as though nothing had happened and you don’t have to feel awkward around me.
I am not a grieving mother. I am the mother who will live, every single day, for the rest of my life, with the pain of losing Vincent and James, and with the memory of bringing them up.
To the Chinese media who ran the headlines about the deaths of my children coupled with my decision to abandon my mother tongue or my turning my back on my mother country (“a traitor deserves to be punished” was a message conveyed without subtlety, sometimes explicitly); to the giddy tabloids who called me the murderer and the killer of my children; to the trolls who fabricated sensational stories about my life (apparently, I often abandoned my children for a glittering high society in Europe); to the Alex Joneses of Chinese origin who hypothesized that I belonged to a cult to lure young people (including my own children) into suicide and proposed that the university I teach at should investigate the cases of students who died by suicide in the past few years and their connections to me; to the psychological experts who did public psychoanalysis on me; to the astrologists who looked at my birth information for a postmortem of my fate; to the gossipmongers and hobbyist commentators: I am sorry for whatever losses you have suffered or whatever deficiencies you were born with that make you, unavoidably, who you are and what you are.
I’ve known people—in China and in America—who treasure their malevolence, and who revel in the pain they inflict on others. Whether they do this out of profound unhappiness or a profound delusion of power (or both) I do not know; what I do know is that they cannot be helped, and they cannot help themselves.
Some years ago, a middle school classmate of mine committed suicide in Beijing in his thirties. In our younger years he and I were close. He was sensitive, fragile, proud, and lonely—but how else could a boy of artistic and soulful temperament be? Ask Chopin, ask Rimbaud, ask Vincent.
My friend was good at painting, I was a budding accordionist, and we loved and excelled in poetry equally. He became a designer, and shortly before his death, he wrote to me and congratulated me because, in his words, I had prevailed in being a dreamer.
After his death, our old schoolmates, as a collective group, seemed to have very little sympathy. Rather, there were jokes and there was gossip, as if a young man’s death, especially an artistic and sensitive young man’s death, deserved nothing more than laughter and mockery. I remember feeling relief on my friend’s behalf, rather than pain and loss: the world is a cruel place; why stay here among these cruel people, people who will never dare to go to where you’ve found your freedom?
When the Chinese media were having a giddy time with my life, Brigid told me several times not to read the news, but I explained that a writer must know the world as it is.
Children die, and parents go on living in an abyss, but that, I now know, is not the worst thing. Beyond that abyss is yet another abyss, and one has to rely on one’s thinking to stay in the more meaningful abyss. People can hurt only our feelings, not our thinking—not unless we let go of the independence of our minds.
And people who intentionally or unintentionally hurt other people: I have come to the conclusion that they cannot help themselves, and they cannot be helped. This is only an acknowledgement, and it is not understanding or forgiveness, neither of which I will give.
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE SUMMER I returned to the university swimming pool. The semester was over. The students were gone. James would have finished his first year in college. Vincent would have graduated from college this year.
I am the slowest swimmer in the pool. The second slowest swimmer is a man who looks at least ninety years old. An older Japanese woman once told me, after I got out of the water, that more than once she had sat on the bench and watched me swim. The reason, she explained with sincerity, was that she had never really learned to swim properly—she simply knew how to swim from her childhood. Most swimmers in that pool are such good swimmers, she said, she can’t quite study their form because they are too fast; but I can watch your movements, she said, and she had been trying to imitate my strokes. I laughed, and told her I had just learned to swim. I am the slowest swimmer in the pool, and I swim in slow motion because I have to think with every stroke and every kick.
For most of my life I was extremely afraid of water. When Vincent and James were small boys, I thought I should be able to get into a pool with them, so I hired a student from the college I was teaching at then, and when that student graduated, I hired another. My progress through the lessons, on and off for more than a year, was steady enough that I could get into the shallow end of the pool with the boys. Then they learned swimming themselves. Then they were old enough not to need me in the water with them.
After Vincent died, I thought I would tackle swimming again, this time for myself. I hired a student lifeguard, who was patient; she told me that her mother couldn’t swim, either. Sometimes I asked the student about this or that movement, and she would have to swim herself, trying to figure out which part of the body and what muscles to focus on to achieve the desired effect.
Those who have learned swimming in their childhood tend to swim unthinkingly. For some people, the same must be true in life; for them living is a natural process. This has never been the case for me or for my children. I now go to the pool at six thirty in the morning, and I am still the slowest swimmer. Swimming was something I learned for my children’s sake; it’s something I do for myself now. I count between breaths, I kick my legs, I stretch my arms, calculating the angle at which my hands enter the water, I turn my head—all these movements, all action verbs, require some conscious thinking.
Sooner or later, however, my mind drifts elsewhere. In the water it is now and now and now and forever now. My life, strange to others, is stranger to myself, but that doesn’t really matter. In this strange life I can still think—think about things and then scrutinize those thoughts; think through things and then start all over, accepting that, short of one’s death, all finalities in life are provisional.
I think about how to make the next stroke less feeble, about the chapter of the novel I shall be writing after swimming, about the Chopin nocturnes too sophisticated for me to play, and about the oriental poppies that I loved when I was a young girl, which I have been unwilling to plant in my garden. The Chinese name of the flower, Beauty Yu, is an homage to a famous courtesan who killed herself for her lover, a general who was to face the first emperor of the Han dynasty in his final and fatal battle the following day. (Perhaps next year I shall plant some oriental poppies, along with the rose named Sweet Juliet.)
I think about counting days and marking time, and my thoughts, inevitably, return to my children. That a mother can no longer mother her children won’t change the fact that her thoughts are mostly a mother’s thoughts.
I think about Lear’s howl and Cordelia’s stubbornness. I think about Richard II’s hollow crown and the tears of his queen, with which she curses the gardener because he has brought the news of her husband’s downfall. I think about our upcoming trip to Wales to meet my friend Cressida—two days after James died, Brigid asked me if there was one thing I wanted that could be made to happen, and I said that I wanted to go to Wales in the summer—we’d talked for some years about going there and hearing James speak Welsh to people.
I think about counting days and marking time, and my thoughts, inevitably, return to my children. That a mother can no longer mother her children won’t change the fact that her thoughts are mostly a mother’s thoughts.
I think about Vincent’s clothes, which I had packed and then unpacked to hang up in the closet after we moved into the house: bright T-shirts, light-colored pants, at least a dozen woolen and cashmere scarves, which he had chosen for himself in Scotland the summer before he died (while laughing at his vanity). After James died, I took a fleece jacket from Vincent’s closet, of a cool, grayish blue, and started to wear it even though it was a little small for me. (It was the first time an object that used to belong to Vincent had become mine.)
I think about James’s clothes, too, jeans that are of the same brand and the same three dark shades, T-shirts with mathematical illustrations, twenty pairs of identical socks—plain white, unlike Vincent’s socks, all in bright colors. When we brought James’s belongings back from his dorm, Brigid laundered all the clothes and folded and packed them in a suitcase. For months I have been walking into his bedroom, thinking that I should return the clothes to the closet and his underpants and socks to the chest of drawers; I cannot do it. The only thing I did was to pick up some loose clothes hangers and hang them in his closet, free of any clothes. All the same it is some small measure of order I have brought to this life of extremity.
James’s retainers are in a box on his desk. Vincent’s retainers are in a box on his shelf. A few weeks after James’s death, his dentist’s office sent a reminder about a routine checkup and cleaning. The dentist has seen James since we moved to Princeton; before that, I had always brought the two children to their dental appointments together in Berkeley. The dentist in Princeton, a tall and bearlike man, was extremely gentle with James for the next six years, and I had to reply to the text sent from his office, saying we would not be able to make it to the appointment because James had died.
A few years earlier, a student of Christiane’s died from suicide, and she wrote to me:
These are sad days for me; a student I was close to for the past four years
died last week. I will speak at his service in the Chapel tomorrow and want
to share here with you this line from a German poem that I intend to read
(my informal translation):
There are times in life when the world seems to stand still, and when it turns again, nothing is as before.
If the world seemed to stand still once, it is stiller now.
That a mother can do all things humanly possible for her children and yet cannot keep them alive—this is a fact that eschews any adjective.
Children die, and parents go on living—this, too, is a fact that defies all adjectives.
When Vincent’s phone was returned to us, only a corner of it was fractured. When James’s backpack was returned to us, among a stack of papers, all unused, there was a pencil. It was broken into halves at the same moment James died. These are facts, too. And I think about them often.
In this abyss that I call my life, facts, with their logic, meaning, and weight, are what I hold on to. It’s not much, this holding on, and yet it’s the best I can do.
And this book for James—I don’t think it will live up to his standard. There was never a single argument between James and me, as there were many arguments between Vincent and me. Vincent had made demands I could not meet in his life, but James put up with what I was not able to do for him. Within my capacity I have loved and taken care of James. Within his capacity he allowed me to mother him.
Sometimes a mother and a child are like two hands placed next to each other: only just touching, or else with fingers intertwined. Then the world turns, and one hand is left, holding on to everything and nothing that is called now and now and now and now.
*Adapted from chapters 21 and 23 of Things In Nature Merely Grow, by Yiyun Li, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
