Title: Things in Nature Merely Grow.
Author: Yiyun Li.
Genre: Non-fiction, death, suicide, memoir.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2025.
Summary: The author lost both her children to suicide—Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, "a single point in a time line." Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. She does what she can: doing "things that work,": including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. This is a book for James.
My rating: 7.5/10.
My review:
♥ There is no good way to say this—when the police arrive, they inevitably preface the bad news with that sentence, as though their presence had not been ominous enough. The firs time I heard the line, I knew already what was about to be conveyed. Nevertheless, I paid attention to how the news was delivered: the detective insisted that I take a seat first. I sat down at the dinner table, and he moved another chair to the right distance and sat down himself. No doubt he was following protocol, and yet the sentence—there is no good way to say this—struck me as both accurate and effective. It must be a sentence that, though nearly a cliché, is not often used in daily conversation; its precision has stayed with me.
The second time, having guessed the news about to be delivered, I did not give the sentence a moment's thought. I did not wait for the detective to ask me to sit down, either. I indicated a chair where my husband should sit and took the other chair in the living room. My heart already began to feel that sensation for which there is no name. Call it aching, call it wrenching, call it shattering, but they are all wrong words, useless in their familiarity. This time, the four policemen all stood.
There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged before I go on with this book. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 20217, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home; James near Princeton Station, Vincent near Princeton Junction.
♥ It was the seventh day after James's death, and the New jersey Transit detective was visiting a second time to return James's backpack, just as the Amtrak detective had come back to return Vincent's phone. A case involving life and death never miraculously closes itself at the time of the pronounced death.
Objects don't die. Their journeys in this physical world, up to a certain point, are parallel to the trajectories of the humans to whom the objects belong. Then comes the moment when the separation happens. Vincent's phone became a phone, Jame's backpack, a backpack. They became objective objects, left behind in strangers' hands.
Few objects speak. The phone and the backpack were reticent, so they could do little to illuminate the last moments of my children's lives.
Many objects outlive people—this thought has often occurred to me when I see in a museum an eighteenth-century pianoforte or a twelfth-century sword or a bowl from 500 BCE. All of Vincent's belongings and all of James's belongings have outlived them; not a single item has left our care. There are Vincent's many paintings hung around the house. There is James's collection of pocket watches on a shelf. Everywhere I turn in the house there are objects: their meanings reside in the memories connected to them; the memories limn the voids, which cannot be filled by the objects.
♥
From which awaked, the truth of what we are
Shows us but this: I am sworn brother, sweet,
To grim necessity.
Sometimes, walking around the house, among the objects I study closely or only glance at, I recite Richard II's woeful words to myself. And yet I am not that dethroned king, our house is not a museum or a shrine, and our past is not merely a happy dream. I am not awakened, as I have stayed awake; I have been attentive and alert throughout all those years as the mother of my children. The necessity I face has no need of that adjective, "grim." Necessity—my necessity—is an extremity: any adjective is an irrelevance when it comes to extremity.
♥ Words tend to take on a flabbiness or a staleness after a catastrophe, but if one has to live with the extremity of losing two children, an imperfect and ineffective language is but a minor misfortune.
There is no good way to say this: words fall short.
And yet these two clichés speak an irrefutable truth. Anything I write for James is bound to be a partial failure. Sooner or later there will come the moment when my understanding parts ways with his essence. I can ask questions—answerable or unanswerable—but it is likely that by the end of the book I will have failed to find the right questions, just as I will have failed to pinpoint the exact moment when James's contemplation of suicide shifted from Vincent's to his own.
♥ Fiction, I've learned from writing it and reading it, tends to be about the inexplicable and the illogical. Sometimes my students complain about what they read in fiction—I don't believe this would happen in life, or, I don't believe any parent would do that to their children. What can I say to a young person who has strong convictions but a failure of the imagination? Not much, really. The world, it seems to me, is governed by strong conviction and paltry imagination and meager understanding.
..[Vincent] also envisioned baking in the kitchen and helping me improve the garden, which did not look too impressive: the couple who'd occupied the house before us, both economists, were not keen gardeners.
Vincent died on the day we put down the deposit for the house. Deposit, death, in that order, four hours apart. I would never have put those two things on the same day in a novel. In writing fiction, one avoids coincidences like that, which offer convenient metaphor, shoddy poignancy, and unearned drama. Life, however, does not follow a novelist's discipline. Fiction, one suspects, is tamer than life.
♥ Vincent and James were born three years, four months, and six days apart. The gap between their deaths: six years, four months, and nineteen days. These numbers and dates are carved into my mind more deeply than they could be into stone, but they convey very little.
♥ The day after James's death, I said to Brigid, "One has to muddle through this life."
That statement was not accurate. There was something stark and piercing in me, which was much closer to clarity than to muddle, but calling it a muddle took less effort. It was as though I were averting my eyes from a mirror, which reflected my mind to me in such an unrelenting and sharp manner that I was startled by myself, frightened, even. By looking away one could imagine a muddled image, vaguer, softer, and less unsettling.
♥ After Vincent died, I read and reread Grief Lessons, a collection of Euripides's plays translated by Anne Carson, and Constance's monologue in Shakespeare's King John, after she lost young Arthur, who had been robbed of his throne and then his life. Those ancient Greeks sing their grief at the highest pitch, which, as Carson pointed out, is rage. Their grief and their rage are nearly untranslatable, as though feelings in extremity can only be physical sensations—the language assails the readers with a blind and blunt force. Constance, when chastised by Cardinal Randolph for her lack of composure ("Lady, you utter madness and not sorrow"), retorts:
My name is Constance: I was Geoffrey's wife:
Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost.
I am not mad; I would to heaven I were,
For then, 'tis like I should forget myself.
Oh, if I could, what grief should I forget!
Preach some philosophy to make me mad,
And thou shalt be canonized, cardinal.
For, being not mad by sensible of grief,
My reasonable part produces reason
How I may be delivered of these woes,
And teaches me to kill or hang myself.
If I were mad, I should forget my son,
Or madly think a babe of clouts were he.
I am not mad. Too well, too well I feel
The different plague of each calamity.
The ancient Greeks and Constance might have said something I could not find words for after Vincent died, and yet this statement is not entirely accurate. Those mothers in the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies voiced their sorrows at a higher pitch than mine. I did not lose my words and I was not at a loss for words when Vincent died. I wrote a book for him.
I also, on one occasion, wept. A few weeks after Vincent's death, Brigid and I went to see a production of King Lear in new York. By the time Lear finished his howling monologue, I was weeping; I went on weeping when we left the theater, sitting on the edge of a stone planter, in the center of which a small tree was shedding its last leaves. When I stopped crying, I said to Brigid, "There's no surprise left for me. No one will ever be able to surprise me after Vincent."
How one misspeaks, and how one misspeaks in extremity. James surprised me more than Vincent did, but this time, I know not to make any statement of finality.
This time, rereading Euripides and Shakespeare, I have a different reaction: make Constance's words a hundred times shriller, make those Greek mothers' cries a hundred times more piercing, and I would say, this is close to how I could express myself, too; only, I would prefer not to.
The truth is that however I choose to express myself will not live up to the weight of these facts: Vincent died, and then James died..
♥ A few weeks after James died, I wrote to Jane, a colleague who works in theater: "Our life seems to have entered the realm of Shakespearean dramas or Greek tragedies." And she replied: "Your losses are indeed epic and unfathomably hard; no language of mine can meet that."
And yet life is still to be lived, inside tragedies, outside tragedies, and despite tragedies. Writing this book is a way to separate myself from that strange realm while simultaneously settling myself permanently into that realm.
♥ I've decided to write this book starting with a single established fact: I am in an abyss.
..So, here's the fact: I am in tan abyss. I did not stray into the abyss. I did not fall into the abyss. I was not bullied or persecuted by others and thrown into the abyss. Rather, inexplicably and stunningly, I simply am in an abyss.
I am not lost. The feeling of being lost—a disorientation akin to despair—occurred briefly after Vincent died. I remember, after dropping off James at school, driving under a leaden sky, thinking that there was nowhere for us to go.
..feelings, unexamined, present themselves as thoughts; even, facts.
This time I have been careful not to mistake feelings as thoughts or facts. My feelings: stunned, but not lost. My thought: I am found in an abyss.
♥ Indeed there are euphemisms one could use. The word "euphemism," coming from Greek euphēmismós and meaning the substitution of an auspicious word for an inauspicious one, may imply sensitivity, but it may also imply cowardice. It is the latter, rather than the former, that puts people in the mood to censor and demonize.
♥ Reality, which can be conveyed in many ways, is better spoken of in the most straightforward language.
♥ So, dear readers: if a mother using the word "died" or "death" offends your sensibilities (a journalist from China featured my word choice in a profile of me, which led to disapproval among Chinese readers); if you believe that "love" is a magic word that will make everything all right (as did one of my readers, who confronted me on a book tour, asking me how I could have attempted suicide if I have ever loved my children); if you think I've erred by not putting my life in the loving hands of thy god (as an ex-friend of mine believes, telling me after Vincent's death that he was sent by God and taken away bu God so there was no reason for me to feel too sad); if you think suicide is too depressing a subject; if the fact that all things insoluble in life remain insoluble is too bleak for you; and if you prefer that radical acceptance remain a foreign concept to you, this is a good time for you to stop reading.
♥ I've in the past quoted Montaigne: "To philosophize is to learn to die." And I now know there are other variations:
To philosophize is to learn to live with deaths.
To philosophize is to learn to live with those deaths until one dies.
To philosophize is what one can do while living in an abyss—not lost, but found.
♥ "How does one ever recover from that line?" I asked James, about the line in Camus's play. "I haven't stopped thinking about it for days."
"It's quite compelling," he said.
Men die; and they are not happy. Half of the line is a fact; the other half, a conjecture. There is no cause and effect emphasized: do men die because they are not happy, or are they not happy because they have to die someday? The two statements, existing together, are like two hands kept close, either barely touching or with their fingers intertwined.
One could envision some variations of this line:
Men die; and they are happy.
Gods don't die; and they are not happy.
Gods don't die; and they are happy.
All four scenarios offer possibilities for stories. Much of literature—one could even argue much of life, too—falls into one of the categories. There is Hamlet (men die; and they are not happy). There is Don Quixote (men die; and they are happy). And then there are those gods who dole out eternal punishments to Sisyphus, Prometheus, Narcissus, et al.: those gods, though imaginative and immortal, surely cannot be called happy.
And of course, there are plenty of mortals who take on the roles of unhappy gods.
..But raising children is more than offering them the space to be; the world seems to care more about children's doings than about their beings. When Vincent was five, I thought of signing him up for a soccer club, and he informed me, with utter seriousness, that I would be doing that not for his happiness, but because I wanted him to be just like the other children. I instantly gave up the idea. And yet how many parents can say with confidence, when it comes to their children's upbringing, that they have achieved a real understanding between being and doing?
..What can parents do but give their children the space to be, and allow them to do what they need so they can become more of themselves?
And yet, despite the parents' efforts, and despite all the beings and doings that occur as the children grow, some among them die before their time.
Children die, and they are not happy.
And their parents can never know if those children died because they were not happy, or they were not happy because they sensed, too early, that they must face their own deaths.
♥ Some parents, those with no intuition and those who do not trust or understand their intuition, place their faith only in what is visible and explicable. And these self-blinded parents, by strengthening the only reality they're willing to accept, a reality without depth, ambiguity, and uncertainty, cast their children away with a centrifugal force. Think of those parents who refuse to understand their children's sexual orientation, their existential questions, or simply, their feelings. Where do those children go? To the abyss, to unreality, or, if they're lucky, to their independence.
♥ It's been my experience, both as a child and as a parent, that adults—at least those specializing in arrogance and ignorance, and those who easily forget or else write off their own childhood memories—are extremely good at underestimating children. A ten-year-old already has the capacity to understand life's bleakness. Only, most ten-year-olds have not found the language to articulate their feelings, and very few of them have the ability to find a way out of that all-encompassing bleakness unaided.
♥ What can a mother do, facing reality, facing unreality, but rely on her intuition while at the same time keeping her intuition at bay?
Intuitions are narratives. I have an intrinsic distrust of narratives, which are among the most misleading things in life. I have seen lives saved by narratives and lives derailed by narratives. That I've chosen to write narratives is an incongruity one has to acknowledge.
But intuitions are a tricky subset of narratives: incomplete, un-completable. I avoid putting my intuitions into words, which would be pinning a butterfly on a specimen board so as to claim the certainty of possession.
..Intuitions are narratives about potentials, possibilities, and alternatives. In that sense, intuitions are fiction, until, once informed by life, they become facts.
♥ It seemed to me that to honor the sensitivity and peculiarity of my children—so that each could have as much space as possible to grow int his individual self—was the best I could do as a mother. Yes, I loved them, and I still love them, but more important than loving is understanding and respecting my children, which includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives.
♥ Seeing is believing, but a mother must restrain herself from foreseeing. To foresee is to give too much weight to intuition; foreseeing might be waving a white flag permanently.
♥ He is not the only person who has asked me about anger: the question must be relevant and legitimate, but anger is not a major or even a minor emotion in my life. I explained this to the doctor in Los Angeles, and he said I was "very fortunate." I believed him—I have known some angry people, I have encountered many people's anger, but I have rarely found angry people illuminating or inspiring. Too often their anger—a feeling, a reaction, an interpretation—is presented as fact, or, worse, truth.
♥ That a mother could do all things humanly possible and sensible for a child but still could not keep him alive—this was the fact that I would have to live with, I thought, every single day, for the rest of my life. It was Vincent's death that made me begin to use that phrase, "every single day, for the rest of my life."
After Vincent's death, there were excruciating days, days of numbness, days of contentment, and days of melancholy, days of reading and writing and days of not being able to read or write, days of holding on upside down (like the bat in Marianne Moore's poem) and days of holding on with the right side up. But in all those days, where one is obliged to live ("where can we live but days?" in Philip Larkin's words), there remained that thought: every single day, for the rest of my life, I will be thinking of Vincent.
♥ Did I have a fleeting thought that I should have checked in with James to see if he felt suicidal? I can't answer that question now, because on this side of death no answer can be trusted.
♥ Through their entire lives, at every school drop-off, every time they were leaving for a party or a playdate, every time I was leaving for a trip, and with each exchange of text, the last thing I said to Vincent and James was inevitably "I love you."
No matter how long we get to parent our children, there are only limited numbers of "I love yous" we can say to them. That, too, is a fact.
♥ I have always known that I can keep my body still and my mind clear, a skill that I must have mastered from being the daughter of my mother, who had done all the screaming and banging and crying and swearing when I was growing up. A few days after James died, I remembered once again my mother's wrath when she whipped my shoulders and back with a metal pencil box or a broomstick, not because I had done anything unforgivable, but because she was angry. The longer she beat me, the angrier she became, because I was neither crying nor trying to escape her beating. "I just don't believe I can't make you cry," she would swear, hitting out of a blind rage. I would sit in the chair, wooden-faced and dry-eyed, knowing that other than exhausting herself, there was nothing she could do to claim victory over me.
Life has stunned me, but I prefer not to give life the pleasure of boasting that it has defeated me, just as I did not give my mother the satisfaction of knowing that her beating could break me and bring tears to my eyes.
So when I sat down next to my husband and said "Shit," that unfamiliar word was life at an extremity, to which I responded with my own extremity. Sometimes I wonder if that might have been the worst moment in my life, though, as Edgar said in King Lear, "And worse I may be yet. The worst is not / So long as we can say 'This is the worst.'"
♥ Parents die, and children go on living. It is statistically sound to say that this is the case for the majority of the population.
But sometimes children die before their parents.
Children die, and parents go on living. Those parents go on living because they do not have many options: they either live or follow their children down to Hades.
Children die, and parents go on living. Those parents go on living because death, though a hard, hard thing, is not always the hardest thing. Both my children chose a hard thing. We are left with the hardest: to live after their deaths.
Sometimes a young writer or a writing student tells me how hard they find writing is. Writing is so hard, they say, with a whine or else self-glorification in their voice. That always puts me in a suspicious mood. If you complain about writing being hard—I sometimes want to say to them—then you must have understood very little about life.
Writing is hard, but living is harder. Writing is optional. Living, too, is optional, though its demands make writing seem idyllic.
..Dying is hard. Living is harder. Even harder is living on when life is fractured by timeless deaths. It takes an instant for death to become a fact, a single point in a time line, which eclipses all things in the past and eliminates any possibility for the future. Death is like Euclid's definition of the point in geometry: "A point is that which has no part."
Living, on the other hand, is not about a single point. There is not a single point in time or space that can become life itself.
Children die, and parents go on living. Those parents go on living because that's the only way for them to go on loving their children, whose deaths easily turn them into a news story one day and gossip the next day, and then, eventually, statistics.
Children die, and parents go on living, except they go on living in a different way than they did before. (It's like living with "a new knowledge of reality," I wrote to my friend Deborah a couple of weeks after James's death, quoting the last line of the last poem of the collected poems of Wallace Stevens, titled "Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself."
♥ Quintus was named by Vincent, "the fifth" in Latin, because when he arrived we had four members in the family. After Vincent died, James's Californian therapist, who Skyped that fall and winter once a week to support James (and us), told me that one day James had explained to him matter-of-factly that Quintus was thus named because there had been four people in the family. He—the therapist—felt the poignancy of this moment because James did not say that one of those four people had died. He only looked his stoic self, the therapist said.
Of course, we've always been a household of four people for James. That was the condition he was born into. Death would not change that for him, just as two deaths do not change it for me: when I think of my family now, I think of us as two parents, two children, and a dog.
♥ Oblivion is a kind of blessing, too, though one I would prefer not to have to experience.
♥ Children die, and their dog goes on living.
♥ The saddest and yet the most irrefutable truth: when you lose a second child, you have already learned a few things about losing a child from your previous experience.
The second time around I knew neither to battle life nor to battle death: in both endeavors, there would be unlimited exhaustion and very little to gain. If death is one reality and life is another, I would rather they were like two hands placed next to each other—barely touching or with fingers intertwined. The two hands are not arm wrestling; they cannot beat or dominate each other.
♥ You did everything you could to help James find his place in life, but he wanted to leave and one must let go—for weeks and months after, I've often returned to Christiane's words, and to her extraordinary instinct to write in this way at that most difficult moment, from a deep and austere understanding of James, of his parents, and of life itself. Very few people, in my experience, have the moral courage to say what Christiane said to me on that day, precisely an hour and a half after a child's death.
♥ I remembered the other time, sitting at the kitchen counter myself, on the morning after Vincent died: then, too, it seemed that the clock had stopped at five o'clock.
When life is full of tasks, obligations, and events, time carries us, too swiftly it seems, for is it not our perpetual protest about life that there is not enough time for this or that? But those who complain about that—myself at different phases of my life, too—forget how fortunate they are: Life does not guarantee that time has the capacity to carry us. Time flies, time is fleeting, but then there comes a moment when time, no longer nimble-footed, no longer winged, is for us to carry.
Death, a major disruptor of life, can feel like a black hole, depleting all one's energy, but death fails to be a black hole in one particular sense: it does not absorb all the time. Those who have to live through the days after a beloved's death and those who are beset by debilitating depression will know this: time stands still, time feels monotonous, and then time becomes Sisyphus's boulder. One carries it from morning to night, and if sleep comes, it's but meager comfort with little relief. Then, one starts all over again the next day. The exhaustion one feels while mourning or battling depression is from that never-ending effort to carry time, an exhaustion similar to that of carrying an infant that refuses to nurse, refuses to fall asleep, and cries all day long. One cannot drop time as one cannot drop a baby; one simply has to carry on.
The immediate days after a child's death (or the death of any loved one, I think) share something with the immediate days after a child's birth. Very rarely in life do we count the days as loyally as we count a newborn's beginnings: a day old, three days old, seven days old, two weeks old, three weeks old—in fact, the only other time the days are counted in such a consistent and mindful manner, in my experience, is after the death of a child: one day gone, three days gone, a week gone, three months gone.
♥ The worries, the frustrations, the joys, the surprises—parents rarely know enough about parenting, and yet children, somehow, offer parents the assistance they need; they help themselves grow up.
The death of a child is a newborn, too. The death of a child is a newborn that does not grow or change. And those children, gone from the world, are no longer able to help their parents.
♥ And, most important of all, for me: radical acceptance. The death of a child realigns time and space. If an abyss is where I shall be for the rest of my life, the abyss is my habitat. One should not waste energy fighting one's habitat.
♥ After James died, flowers arrived in front of our door. The flowers deserved attention, but I had to turn myself inside out to find the energy needed for that attention: to cut open the packaging, to trim a bouquet of peonies, to place them in a vase. (Here's a small thing I've learned: if one is to send flowers as a gesture of condolence, better to ensure the flowers arrive already arranged in a vase.)
♥ I did not stop writing or take time off from teaching when Vincent died. Writing, teaching, gardening, grocery shopping, cooking, doing laundry—all these activities are time-bound, and they do not complete with my children, who are timeless now. There is no rush, as I will have every single day, for the rest of my life, to think about Vincent and James, outside time, outside the many activities of everyday life.
And this, among other reasons, is why I am against the word "grief," which on contemporary culture seems to indicate a process that has an end point: the sooner you get there, the sooner you prove yourself to be a good sport at living, and the less awkward people around you will feel. Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone. How lonely the dead would feel, if the living were to stand up from death's shadow, clap their hands, dust their pants, and say to themselves and to the world, I am done with my grieving; from this point on it's life as usual, business as usual.
I don't want an end point to my sorrow. The death of a child is not a heat wave or a snowstorm, nor an obstacle race to rush through and win, nor an acute or chronic illness to recover from. What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word?
Thinking about my children is like air, like time. Thinking about them will only end when I reach the end of my life.
..Have I reason to be fond of grief? Yes, as much as a mother has reason to love her children. Alas, few people use the word "grief" these days as compellingly as Constance. For that reason, I prefer that in the abyss that is my habitat, grief is not given a place by design. If it decides to grow there, it will grow like a volunteer rose campion or a sweet violet or a columbine.
♥ Late last year, I planted twelve hundred bulbs, an addition to the seven hundred and the five hundred from the previous two autumns. The tender green had just been popping out of the stale, winter-long snow when James died, and by late March the bulbs were blooming with abandon. Things in nature merely grow—the line has become a reoccurring thought after James's death—things in nature merely grow until it's time for them to die.
♥ Now that I have a garden, I've come to understand Trevor's point: gardening is good training for a novelist. One learns to be patient, one learns to make concessions, one learns to redefine one's visions and ambitions, and one learns to stop being a perfectionist. A garden is good training for life, too. Would it have changed Vincent a little, had he had the opportunity to work on the garden with me for a season, several seasons? Better stop asking these questions that tread in the realm of alternatives—whatever the answer is doesn't make a difference in this life.
♥ After James died, someone sent me a picture of spring flowers and touted "earth's regenerative power." That kind of language, like the encouragement from people who cheerfully predicted that I would soon reach "the end of the tunnel," makes me conscious of how people fall into the trap of using cliché to express care.
Clichés are not merely flabby words used to express unimaginative thoughts; rather, clichés corrode the mind. Flabby language begetting flabby thinking seems a more alarming prospect than the opposite, flabby thinking finding refuge in flabby language.
My garden is not a metaphor for hope or regeneration, the flowers are never tasked to be the heralds for brightness and optimism. Things in nature merely grow. There is no suicidal or angry rose, there is no depressed or rebellious lily. Plants have but one goal: to live. In order to live they grow when they can, and go into dormancy if needed. They live until they die—and either they die as destined by nature or are cut down by other elements in nature. A garden is a placeholder. Flowers are placeholders.
♥ Years ago, after a mental crisis, I stayed in an emergency facility in California for a weekend. At mealtimes, patients lined up to receive trays of mushy, nondescript food, and the man or the woman who handed over the tray would say, "Here, made with love, just for you." That sentence, along with the police detectives' line—there is no good way to say this—is among the saddest words ever said to me.
♥ And parenting—is that not the ultimate effort to hold a place for children, so that, to the best of one's ability, they can be given all they need to grow? And yet there is futility, too, in this effort: the children are bound to outgrow the space the parents provide; the world is just outside. A mother can cook every meal with great care, but a mother's care, like a point in geometry, is essential to the order of things, insubstantial in the scale of things.
♥ A book is a placeholder, no more, no less. This book for James—what does it hold? All the words that have come to me: many of them fall short; some are kept because they are needed to hold a place for James.
..looking at the old traveling pictures, thinking about but not touching Vincent's clothes in his closet, thinking about but not being able to unpack James's suitcase brought back from his dorm—every action is a placeholder, so is every action not taken. What I did for my children once made placeholders of their lives; what I couldn't do—keep them alive—is the most important placeholder of my life: my children, in their absence.
♥ James, who graduated from high school in his bluer cap and gown, was still kept safe in the bubble that was called last year when the piece was published. Had I been able to go back and tell myself that in six months I would live as a mother who has lost two sons, the novelist in me and the mother in me would have been equally incredulous. That wouldn't do, in fiction or in life. I would have raised my voice and protested: that only happens in Greek tragedies.
The chorus, singing about Herakles's children, who would soon be killed by Herakles in a frenzy of madness, admonishes (in Anne Carson's translation): "Bad luck is not gone from these children, but neither is beauty."
♥ I also told her that I did not yet know how our life would be lived but there was one thing I did know: do things that work.
"Do things that work" is a notion I have retained from Marsha Linehan's manual of dialectical behavior therapy, which I read a few times after my suicidal depression. There are other practical tips in that manual, some of which I've found helpful. For instance, holding a piece of ice in my hand is a quick and effective was to remind myself of the physicality of my body. Or, setting a timer if I need to worry about something beyond my control: I can rarely do five minutes of intense, focused, and unmitigated worrying—a mind wanders whether it's meditating or whether it's beset by anxiety.
But more than a decade after studying the manual, the most memorable thing for me is this notion: do things that work.
♥ More important to myself, do things that make sense means one must pressure one's thoughts and recognize that some automatic thoughts are but pebbles.
The analogy of pebbles was given to me by Brigid when she stayed with us the weekend after James's death. In a moment of self-pity, I blurted out—"Am I not the worst mother in the world?"—to which Brigid replied that we both knew the answer to that question, and we also knew the question was not a real question, only, a pebble of a question. Better kick the pebble out of your way instead of letting it stop you, she said.
If one is destined to live as a Sisyphus in an abyss, there is good sense in distinguishing a meaningful boulder from insignificant pebbles. A Sisyphus making a boulder out of pebble would only become a comedy. In the past few months I've developed a habit of scrutinizing my mind: is this thought a pebble of a thought, is this worry a pebble of a worry, is this question, seemingly unanswerable, only a pebble of a question?
..The extraordinary nature of friendship with these clearheaded friends: they do not get distracted by my pebbles of questions and thoughts, and they do not indulge me in pebble-mongering. A pebble is a pebble, which will not get more due than it deserves. If I aspire to live by intuition and logic, these are the friends who are more intuitive than I am when intuition is needed, more logical than I am when my reasoning falls short.
♥ After Vincent died, the weekend breakfasts came with a cluster of lavender-colored chive flowers or a few marigolds arranged on the edge of the plate, or a small jar of fresh roses on the table. In all those years of baking and knitting and choosing his own outfits, Vincent had a keen eye for beauty, so why not bring some touches of Vincent into a corner of our life; not to accentuate his absence, only, to acknowledge it.
♥ In London the same old joke came back; it was while queuing in the Science Museum that James, aged six, invented the "most insulting insult" that made Vincent bend over with laughter: "Mommy, you're so dense that if we put you next to a black hole, you would not be sucked in by the black hole, but the black hole would be sucked into you."
Little did James know, a little did I know, that someday I would live with a black hole inside me, the precise shape of my two children.
♥ What do you call parents who can no longer parent?
I stop myself from saying parents who no longer have children. Death does not alter the fact that they are as much our children now as they were ten years ago. One of the very few things that surprised me, after Vincent died, was that he did no stay forever sixteen, as I mistakenly said he would, in the book I wrote for him. James grew, turning thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, so Vincent did grow too.
And yet, only a few weeks before James died, feeling all of a sudden as though caught in a trance, I said to Elizabeth that somehow I felt stunted by life, and had never really moved away from when I was forty-four, when Vincent died.
The facts, however, remain as they are. I am fifty-one at the time of writing this book. And we are parents who can no longer parent. The noun form of the word is forever disconnected from its verb form. And it's the verbs, if one thinks about it, which tend to bear the brunt of death. Mother are always mothers: some, now buried, can no longer mother their children; some, having lost their children, have no one to mother. (And some, mistaking "to give birth to" as "to mother," have never known the meaning of how to be a mother.)
Verbs can die, too, when children die. Dead verbs are like bees and ants and butterflies enfolded by the amber of time: to parent, to mother, to shape the pancakes beyond the letter Z.
The verb that does not die is "to be." Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and latter; only now and now and now and now.
♥ There was no way to explain that Vincent, who took pride and pleasure in his own brilliance, was only being truthful, and there was no way to explain that James was a child who, in second grade then, would be halfway through a meal and, putting down his fork, ponderously say, "Apparently the Higgs boson..." or, "Apparently the predatory tunicates..." Higgs boson? Predatory tunicates? All three of us marveled, not understanding how those topics entered family life at an hour when the world seemed mundane enough to be made of forks and spoons and chopsticks, not knowing, even, what those words, which we had barely or never heard of, meant.
Between the ages of five and twelve, James would preface many of his sentences with the adverb "apparently," a habit that would vanish after he lost Vincent. Perhaps Vincent's death stopped the world from being apparent.
♥ Around the same time he also told me that he was "still" suffering from "monophobia." Monophobia? It was the first time I had heard the word, and I looked it up in a dictionary: a morbid dread of being alone. For how long had this little boy suffered from monophobia that at age six he would announce he was "still" afflicted?
♥ That a mother can do all things humanly possible for a child, and yet she can never understand the incommunicable vastness and strangeness of the world felt by that child; that a mother cannot make the world just a little more welcoming so the child feels less alone; that a mother cannot keep that child alive—these are facts I have to live with now, every single day, for the rest of my life.
♥ "You are still here. You'll always be here. The void that is James is not going to change."
The void that is James: before his death he had turned away. Or, perhaps a more accurate way to say this is that, in his life, he was forever turning away. Vincent, good at being in everyone's face, did not often allow James to absent himself entirely. What Vincent had done for James we parents were not able to do.
♥ After Vincent died, a parent of a friend of his wrote that she would always remember Vincent as the child who, in the street lit by an orange lamp, jumped higher, ran faster, and laughed more loudly than all the children around him.
She was talking about a night after a school dance, in the first year of high school, but she might also be talking about Vincent in his entire, short life. Vincent lived flamboyantly and demandingly. Vincent died because he did not feel that life could meet him: in poetry, in music, in beauty, in courage, and in perfection.
♥ I had dreaded for six years and prepared myself for six years before Vincent's death. It occurred to me that during those six years when I was not preparing myself for James's death, he must have contemplated suicide, first, Vincent's, then at some point, as an option for himself.
♥ I smiled and shook my head, which seemed to disappoint her a little, so I asked about her plans. "I'm off in the morning, and I'm taking my mother out for Mother's Day brunch," she said proudly. I said how wonderful that sounded, and how lucky her mother was, which made the young woman—no, really, a kid, Vincent's or James's age—blush with happiness. "Do you have children?" she asked.
In that instant I knew that I could not always follow the protocol I had relied on all these years. I could hardly say to this young woman, her eager, friendly face still showing baby fat: I had two children, and I lost them both, so strictly speaking I don't have children, or more precisely, I'm a mother who no longer has children.
Instead, I shook my head, hoping that the ambiguity would end the conversation. She glanced at my hair. "Oh," she said with a little dejection, then gave me a kind smile. Perhaps my reply implied a pitiful situation: a woman her mother's age who either chose not to have children or could not have children, for whom Mother's Day would be just another day of the year.
Edgar's line came back to me at that moment: "And worse I may be yet: the worst is not so long as we can say, 'This is the worst.'"
♥ To philosophize is lonely, but to philosophize is also to learn to walk past some emotions, including that momentary loneliness, and say: these are but pebbles that should not and will not stop me.
♥ And my life is here, in this now, still baffling. Outside my now are people: friends who sustain me, but also strangers. These strangers can be unthinkingly oblivious or unthinkably cruel. Some of them want my attention and some revel in my tragedy, but in an odd way, they sustain me too: one wants to know the best of people, but one also wants to know the worst of people, which is not a necessity for living, but it is a necessity for writing fiction.
"Gods are stubborn. So am I," Herakles says after having been tricked into killing his own children by Madness, whose father is Heaven and whose mother is Night.
Life is stubborn. So am I. I have conceded to make this abyss my habitat, every single day, for the rest of my life. But I shall live in this abyss only on my terms.
♥ Where can we live but in days?
And the days after James's death are but an abyss.
How does one live in an abyss?
By marking time, how else does one live?
Music is about marking time—perhaps one day I will play Chopin's nocturnes, perhaps not. "Ten years? I said once, "I'm giving myself ten years. What do you think? Will I be able to play his nocturnes then?"
Cristina, a professional who made an exception to take me on as a student. ("Most adult students are hobbyists," she explained to me the first time we met), looked at me thoughtfully and said, "Yes, that's possible."
Then, ignorantly, I added, "And in five years I will play Chopin's études."
Cristina looked at me sternly and said, "Now you're being very funny. That you cannot do, not in five years, not in ten years."
In music you can't skip a passage and pick up somewhere else—although you can, of course, when you practice. But life is neither practice nor rehearsal. The absoluteness of life—whether it's life in an abyss or not—is that in each day, time has to be marked before the next day arrives.
Playing the Hanon exercises is a way of marking time, and so are all my other activities: working through Euclid's geometry books; going to piano lessons; taking a midday walk with my husband (in cold February rain, in a fragrant April breeze, in an unrelenting June heat); reading, writing, baking soda bread or yogurt coffee cake; pruning and feeding the roses, planting new seedlings, going outside to yell at the newborn bunnies that are feasting on my garden and then giving up when the bunnies cannot be stopped; weeding, weeding, weeding and then one day giving up because weeds are part of nature, too, and things in nature merely grow.
♥ Words, words, words. Words form castles on the solid ground and in the clouds, words become armors and prison walls, words make riptides and quicksands. One can never take words for granted; one cannot always trust words; and yet, where else can my mind live but in words?
♥ "Get thee to the nuttery," a cartoonist friend jokingly messaged me the other day. Isn't the world the most inclusive nuttery? Very few people are like Bartleby or my children; very few people will say: I would prefer not to.
♥ An old woman, who had spent most of her days conversing with her dead family members, asked me once what I was writing in my exercise book, and I showed her the word "abyss" on a new page. She squinted at the word for a long moment and sighed. "Abyss, abysmal, abysmally," she said. "I feel abysmal, yes, I feel abysmal. Do you feel abysmal? Abyss, abysmal, abysmally."
I too felt abysmal, and it was in that moment I realized that abyss, like bliss, is hard to communicate to another person. No one's abyss is more or less abysmal than another person's, just as no one's bliss is more or less blissful than another person's.
♥ "I'm not mad," she said to me. "I got my heart broken by a man. But now they're not letting me leave."
I am not mad—Constance says that when she mourns the young Arthur, and every woman in that ward said that, too. And yet every single woman there was in an abyss. What is the difference between being mad and being in an abyss?
♥ Had the woman in the pink Chanel suit decided to tell me her story, I wold have listened to every single word, though perhaps my respect for her was the same as hers for me: we all live in stories that cannot be fully told; very few people in the world deserve our hearts.
♥ Writing, offering a transient refuge, is an approximation of salvation, nothing more. Who among us stands a chance facing an abyss?
And who among the writers I've loved has summoned up the abyss in the precise way that I've experienced it? There is no shared abyss; we each dwell alone in our own.
♥ How extraordinary, I realized then, when a friend, not dreading discomfort or unease, has the courage to ask the most difficult questions. Despite catastrophes, I am still myself—this, I've learned, is not necessarily obvious or even graspable to some friends; not all of them treat me as the intellectual equal of my old self.
♥ Life, in an absolute sense, is worth living, just as art is worth pursuing, science is worth exploring, justice is worth seeking. However, the fact that something is worth doing doesn't always mean a person is endowed with the capacity to do it, or that a person, once endowed with that capacity, can retain it. The gap between worth doing and being able to do is where aspiration dwells for the young and decline lies in wait for the old.
♥ But I was wrong. A livable life might not have been attractive or engaging enough for James. A livable life fell short at some point. Stoicism could mean that death, like life, could be endured. James died as a result of thinking, not feeling, just as in my own case it was thinking, rather than feeling, that had led me to the border between life and death. One could say that James thought himself into a corner; one could also say that James thought himself out of his loneliness, which was not only about losing Vincent, though losing Vincent must have been the safest thing that happened in James's life. His intelligence would have worked better for him had he wanted something more from life. But in a few conversations we had around the time he went to college, he confirmed my fear that he was not interested in anything external or worldly. Wealth or fame would not allure him. Self-expression would not interest him. Knowledge—language, philosophy, history—would give him pleasure, but that pleasure would remain private; he saw little need to communicate it to another person. It was not often that he would find an incentive to speak: if he did not understand something, he could not possibly speak; if he understood something thoroughly, there was no point in speaking.
"Rarely is suicide committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) through reflection," Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus. The line stood out to me when I reread the book after James's death. I cannot be certain enough to say he did exactly that, and yet his suicide did have an element of calm inevitability, the result of long and through reflection.
♥ For Vincent, I don't think life would ever have become easier. However, I do believe that we learn to suffer better. We become more discerning in our suffering: there are things that are worth suffering for, and then there is the rest—minor suffering an inessential pain—that is but pebbles, which can be ignored or kicked aside. We also become less rigid: suffering suffuses one's being; one no longer resists.
I wish I had shared these thoughts with Vincent when he was younger. It might have helped him a little, or it might not have changed the course of his life or my life. But wishes are but artificial flowers. I did not know back then that one could learn to suffer better. I did not even know it after Vincent's death. I learned this only after James's death.
I do not know if these thoughts would have helped James at all. For years, he had perfected suffering as a state of being, and in the end, he too turned away.
♥ 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.
..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.
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.
♥ 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.
♥ Vincent had sent a farewell message to me minutes before he died, but I had not known, until then, that he had said farewell to two friends.
This information is a fact now, among many facts of my life.
♥ 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 he 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.
♥ People do laugh from the abyss. A few years ago, a nanny in New York killed two of the three children in the family. The children's mother, when she was put on the witness stand at the trial, was reported to have "laughed nervously as she tried to maintain her composure." I suppose that nervous laughter was out of the need to detach herself from the most horrendous memory. I sometimes mention that detail to my students, because their characters often behave predictably, crying or screaming in pain. Deep pain doesn't necessarily make a character scream, I explain. Look at that mother, she laughed! My students are often dumbfounded: They are still young, but it is my job to tell them that tiresome poetic words about grief and grieving are only husks. It's their good fortune that they haven't learned that sometimes people don't have the luxury to wallow in clichés.
♥ Though one thought did occur to me after Vincent's death, and again after James's death. The same thought has also occurred to my husband. We each grew up with a difficult parent: he's a much, much better father than his father; I, a much, much better mother than my mother.
Children of abusive parents might grow into rebels, or they might become escape artists. I have never been an overt rebel, but I have honed my craft as an escape artist all my life. "That need only children of abusive parents know," I said to my husband. "The need to keep one thing to yourself and making sure no one can take it away from you. You have it, I have it, but our children didn't have it. If they had had that, they might not have chosen suicide."
"But how much more they'd have suffered," my husband said. "And we didn't want them to suffer."
"No, I agreed.
And yet they still suffered. Only, not under tyrannical parents. We had spun them cocoons and fortified them. And in the end, our endeavors did not keep our children alive. They became escape artists, too.
♥ 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 a natural process. This has never been the case for me or for my children.
♥ 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 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.
♥ A few years earlier, a student of Christiane's died from suicide, and she wrote to me:
These are times in life when the world seems to stand still, and when it turns again, nothing is as before.
If the word 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.
♥ 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.
suicide, mental health, abuse, parenthood, memoir, asylums, Chinese, death,
