Yiyun Li lost both of her sons, Vincent and James, to suicide, six years apart, at 16 and 19. In this essay, drawn from her forthcoming book, Things in Nature Merely Grow, Li writes through her grief. It’s difficult to read, and yet Li writes with a lucidity and steadiness that guides us through with her.
When Vincent was around the same age, he asked, pointedly, “You understand suffering, and you write about suffering so well. Why did you give birth to us?” A question for which I never had a good answer.
All those books teaching parents how to take care of their children—the first year, the first eighteen months, the first five or ten years—none of them addresses this difficulty: for parents and for children, the border between reality and unreality is not always clearly marked.
More picks about grief
Molly
“Love someone back,” she wrote in a poem that I read the first day I realized I already loved her and always would. “You just begin.” So I began.
A Mother’s Exchange for Her Daughter’s Future
“Two lives bound into one story by immigration and illness.”
A Mourner’s Thesaurus
“‘Chris is dead.’ Just like that, I was empty.”
