Things in Nature Merely Grow

by Yiyun Li

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.

There are many ways for things to go wrong, and yet one’s hope, always, is that somehow they will turn out all right in the end. Just all right, we say to ourselves, out of blind courage, out of wishful thinking, both indispensable for a parent.

Intuitions are narratives about potentials, possibilities, and alternatives. In that sense, intuitions are fiction, until, once confirmed 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 into 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 prematurely.

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.

You did everything you could to help James find his place in life, but he wanted to leave and one must let go—for

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.

I am against the word “grief,” which in 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.

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.

things in nature merely grow until it’s time for them to die.

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 later; only now and now and now and now.

Every single day, as I pause in the middle of typing, or cooking, or reading, or practicing on the piano, or as I pause on the stairs, going up, going down, I can hear myself say: How did this happen? How can this be possible? How did I end up in this extremity called my life? It is a fact that these questions, unanswerable, fill in the gaps between two moments. They are not pebbles. They are not temporary. They make up that boulder that I cannot carry out of my abyss; my only way, so far as I can see, is to coexist with this boulder, in this abyss. Two hands, barely touching or with fingers intertwined, what difference does it make?

we all live in stories that cannot be fully told; very few people in the world deserve our tears.

There is no shared abyss; we each dwell alone in our own.

I know suffering, and I have written well about suffering, but I also know that one’s relationship with one’s suffering can change. 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 and 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 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.

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 acknowledgment, and it is not understanding or forgiveness, neither of which I will give.

I tried to kill myself. And the very last thought on my mind was seemingly logical: if I’m losing my grip on this real life and slipping into unreality, I would prefer that my children do not have to deal with a mother gone mad.