Things in Nature Merely Grow

by Yiyun Li

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.

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.

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, James’s backpack, a backpack. They became objective objects, left behind in strangers’ hands.

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.

Words tend to take on a flabbiness or a staleness after a catastrophe,

There is no good way to say this: words fall short.

The world, it seems to me, is governed by strong conviction and paltry imagination and meager understanding.

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.

The fact is, there is no word for this state I’ve found myself in, in which lucidity and opacity are one and the same.

Those ancient Greeks sing their grief at the highest pitch, which, as Carson pointed out, is rage.

I am not mad. Too well, too well I feel The different plague of each calamity.

“There’s no surprise left for me. No one will ever be able to surprise me after Vincent.”

words are my guilty pleasure. And my joy, too. And the only way I can make some sense out of this senseless life. Words are what I will do for James, too, even if I cannot learn a new alphabet and invent a new language, even knowing, right before starting, the inevitability of failing him.

And yet life is still to be lived, inside tragedies, outside tragedies, and despite tragedies.

am in an abyss.

“The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint.”

This book is about life’s extremities, about facts and logic, written from a particularly abysmal place where no parent would want to be.

“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.

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.

And yet for those who go on living, few can afford simply to be, and very few can be all right. The border between all right and all wrong, like the border between life and death, is not solid.

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?

“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.

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 confirmed by life, they become facts.

A mother’s job is to provide a framework for living: things to do, places to go, days that never fail to break, and nights that always fall.

If I focus my mind on the happy moments, the framework for living seems sturdy enough. And yet it is not an indestructible shelter from catastrophes.

To foresee is to give too much weight to intuition; foreseeing might be waving a white flag prematurely.

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.

I did not feel any anger when Vincent died—not at him, not at life, either. But I did feel baffled and wounded by life. 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.

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.

where can we live but days?”

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.

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.

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.”

Neither of us cried, but I remember thinking James was wilting, and I was wilting too.

Oblivion is a kind of blessing, too, though one I would prefer not to have to experience.

I dreaded sleep, for fear that when the morning arrived, there would be a brief moment—no more than ten seconds—when what had happened and what had not happened seemed interchangeable. I dreaded that plummeting from not remembering to remembering. I would rather stay awake all night so there was no mistake, no illusion, only the abyss from where I could not fall further.

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

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.

time stands still, time feels monotonous, and then time becomes Sisyphus’s boulder.

all these activities are time-bound, and they do not compete 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 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.

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.

What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word?

Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form; Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?

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.

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.