Things in Nature Merely Grow

by Yiyun Li

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.

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.

to live only with meaningful placeholders and to acknowledge that they are nevertheless only placeholders.

Because placeholders are neither solutions nor salvations. None of them will play the magic trick of delivering me into another realm, where life regenerates itself through hope and love and wishful thinking. Neither my garden nor my writing will solve what is insoluble in my life. Though there are not that many things in my life that are worthy of that adjective, “insoluble.”

“Bad luck is not gone from these children, but neither is beauty.”

They both journeyed on more resolutely than I would have wanted them to, and they both crossed that great, awful distance after I said my last “I love you” to them.

opening myself only to people who have the real strength and understanding just to be in the starkness of my life with me for a moment.

So this now is as definite and concrete and yet as ineffable and incommunicable as a point in geometry. How long is now: a minute, an hour, six years, half a lifetime? How do you separate now from itself so that it is no longer now, but now and then, or now and later? Now is an extremity, too.

Mothers 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.)

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.

This now is about not the part but the whole of life. This now is more permanent, forever a beginning and always an end. This now, indivisible as a point, an extremity, is where we live.

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.

“Never feel that you’re obliged to show your pain to the world,” she said. “Very few people deserve to see your tears.”

So for you to go directly to the intellectual side of yourself confuses people; so few people are capable of going directly there that they don’t believe you can; they feel you must be ignoring or repressing the reaction that they are sure they would have. It also means that they can’t offer the help that they would want to receive in your place: they can’t wipe your tears, hold you while you wail; it pushes them out of the room, in a way. Hence the loneliness of mourning as you do: not only are you mourning but the form of your grief and your ways of approaching it are not understood, or are misinterpreted.

weeding, weeding, weeding and then one day giving up because weeds are part of nature, too, and things in nature merely grow.

Anything that marks time falls into the realm of the living. The dead, not going anywhere, do not need to mark time. They don’t necessarily help us mark time, either.

A habitat is not always a place of security, but it offers a possible hiding spot. There is no guarantee of safety; only, a better chance at eluding the predators.

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?

There is no real salvation from one’s own life; books, however, offer the approximation of it.

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

“There I turned the corner, and guess who was coming down the hallway? Joan Didion. Well, I thought to myself, if she hasn’t figured out about life, who else among us stands a chance?”

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.

People sometimes say of those who’ve attempted suicide or succeeded that they are selfish, or feebleminded, or attention seeking. People feel hurt, are offended and angry, perhaps out of fear or incomprehension, or perhaps because for once they cannot claim the center of someone else’s story: suicide is among the most absolute and exclusive actions in life.

Those who’ve attempted suicide or succeeded in suicide are not necessarily eager to kill themselves; rather, the pain can be such that nothing short of wiping out their physical existence can end their suffering. People don’t call those with cancer or other illnesses selfish or feebleminded or attention seeking, but in my experience, people tend to be harsh and critical of those who suffer from suicidal depression or other mental illnesses.

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.

Is this life, which may be worth living, worth suffering for? If life is worth suffering for, should there be a limit, or should one have to suffer unquestioningly, all in the name of living?

Vincent lived through his feelings, deep, intense, and overwhelming feelings, and he died from his feelings: a life worth living, in the end, did not prove livable; an acutely artistic and sensitive soul might not always have the means to prevail in this world.

James thought hard: deeply, philosophically, and privately. He died from thinking: a livable life might not be worth the trouble; a livable life, he must have concluded, was not what he wanted.

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.

But wishes are but artificial flowers.

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.

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 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.

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.

Life is a comedy for those who think. I have always believed that thinking, rather than feeling, will stand me in better stead.

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.

They are still young, but it is my job to tell them that sometimes 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.

I have never been an overt rebel, but I have honed my craft as an escape artist all my life.

“The need to keep one thing to yourself and making sure no one can take it away from you.

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 is a natural process. This has never been the case for me or for my children.

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.

There are times in life when the world seems to stand still, and when it turns again, nothing is as before.

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.