Children Die and Parents go on Living

Having just lost my own darling dad, I was looking for silver linings in the bereavement, and one such is that my father had expressed how burying one’s parents is the natural and right way, as they ‘pay their debt to Nature’ as he put it. But he also expressed he felt it would be such tragedy if it was reversed and a parent had to bury a child. So this slim volume by Yiyun Li is a book that made me curious as to how a writer will handle such a painful subject matter:

My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, 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” (p4).

Right from the start Li makes clear she has no anger about her children’s suicides. She says so explicitly, and explains,

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 then, 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” (p46).

In fact, she not only accepts their choice to end their lives, she even lacks a reason for having begun their lives:

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” (p40)

She brings this question up again further along in the book, and still has no answer.

A lot of the book is about how she has coped, though this is not a self-help book, it is in fact, supposed to be a book for James. But a lot of the writing her describes how she has navigated her way through the nightmare of losing two children. Li beautifully describes the careful balancing act that life has become:

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 have chosen to write narratives is an incongruity one has to acknowledge” (p40).

It comes across that Li is chronically distrustful of systems and processes, especially the expected and oft-used ones, refusing to channel her pain down any of these, foregoing the comfort of their social acceptability.

Li also talks of how she manages the grieving process.

Losing a child for the second time, I knew some things to be important: sleep, hydration, small and frequent snacks, daily exercise. Get out of bed at the regular time and never ruminate while lying in bed” (p73)

Li also tell us that the most important of all for her, is ‘radical acceptance’. By that, she explains

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.

I have only this abyss, which is my life. And an inevitable part of existing in this abyss is exhaustion, which the second time, I learnt to accept without protest” (p74)

Some part of this uncompromising facing of reality comes across almost as self-punishment, accepting the sentence of the abyss and coming close to embracing it, in fact. But putting aside the radicalness of her acceptance, Li is wise in making peace with living with loss.

Li may not be angry with her children for their suicides, but she is not always so forgiving of others, especially of well meaning people spouting would-be comforting cliches and sentimentalities, which she condemns as flabby words and flabby thoughts. She is also clearly impatient or even frustrated with being misunderstood.

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 heatwave 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” (p76).

While I do take Li’s point that grieving may not have an easy end point, she seems to have conflating grieving and thinking about her children – surely these two things need not always be mutual? Or maybe they are, for a parent.

She does mention her husband in passing, but she seems not to have drawn comfort or consolation from their shared sorrow. In fact, we barely see her husband in all this, and yet, he is not just her husband, he was father to those dead boys. It is a curious and resonant silence in the book. She also tells us she herself had 3 failed suicide attempts. And that people raised the issue with her whether Vincent’s suicide may have influenced James, particularly as James was very close to his older brother. There are, of course, no possible clear answers, but it comes across that they are a family not particularly wedded to life or living.

To carry on after losing both children, Li tells us

to live only with meaningful placeholders and to acknowledge that they are nevertheless only placeholders” (p85).

Again, that tension of ambiguity, like the intuition that needs to be simultaneously relied on and kept at bay; Li is indeed the artist, who reconciles opposites. But she is also practical, with a Chinese pragmatism: she reiterates again and again, “Do things that work” (p91).

Li clearly wants to be uncompromisingly about facing reality headon, without any softening of the edges. She seems to refuse even comfort. But her strategy seems in itself her way of gaining solace. She does not seem to want to ‘move on’ – such an obnoxious phrase – from her children’s deaths:

We like to set out hearts on a finish line, hoping to take the right actions so that we can reach that finish line fast and with the least hassle or pain. […] as though bereaved parents are expected to put in a period of hard mental work and then can clap their hands and say, I’m no longer heartbroken for my dead child, and I’m one of you normal people again, so now we can go on living as though nothing had happened and you don’t have to feel awkward around me.

               I am not a grieving mother I am the mother who will live, every single day, for the rest of my life, wth the pain of losing Vincent and James, and with the memory of bringing them up” (p155)

It makes me wonder; this was published only 2 years after James’ death. I do wonder, if Li was to write this book 10 years hence, 20 years hence, would she still refuse to countenance living anywhere except in that abyss?

This is quite an elegantly written book, but a little uneven – the first half is far stronger and more coherent than the second half. The second half was getting diffused, and perhaps it is because it is hard to keep holding in such tight rein, that level of pain. Li sees herself as a survivor, of much suffering, and particularly of her mother’s rages, abuse, physical and emotional, and she stresses her ability to endure. Maybe she feels her life has been training which now stands her in good stead to live with the loss of her sons. A poignant line and refrain in the book, is, ‘children die and parents go on living’, the title of her chapter 8 in fact. That sums up Li’s book: the fact, the starkness, the uncompromising facing of her harsh reality.  

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