★★★★★ | Memoir | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
There are levels of hell on earth that only a parent who has lost a child have traveled. YiYun Li, a successful novelist and mother of two, lost her oldest son to suicide seven years ago. Her youngest son, James, whom this memoir is loosely about, took his life last year in the same fashion as his brother. In this memoir, Li pays tribute to James and shares what it’s like for a mother to lose her children to suicide.
Li is a gifted writer. The language here is sparse and omits any emotional flourish. She is clear-eyed and honest about her experience. As someone who has lost a child, I could only read this in small doses. I can’t imagine how difficult this was for her to write.
Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone.
One of the incredible things about books is when an author writes something so beautiful and so recognizably true, but you could never have grasped the thought on your own. Most readers won’t understand, but a few, the ones who never chose to be part of this unfortunate club, will nod their heads, and cry, and set this book down in meditative thought many times during their reading.
There’s advice here for friends and family of someone who has lost a child. What do you say? What should you never say? The consoling friend who says: I know what you must be going through, my two sons are away at college and I never see them, as if an empty nester’s plight is the same as a grieving parent. Or those who make it about them, saying they understand, they’ve lost a pet, or an aunt, or a parent. No, no, no, you don’t understand.
Kindhearted and well-intentioned people: don’t make those comparisons. These messages are not compassionate; they are clueless, even egotistic. It’s all right not to understand the situation—neither do the parents! And it’s more than all right to acknowledge that you cannot find the right words—I, a professional who has worked with words for twenty years, can’t either. It’s not quite all right when you make yourself the center of the message: no need to remember your own losses, and no need to provide advice about how to overcome grief from your own triumphant experience.
There is no happy ending. This isn’t the kind of loss you ever recoup. Li writes: “Our life is never going to be all right again, but we are doing all right.” And this:
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’s often very little you can say to someone who has suffered this kind of loss. But sometimes words from a fellow sufferer can get through. This book for me has been like that. A cool glass of water in hell.
Favorite Highlights
The world, it seems to me, is governed by strong conviction and paltry imagination and meager understanding.
The border between all right and all wrong, like the border between life and death, is not solid. For the past few months, I have replied to friends’ queries with this line: “Our life is never going to be all right again, but we are doing all right.”
Knowing something that may or may not happen in the future does not exempt one from the tasks of living.
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”
— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
Children die, and parents go on living. 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.
The night after Vincent died, I sat up all night, not daring to lie down. 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.
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.
Things in nature merely grow—the line has become a reoccurring thought after James’s death—things in nature merely grow until it’s time for them to die.
There is a tragedy, and some people’s social and religious conscience decrees that they must be present: to their minds they must be doing things that work. For whom, though? Sometimes people want to play a part in a tragedy that is, thankfully, not theirs personally: that, too, is doing things that work—for their own psychology.
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.
There is no real salvation from one’s own life; books, however, offer the approximation of it.
Despite catastrophes, I am still myself—this, I’ve learned, is not necessarily obvious or even graspable to some friends; not all of them treat me as the intellectual equal of my old self.
Inevitably there were people who wrote that they understood our pain because, though they hadn’t lost a child or they didn’t have children, they had lost a parent or a beloved pet. Kindhearted and well-intentioned people: don’t make those comparisons. These messages are not compassionate; they are clueless, even egotistic. It’s all right not to understand the situation—neither do the parents! And it’s more than all right to acknowledge that you cannot find the right words—I, a professional who has worked with words for twenty years, can’t either. It’s not quite all right when you make yourself the center of the message: no need to remember your own losses, and no need to provide advice about how to overcome grief from your own triumphant experience.
There are times in life when the world seems to stand still, and when it turns again, nothing is as before.
— An unidentified German poem
Related books: Finding Meaning by David Kessler, Grieving Dad by Mark Seidman, Mr Ives’ Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos