When four police officers arrived at Yiyun Li’s home in Princeton, N.J., late on a Friday afternoon last February, she didn’t wait for instructions to sit down. As soon as the detective spoke — “There is no good way to say this” — she sank into a chair in her living room, gesturing for her husband to join her.
Li already sensed the devastating news they had come to deliver, even though she couldn’t fathom it. The detective confirmed the worst. Her son James, a freshman at Princeton University, had died, struck by a train near the campus.
The policemen said they were investigating the circumstances surrounding his death and avoided calling it a suicide. But Li and her husband knew it wasn’t an accident — that James had chosen to end his life, in the same way his older brother had.
A little more than six years earlier, James’s brother Vincent died by suicide at age 16, also killed by an oncoming train nearby. That night in 2017, Li had arrived home to find two detectives waiting for her. The police suggested she sit down before they told her about Vincent, which is why she did so instinctively when they came to deliver the news about James.
After the officers left, Li and her husband, Dapeng Li, sat in their living room, stunned. She felt like time was collapsing around her, as though she was stuck in an eternal present.
The detective’s statement — “There is no good way to say this” — struck Li, an acclaimed novelist, as both a cliché and undeniably true. No words could capture the devastation she felt, losing both of her sons. Shattering, wrenching, aching: Words that came close felt meaningless. But Li knew that words were the only way to anchor her thoughts to reality.
Three months after James’s death, Li started writing “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” a memoir about James, Vincent and how their lives and deaths intertwined. In direct and unsparing reflections, Li confronts not only the loss of her children but the limits of language, as she tries to convey anguish that defies description. The closest she can come to relaying her loss is to say she lives in an abyss, a murky place where no light can penetrate.
“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,” she writes. “Words may fall short, but they cast long shadows that sometimes can reach the unspeakable.”
In some ways, Li’s memoir is a radical rebuke of the conventions surrounding grieving. Early on, she warns those who expect a narrative of healing or solace to stop reading: This is not a story about overcoming loss or moving on.
“I don’t ever want to be free from the pain of missing my children,” Li told me when we met on a sunny day in April at her home near the university, where she teaches creative writing. “This pain is in my life for ever and ever, and I don’t want to do anything to mitigate the pain, because to mitigate it means that’s something bad, it’s an illness or affliction.”
Li was at home with her husband, a software engineer, and their dog Quintus, a white cockapoo with cloudy cataract-filled eyes, who bounded into the living room, still exuberant at 13. Quintus joined the family when the boys were 7 and 10; Vincent chose his name, Latin for “fifth,” because he was the fifth family member.
Li made me a cup of green tea and led me to the sunny sitting room off her garden, where she spends endless hours tending to plants and flowers. She had just planted some Japanese anemones that wouldn’t bloom until the fall, and the yard teemed with vibrant daffodils, hyacinths and tulips. With a hint of pride, Li said she had planted 1,600 bulbs and was pleased that around half of them had sprouted. She fretted about the fate of hatchlings in a wren’s nest nestled low in a rose bush. “You just worry about those little birds,” she said.
Li, who was born in Beijing in 1972, has a round, youthful face and speaks softly and deliberately. Though she comes across as serious and cerebral at first, she frequently broke into smiles and laughter. She joked about what a bad swimmer and mediocre piano player she is, and gently mocked people she calls “silver liners,” well meaning acquaintances and strangers who have tried to assure her there’s life beyond grief.
“People always say, you’re going to overcome this,” she said. “No, I’m not.”
Li told me she often senses that her circumstances make people uncomfortable, especially other parents. She’s also keenly aware that her easy, quiet demeanor and her way of coping by sticking to her schedule — she went straight back to teaching and writing in the days after the deaths of her children — fails to match most people’s assumptions about the devastating aftermath of losing a child.
“People expect a grieving mother to behave a certain way, and I never think I can live according to other people’s narrative,” she said. “There is the expectation you will open yourself up, show your vulnerability, show your progress, all these things I don’t do.”
What’s perhaps most surprising about talking to Li is witnessing her ability to exist in two realities that seem incompatible: one where she’s living in a desolate state she calls the abyss, and another where she finds fulfillment, amusement and even joy in her work, her friendships and her marriage, in little moments and memories.
“To live with pain is possible, you do things in everyday life, you garden, you listen to music, but you’re thinking about,” she said, trailing off, leaving the unspeakable unsaid.
Vincent and James remain a tangible presence throughout Li’s quiet, spacious home. The walls of her light-filled office off the living room are lined with Vincent’s bright, whimsical artwork. Above the mantel is a large painting he made as a young boy, of a child standing in a field with three brown barns and an emerald green pond, against a golden sky. She discovered it after his death, and figured he hid it in a closet because he misspelled his name in his signature.
Elsewhere around the house are family photos, school portraits and knickknacks that reflect the boys’ quirks and obsessions. She keeps James’s collection of pocket watches, the origami animals he folded and the stuffed lamb, named Marmalade, that he got during a vacation to Ireland. She has Vincent’s collection of 47 stuffed penguins.
Li and her husband have held onto all of their sons’ possessions, among them items that were returned by the police — Vincent’s phone, fractured at the corner, and James’s backpack, which held a pencil that had snapped in half. Even mundane objects have become treasures. James’s retainers are in a box on his desk; Vincent’s are on his shelf.
“I cannot do anything about them,” Li said of her sons’ belongings. “It’s quite painful even to move an object. We have our human limits.”
When James was born in 2005, Li’s literary career was taking off. She had abandoned a Ph.D. in immunology to pursue writing, and after enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she’d published some short stories. In 2005, she released her debut story collection, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.” She followed with highly praised novels like “Kinder than Solitude” and “The Vagrants,” which explored the oppression and paranoia of life in Communist China, and went on to accumulate a string of prestigious awards, including a Whiting Award and Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships.
Even as she won accolades for her work and had a fulfilling home life with two bright, curious children, Li fought the pull of depression. During a breakdown in 2012, she felt herself “slipping into unreality” and attempted suicide twice, a bewildering experience she describes in her memoir, “Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life.”
She has wondered if her near suicide influenced Vincent, and how Vincent’s death influenced James, but she refuses to dwell on those questions; the only people who could answer them are gone.
In a devastating coincidence, Li was working on her novel, “Must I Go,” which centers on a woman who lost a daughter to suicide, when Vincent took his life in September 2017.
After Vincent’s death, Li immediately began writing down imagined conversations with her son, telling him about the cheesecake she baked, her clumsy attempt to knit a scarf from the yellow yarn he left behind. The dialogue became Li’s novel “Where Reasons End,” a spare, intimate conversation between a mother and her brilliant, funny, eccentric son who has died by suicide and speaks to her from a vague afterlife. Vincent’s voice came so readily, it felt like he was speaking to her, Li said. “I wanted to have him around for a little bit,” Li said.
But after James died, Li found it impossible to conjure him at first. Unlike Vincent, who was artistic, expressive and outgoing, James was introverted, governed by logic rather than feelings.
Li felt any attempt to capture James in writing was doomed to be “a partial failure,” she said. Still, she decided she would rather fail than not try.
“I had all these thoughts after James died, but those thoughts are nothing unless I think them through in writing,” Li said.
It took her several months before she found the right language to write about him, but once she started, the words came quickly.
“By the time I started writing, I knew it was going to come out all right,” she said, then quickly corrected herself with a quiet laugh that caught in her throat. “I keep saying all right, as though everything is going to be all right, nothing is all right.”
Vincent’s death was shocking, but not entirely unexpected. Even as a young child, he was prone to depression and despair. His fourth grade teacher sent a concerned email to Li about poems he wrote, painful verses reflecting on life and death. A therapist treating him warned Li that he might act on his suicidal thoughts and told her she should be prepared.
There were no similar warning signs from James, who was also in therapy and came across as stoic and resilient, and didn’t exhibit his brother’s emotional extremes or crippling perfectionism.
James loved philosophy, linguistics and science. He sometimes stunned his family as a young child, when he would offhandedly explain mysterious quantum particles or the behavior of obscure deep sea invertebrates at the dinner table. He excelled at languages — he studied Spanish, Italian and Japanese, and taught himself Welsh, German, Romanian and Russian — but often kept his thoughts to himself. In kindergarten, James came home one day wearing a sign he’d written that said, “IM NOt TaLKING Becuase I DON’t WaNT TO!”
Sometimes Li wonders if she failed to notice a downward spiral because James was so self-contained.
A few weeks before his death, James told his mother that he was reading “The Myth of Sisyphus.” by the French philosopher Albert Camus, which opens with the question of whether life is worth living. Li recalled a conversation she and James had around that time, when she told him that most people endure the monotonous or painful parts of life for moments of pure joy. The last time Li and her husband saw James, when they dropped him off at his dorm after dinner the weekend before he died, Li asked what he was reading. James said that he was rereading “The Myth of Sisyphus.”
Looking back, Li wonders if she sensed something then. But she doesn’t allow herself to dwell on whether his death could have been prevented, a trap she fell into when Vincent died, she said.
“When people die from suicide, family who are left behind usually ask, what if? Why?” Li said. “This time I thought, we don’t want to start with those questions, we want to start somewhere else, which was just to accept this is a fact. This was his decision, he died, and there was a reason for him to make this decision.”
One thought kept resurfacing: Li was certain that James trusted in his parents’ ability to survive his death. That unshakable certainty is one of the things that keeps Li grounded and able to go on living.
“He was aware that we would endure this, because we endured it once,” she said. “I thought, we must respect his understanding and we must respect his choice.”
Experiencing a devastating loss for a second time, Li knew she needed to ground herself in routine, she said.
She knew she needed to sleep, stay hydrated, get exercise every day, and to stick to her schedule, continuing with her lap swimming, her weekly piano lessons, her classes at Princeton. She threw herself back into writing, which she does for two or three hours every morning, and recently finished a draft of a new book, a historical novel about a group of musicians, set in early-19th-century Europe.
Li and her husband have continued to travel, something they loved to do with the boys, and to celebrate their sons’ birthdays with homemade cakes. “There’s only one person who knows how I feel — it’s him,” Li said of Dapeng, who prefers to remain private and doesn’t give interviews.
Li has found support from her closest friends, among them the writers Elizabeth McCracken and Mona Simpson, who organized meals for her and her husband for several months, and the editor Brigid Hughes, who came to stay with Li the weekend after James died and helped with the task of alerting Li’s friends and colleagues. A friend later told Hughes that she couldn’t make sense of the message at first, and thought a draft of an old email about Vincent’s death had been sent by accident.
That weekend, Li asked Hughes a painful question: Wasn’t she the worst mother in the world? Hughes quickly replied that they both knew the question was outlandish. One thing Li doesn’t doubt is the depth of her love for her sons, who she always encouraged to be fully themselves. She’s tried to extend that acceptance to not only their lives but their deaths.
“As their mother, I always respected them and tried very hard to understand them,” she said.
While writing “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” Li had doubts about whether she should finish it.
At one point, she asked McCracken to read an early draft and tell her if it was worth publishing. McCracken assured her it was.
“I was astonished by what a work of clear thinking it was, about things that seem impossible to think about,” McCracken said. “To have lost two astonishing children, it’s a life sentence.”
Sitting in her sunroom, Li told me that there’s something she wishes she’d known earlier in her life, so that she could have shared it with her children: that it’s possible “to suffer better,” to be both sad and happy. It’s a place she’s arrived at in recent months. When she’s gardening, when she’s reading, or writing, or listening to music, or taking a walk in the woods with her husband, she feels happy, she said.
“We’re sad, we’re very sad, but we’re not unhappy,” she said. “So long as we live, we carry our love for the children, even though they’re not here.”
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times.
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