Children Die, and Parents Go On Living

ONCE YOU ARE a mother, you are a mother forever. You are a mother before your child is born, you are a mother once your child becomes too large to fit in your arms, you are a mother when your child no longer needs you. You are a mother when your child leaves this earth before you do.

Yiyun Li is a mother who has lost both of her children—her two sons: Vincent, who died at age 16 in 2017, and James, who died at age 19 in 2024. Each chose to end their lives by suicide. I use the language of “suicide” intentionally here; Li makes her disdain for euphemisms clear, given that their primary function is to make other people feel more comfortable. That is not her responsibility. Her responsibility is to her children. Should it be your desire to be made to feel more comfortable, should “a mother using the word ‘died’ or ‘death’ offen[d] your sensibilities,” then, “dear readers,” as Li writes near the beginning of her new book, Things in Nature Merely Grow, “this is a good time for you to stop reading.”

Losing both of your children, no longer having their living physical forms as proof of their existence, does not mean that the relationship between mother and child ends. Instead, it must take a different form. Li, whose medium is writing, uses words to conjure up her children again in the pages of two books, each constructed with respect to both of her sons’ ways of existing within and experiencing the world.

The first, Where Reasons End, written in the wake of Vincent’s suicide and published in 2019, is structured as an imagined conversation between a mother and her dead son. The volume was published as fiction “because it could only be called that: no dead child has ever come back to have an argument with his mother.” The second, Things in Nature Merely Grow, is the book Li wrote after James’s suicide and published this spring, a work of nonfiction in which she uses language to reconstruct thought, attempting to reconfigure the particular, astonishing complexity of her son’s mind—all the while knowing that it will be merely that: a reconstruction.

Li’s project evokes the title of Elizabeth McCracken’s masterful 2008 memoir of the stillbirth of her first child: An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination. I’ve always taken that title to mean that the living child McCracken later births is a replica of the dead child who lived only in her imagination. For Li, perhaps, the books she has written for her two sons are precisely that: replicas of them as they continue to live in her imagination. The “book for Vincent,” as Li often refers to it, is a book that captures his curiosity, his tenacious spark, their passionate mother-son sparring; it “was as much written for Vincent as it was written by Vincent.” James, on the other hand, “resisted metaphor and evaded attention,” making the task of summoning his essence in literature effectively impossible. Li understands this from the outset but chooses to write the book anyway. It is this understanding of the inherent impossibility of bringing James back that makes the resulting piece of writing so remarkable: “Anything I write for James,” she acknowledges,

is bound to be a partial failure. Sooner or later there will come the moment when my understanding parts ways with his essence. I can ask questions—answerable or unanswerable—but it is likely that by the end of the book I will have failed to find the right questions, just as I will have failed to pinpoint the exact moment when James’s contemplation of suicide shifted from Vincent’s to his own.

Within those sentences, which appear near the beginning of Things in Nature Merely Grow, Li arrives at what I believe is the essential project of the book: the conflation of her inability to recreate James in writing and her inability to have predicted his suicide. And yet, with painstaking care, Li resists reflecting on James’s death as if it had been preventable. Her work, and perhaps also her life, is dedicated to honoring her children and respecting the choices they made, which means not only writing in the vein of the distinct lives each lived but also repeatedly referring to their deaths as deaths, using the word suicide, again and again, so that we must acknowledge what it is that happened to them, what they chose, that they existed. That they exist still.

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Things in Nature Merely Grow has an organically cyclical nature. There are refrains and repetitions, like mathematical equations, like philosophical conceits, like musical compositions—like James. Two of the most hauntingly affecting are products of one another, a play on a line in Camus’s Caligula (1944), which James had been rereading before his death: “Men die; and they are not happy.” As Li observes,

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.

Li reinvents the line as “Children die, and parents go on living,” and she often returns to the image of two hands “barely touching or with fingers intertwined.” Each time these lines appear, they mean something slightly different. Each time, that meaning is clearer.

Another unexpectedly compelling facet of Things in Nature Merely Grow’s composition is the frequent inclusion of voices outside of Li’s, in the form of emails, conversations, and telephone calls from close friends—which feel like her conduit for communication much in the same way her son James, who had a predilection for silence, turns toward logic, philosophy, and existentialist literature in order to speak. The book is given weight from the people who kept Li and her husband alive after the death of their children. That is never explicitly stated, but one feels the intensity of what these interlocutors mean to Li: people willing to look with her to see her dead children, to name them, to wonder into Vincent’s and James’s lives and their respective decisions to end them.

There are two such inclusions—one near the beginning of the book and the other near the end—that serve as pillars holding the project together. The first arrives in the form of an email to Li “precisely an hour and a half after [James’s] death” from a friend who was one of James’s professors. “You did everything you could to help James find his place in life, but he wanted to leave and one must let go.” Li repeats the line in italics, ruminating on how deeply the friend understands James and understands the unforgiving nature of life itself. Like Li, I found myself repeating the line and rereading it countless times, feeling the words somewhere underneath my skin, knowing what it means to love someone fiercely whose experience of the world brings them astonishing pain. Recognizing that your desire for them to live is a desire that does not account for their suffering.

Li’s decision to braid the narrative of James’s life and his death with fragments of speech and writing she received in the wake of his suicide is one of the many stylistic choices that ensures the book transcends genre conventions. Things in Nature Merely Grow is a textured, living record of Li’s unfathomable loss. Beyond that, it is an invitation to the reader to carry the unimaginable with her. It is an insistence: rather than turning away from the horror or gawking from a distance, it is necessary to sit inside the room where she and her husband are greeted by police officers for a second time to learn that their last living child has died.

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At one point in the book, Li invokes the concept of assisted suicide, choosing to refer to it with that precise term rather than the elegant, somewhat poetically veiled death with dignity. I pondered this as I read. What does it mean for society to embrace one’s decision to wield power or to assert control over the end of their life when faced with a terminal physical illness in late adulthood, and why are we comparatively unable to understand that some younger people live every day of their lives with a pain that is unspeakable, a pain that makes living no less of a torment? “Those who have learned swimming in their childhood tend to swim unthinkingly,” Li reflects, after beginning swimming lessons following her sons’ deaths. “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.”

Just as the mother character in Where Reasons End never asks her dead son, a portrait of the late Vincent, why he has killed himself, Li rarely wonders in Things in Nature Merely Grow why James has ended his life. The answer to that question will not change his death, and the answer, for her, is not unfamiliar. Toward the book’s close, Li describes a visit from a friend who asks “how much [Li] thought James’s suicide was connected to Vincent’s.” “Do you think,” the friend ventures, “that Vincent’s suicide might have given James a sense of possibility?” Another mother might fall apart at this question or become enraged, but Li feels gratitude. Her friend is willing to stare directly into the abyss of child loss with her, to ask a potentially off-limits question, which then allows Li—who is moving through the book as James might, leading with logic and reason—to ask herself: “How did my suicide attempts affect Vincent? Did I, by trying to end my life, also make him see that as a possibility to end his own suffering? Was I the person to have pointed at what separates life from death and said, Look, that partition is not as solid as people make it out to be?”

Exercising (as ever) extraordinary control and restraint, Li refrains from opening this line of inquiry until the very end of Things in Nature Merely Grow. Before this inclusion, knowing that Li has been open, in the past, about her own suicide attempts, I felt shadows of the shield Joan Didion put up in Blue Nights (2011), the memoir she wrote after the death of her only child, her daughter Quintana. While Didion’s posture of distance is a signature of her style, I’ve always found Blue Nights less narratively satisfying than Didion’s earlier memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), which follows her husband John’s unexpected death. In the latter, Didion exhibits traces of vulnerability that undercut her persona, but Blue Lights seems less interested in contending with the thorny complexities of a parent outliving their child. Li is a very different writer from Didion, though they share an aversion to sentimentality and are each masters in their own right. Li, for her part, chooses to see and see and see and see, reflecting and refracting the image of her hospitalizations for suicidal ideation and her sons’ successful attempts.

A reader, naturally, might ask, following the logic Li herself embeds in the narrative: What might have happened had Li been able to write these books for her children before? To capture their essence while they were living, trace the shadows of their deaths earlier? Which, invoking Li’s preference for bluntness, is another way of asking: Could she have prevented their suicides? But it’s a false question, or, to use a term from the book, it is a pebble of a question: “Better kick the pebble out of your way instead of letting it stop you.” It is a pebble of a question because it presupposes that the deaths of Li’s children are her fault, it places the blame—the responsibility—on the mother. It puts the onus on her children living on her; it disregards the very likely possibility that they were deeply loved and that even that was not enough to make the pain of their lives livable. It disrespects James and Vincent’s choices as much as it does Li’s own.

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Li does not discuss her suicide attempt fully until the second half of the book. She similarly waits until we’ve become familiar with James in the pages of Things in Nature Merely Grow before, indirectly, mentioning certain aspects of his identity that might provide fodder for investigation or assumptions about his decision to die. Initially, when these details appeared, my mind returned to Didion as I contemplated whether Li was protecting herself by withholding; then, I was reminded that, just as Li’s every word is painstakingly chosen, her every decision is measured, calculated, and weighed. Here, she ensures that the reader does not assume the role of detective to try to find clues or answers about James’s death, because doing so is a reductive act. His life is not a puzzle to be solved. Any attempt to do so is dismissive and pathologizing. The answer to his death is not what this book is about.

This book is about James. At the same time, it is, in some ways, about Vincent and in others, about Li herself. Li has long alluded to the unhappiness of her childhood in communist China and her mother’s inhumane cruelty, but it is in Things in Nature Merely Grow that she lays bare her mother’s astonishing abuse. I suppose it is naive to consider a mother inflicting pain on her child as astonishing, but what is certainly astonishing is that in all of Li’s work, it is here, in this book for James, that she most bluntly presents her mother’s staggering violence.

In a late section titled “Things I Never Told My Children,” Li writes about the beatings she endured at the whims of her mother. While the physical violence is devastating, what is arguably more devasting is the psychological violence Li’s mother inflicted, including inventing a game of isolation in which an imagined twin of Li is a child finally worthy of love. Throughout her childhood, Li’s mother asked her: “[D]o you want a dead mother or a mad mother?” In response, Li now writes: “Nobody knew that I had always thought a dead mother would be better than a mad mother,” adding, “That thought too was on my mind when I felt too bleak to live: it’s not my children’s job to keep me alive; in fact, it’s my job to protect them from myself, if I cannot save my sanity.” After Li’s suicide attempt, her mother’s response was “Why did you do that to me?” The question positions Li’s mother herself at the center of her daughter’s pain, rather than attempting to understand or acknowledge it.

Intergenerational trauma defies language. We hold the wounds of our parents inside us: whether or not we’re aware of it, the violence is there, and our children may well feel it. Li’s decision to write about her mother now, then, in the wake of her children’s suicides, reads like an act of defiance, an act of freedom. It is a direct rejection of her mother’s question; just as Li is not responsible for the deaths of her sons, her sons are not responsible for the pain she experiences as she goes on living.

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Toward the book’s close, Li includes a section titled “Minor Comedies—for James,” whose tone takes on an almost childlike glee—if one can ethically use the word “glee” in the space of child loss. Still, glee is the word that occurs to me each time I recall the section of text in which Li seems to inhabit the joy James might’ve felt had he been able to witness her dedicating a substantial portion of the book to publicly exposing the people who have behaved horrifically toward their family in the wake of the children’s deaths—so horrifically that their actions verge on comedy. There is a freeness to the prose in this section that feels shocking for a writer who is an artist of precision.

The way Li playfully embraces vengeance feels both refreshing and somewhat dangerous. Suddenly, no one and nothing is safe: in a scathing paragraph of uncharacteristic catharsis, Li directly addresses the Chinese media and tabloids who ran salacious and crude headlines about the deaths of her children in conjunction with her perceived role in their suicides as well as the many visitors she and her husband were forced to host who inflicted their own harm. Most notable is the mother of one of Vincent’s friends, who came to “file a complaint about [Li’s] dead son.” To them, she now writes: “I am sorry for whatever losses you have suffered or whatever deficiencies you were born with that make you, unavoidably, who you are and what you are.” The descriptions of utter inhumanity serve as a reminder of the difficulty inherent in being human, a feeling Li and her children know intimately.

There is no redemption arc in Things in Nature Merely Grow, no hero’s journey, no arrival at a deeper meaning of life after the compounding tragedies of Vincent and James’s suicides. Instead, there is an astonishing act of what Li refers to as “radical acceptance,” the only form of control she can assert on the tragedies of her life, which is to acknowledge them, which is not to try to play a god that she does not believe in, which is not to try to imagine (at least not for long and with very little indulgence) what might have happened if she had mothered her sons differently, what might have happened if her sons had discovered a world in which they could live—though, of course, they have one now. It is the world she has made in the books she wrote for them.