Novel Readings

There is no good way to say this—when the police arrive, they inevitably preface the bad news with that sentence, as though their presence had not been ominous enough . . .

There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged before I go on with this book. My husband and I had two children and lost them both . . .

I wrote a little bit about Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End, first in 2019, when I could only imagine, and again in 2022, when I no longer had to. I didn’t actually say much myself either time. “Some books,” I said in 2019, “are hard to write about. Imagine how hard this one was to write.”

When I reread it, it was because I was still looking for and sometimes finding comfort in what seemed like the right words. I didn’t bring my critical self to the book, and I can’t bring it to Things In Nature Merely Grow either. Well, I probably could, but I don’t want to: sometimes, what I want from words is to let them do to the work. I appreciate the work Li has done with her words here, again. Her experience is not exactly my own: she is herself; her sons are themselves; she has lost them both. Loss may be universal but every loss is intensely specific. There are also ways in which I don’t actually find Li that congenial a writer, or a thinker. We are not the same person, the same kind of person, at all, I don’t think.

Still, she says things in this hard, painful, honest book that I completely understood and was glad to have articulated. Some of them are things that, for various reasons, I have not been able to say, or not wanted to say, myself. It turns out that there are good ways to say them: unadorned, unapologetic.

As before, then, excerpts.

1.

I did not feel any anger when Vincent died—not at him, not at life either. But I did feel baffled and wounded by life. That a mother could do all things humanly possible and sensible for a child but still could not keep him alive—this was the fact that I would have to live with, I thought, every single day, for the rest of my life. It was Vincent’s death that made me begin to use that phrase, “every single day, for the rest of my life.”

2.

I don’t want an end point to my sorrow. The death of a child is not a heat wave 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.

The only passage in which grief appears in its truest meaning is from King John, when Constance speaks eloquently of a grief that is called madness by others in the play.

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form:
Then, I have I reason to be fond of grief?

3.

That a mother can do all things humanly possible for a child, and yet she can never understand the incommunicable vastness and strangeness of the world felt by that child; that a mother cannot make the world just a little more welcoming so the child feels less alone; that a mother cannot keep that child alive—these are facts I have to live with now, every single day, for the rest of my life.

4.

We like to set our 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 and pain. Perhaps this urge reflects a desire to mark time in a different way: to harness time for gain. And yet in life, time cannot be harnessed.

Marking time after a child’s death is not about overcoming grief or coming out of a dark tunnel—all those bad words sound to me as though bereaved parents are expected to put in a period of hard mental work and then 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.

How often we return to the problem of time, as we go on living, eventually learning—at whatever cost—to seem “normal” again. (“Children die,” Li repeats throughout the book, “and parents go on living—this too is a fact that defies all adjectives.”) “Until the end of time” is also what A. S. Byatt said about her son: “He is dead . . . that will go on and on till the end of time.”