When I heard what Yiyun Li\u2019s new book, \u201cThings in Nature Merely Grow,\u201d was about, my first thought was that I could never read it.<\/p>\n
The book was written in the aftermath of the suicide of her son James in 2024 at age 19, which followed the previous suicide of her son Vincent at age 16 in 2017. These plain facts seem unbearable, a loss beyond comprehension, and I could not imagine an encounter with this kind of grief.<\/p>\n
But soon I could not shake the idea that if someone had been able to write through these circumstances, I had to read it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThings in Nature Merely Grow\u201d is, in fact, not a book about grief. Li writes, \u201cI am against the word, \u2018grief,\u2019 which in contemporary culture seems to indicate a process that has an endpoint: the sooner you get there, the sooner you prove yourself to be a good sport at living and the less awkward people around you will feel.\u201d<\/p>\n
Li goes on to say she is not interested in such endings. \u201cI don\u2019t want an endpoint 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. \u2026 Thinking about my children is like air, like time. Thinking about them will only end when I reach the end of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
The book then is about what Li calls life inside an \u201cabyss,\u201d the abyss marked by the deaths of her children. This is very much still a life filled with activities like gardening, piano lessons, time with friends, and of course writing because Li is a writer. Writing is her work, but it is also more than that.<\/p>\n
The chapters are organized as brief essays extending from an event that triggers thoughts and associations which Li gathers, not necessarily to make sense of \u2014 because this is sometimes not possible \u2014 but to notice. This starts with the opening chapter as she explores the words the authorities used both times she and her husband were notified of a child\u2019s death, \u201cThere\u2019s no good way to say this.\u201d This sentence becomes both a warning to the reader, and by the end, a statement of triumph. There is no way to say this, except over the course of these 23 chapters, many things have been said.<\/p>\n
We come to see James, a savant-like genius who speaks and reads half a dozen languages and is bringing up the Higgs-Boson particle at the dinner table as a grade-schooler. He is shy and kind and we learn that he and Vincent seemed to take a particular delight in each other, brothers and best friends. It feels tragic that these marvelous young people are not in the world, but also miraculous that they had time in the world together.<\/p>\n
Li resists becoming the sage or offering advice. She is living in this abyss, writing from this place that she cannot and in many ways does not want to escape because it is where her children remain.<\/p>\n
After reading the book, I do not know if I truly have any better understanding of what it means to live with this loss, but perhaps this is Li\u2019s point. \u201cThings in Nature Merely Grow\u201d suggests a fatalistic worldview. There is no purpose beyond growth and this growth ends with death.<\/p>\n
These things have happened. Lives continue. What is the alternative?<\/p>\n