The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons
March 28, 2025 at 05:30PM“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes in the opening sentence of this New Yorker essay, quoting the police who arrive at her home to deliver devastating news. I struggle to encapsulate this piece and find myself returning to that same phrase. There is no good way to say this: Li lost both of her sons, Vincent and James, to suicide, six years apart, at 16 and 19. In this essay, drawn from her forthcoming book, Things in Nature Merely Grow, Li writes through her grief, exploring the limitations of language and literature, wrestling with the balance between trusting one’s intuition and letting go, and sitting with the impossibility of ever fully understanding another’s inner world. This is a heartbreaking read that will linger long after you’ve read the last line.
When Vincent was around the same age, he asked, pointedly, “You understand suffering, and you write about suffering so well. Why did you give birth to us?” A question for which I never had a good answer.
All those books teaching parents how to take care of their children—the first year, the first eighteen months, the first five or ten years—none of them addresses this difficulty: for parents and for children, the border between reality and unreality is not always clearly marked.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/28/the-deaths-and-lives-of-two-sons/
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