2017 – 16. Male. RIP.

2024 – 19. Male. RIP.

Brothers. Second generation Chinese immigrants in USA. Their mother, a writer who lost both of them to suicide.

Where Reasons End (2019) by Yiyun Li, after Vincent’s death.

I read this book when it was first published. An imagined conversation between her and her older son, Vincent who lived ‘feelingly’. Sixteen chapters, one for each year of his life. It has a witty and mischievous tone. Nicholai, a name he gave himself, chides his mother’s new embrace of cliches and adjectives. “If you’re protesting by becoming a bad writer, I would say it’s highly unnecessary,” he says. (“Dying is highly unnecessary too,” she shoots back.)

Things In Nature Merely Grow – Pulitzer Prize Finalist 2025, by Yiyun Li, a memoir. She wrote it within two months of her younger son, James’ death. I feel deeply for her and with her but I am not sure I want to read that book right now. A few lines from it sing true:

“I am in an abyss. If an abyss is where I shall be for the rest of my life, the abyss is my habitat.”

“My children were not my burden. My sadness is not my burden.”

“I am very realistic in that I would always acknowledge that I am limited as their mother. I was limited, and I am still limited as a mother, so I can only do my best.”

When people hold an expectation that her grief must have an end date, she retorts, “How lonely the dead would feel, if the living were to stand up from death’s shadow, clap their hands, dust their pants, and say to themselves and to the world, I am done with my grieving; from this point on its life as usual, business as usual.”

“This is a very sad fact of our lives, they took their own lives knowing we would accept and respect their decision.”

Could I accept and respect Saagar’s decision one hundred percent? I believe it was not his decision. It was his utter helplessness and desperation in the face of his illness, his unsuitable antidepressants, lack of medical care, his isolation, his inability to recommence his education, our inability to talk about it and so much more. He was driven to it. It was not by choice. Anyone who knew him, knows that. I do understand though.

I understand, my darling.

References:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/05/where-reasons-end-yiyun-li-review#

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/17/author-yiyun-li-on-the-suicide-of-both-her-sons