Yiyun Li’s Latest Memoir Illuminates My Responsibilities and Limitations as a Parent

Early in Yiyun Li’s latest memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, she writes of parenthood: “There are many ways for things to go wrong, and yet one’s hope, always, is that somehow they will turn out all right in the end.” That combination of “blind courage” and “wishful thinking” are prerequisites for any parent, and in many cases they’re enough. “A mother cannot sit in front of her child’s bedroom all night long,” she argues. “A mother cannot follow a child’s every step of life, just so that she can make sure he remains alive.”

Any parent, no matter how helicoptery or anxious, would be hard-pressed to disagree. In Li’s case, however, a dreadful fact lurks beneath the truism: her two sons died by suicide as teenagers, six years apart. She has written previously about the death of her older son, Vincent—Li is an esteemed professor and prolific author of both memoir and fiction—but this book, drafted in the aftermath of James’s suicide, resounds with the absence of both her children and reckons with her status as a mother “who can no longer mother”.

Li—an economical writer whittled to austerity by these successive tragedies—has produced a book which is slim, spare, and almost devoid of emotion, more philosophical treatise than moving tale of a mother in mourning. This makes it difficult for the reader to connect with her experience, but Li’s pursuit of radical acceptance may necessitate her intellectual remove. As she puts it, “sometimes poetic words about grief and grieving are only husks…sometimes people don’t have the luxury to wallow in clichés.”

Li is not much of a wallower regardless. She writes that the book is “written from a particularly abysmal place where no parent would want to be.” She knows it’s Sisyphean to climb back out, and so doesn’t even make an attempt. Instead, she picks back up her piano lessons, resumes writing, and settles into the weary rhythm of her new existence. “If an abyss is where I shall be for the rest of my life,” Li declares, “the abyss is my habitat. One should not waste energy fighting one’s habitat.”

You might wonder how much of a masochist I must be to plunge into Li’s abyss alongside her. Doubly so, since I am both the mother of young children and the daughter of a man who died by suicide—which makes their odds of suicide greater as a result. My 11-year-old son is also trans, which confers its own harrowing statistics around self-harm. I hesitated to read Things in Nature Merely Grow even as it pulled me in like a black hole: stories of suicide, and stories of losing a child, threaten to puncture the armor I’ve fashioned to make it through each day. But, once in a while, I am compelled to look. If we don’t understand profound vulnerability, we can’t access profound love. In the absence of that, what is life for?

Despite my own past descents into depression, my periodic panic attacks and unrelenting (though well-medicated) anxiety, the thought of suicide has never intruded on my consciousness. As I told my therapist early in our relationship, “The only scenario in which I could conceive of wanting to kill myself would be if both my children died.” Until encountering Li’s heartrending narrative, my imagination had only stretched as far as a car accident or plane crash—now the notion of losing them in successive suicides haunts me, when I let it.

This is why I insist on giving them the concepts and language to discuss their inner lives, however turbulent. It’s been my approach from the beginning, along with being open and honest in an age-appropriate way about their grandpa’s suicide despite the pervasive stigma.

In the spring of 2021, my newly vaccinated mom was coming to visit for the first time in months. While my husband and I raced to tidy up the house, E. and S., then seven and four, were absorbed in a Zoom art class; we listened in from the kitchen.

“Would anyone like to tell us about their drawing?”

E. unmuted. “I drew a picture of Gaga, my grandma. She’s on her way here, and I’m so excited!”

“That’s great. Will you hold your paper up so everyone can see?”

His paper fluttered as he tried to angle it just right.

“What a beautiful drawing! Is it just your grandma or is anyone else coming with her?”

“Not our grandpa!” S. chimed in, her little voice still rounded by a toddler’s soft sounds.

“Oh, why not?”

E. cut in. “Because he’s dead. He killed himself.”

I raced toward them as time turned to Jell-o.

“Before we were born.” S. added.

The teacher’s face froze. “Um…. I’m so sorry to hear that. That must be really sad.” Her eyes searched the mosaic of boxes for help, just as I reached the laptop.

“Yes, it is.” I hit mute and slammed the screen shut.

I sat next to E. on a burnt-orange chair. “Remember when I told you about my dad’s suicide?”

“Yes, Mama. I was really sad for you.”

“Me too,” S. chimed in.

“I said then and I’ll say it now: it’s okay to tell people your grandpa died before you were born. But it’s better not to share how he died. Lots of parents don’t talk about suicide with their kids, so they might be confused or afraid. We talk about it because we don’t keep secrets in our family. You two can never think or feel or do something scary or bad enough to make us stop loving you. You can always come to me and Papa. You know that, right?”

“Right, Mama. But what should I say if someone asks me how he died?” E. was a step ahead of me, as usual.

“Maybe just that…his brain stopped working?”

“It must have stopped working if it told him not to keep living, right?”

“Right.” I left it there. It’s a fine line between being instructive and forthright with my children about dark or controversial matters—like sex, politics, and their grandpa’s suicide—and leaving them susceptible to society’s penchant for shaming in a way that’s unfair to their guilelessness. So much of parenting boils down to this tricky balance between preparing our children for the world and protecting them from it.

Parents who lose their children, Li writes, “either live or follow their children down to Hades”. The ones who live do so “because death, though a hard, hard thing, is not always the hardest thing. Both my children chose a hard thing. We are left with the hardest: to live after their deaths…Dying is hard. Living is harder.”

In its own context, living was certainly harder for my dad. I’ve pieced the narrative of his suicide together from fragments, clues. But I know him almost like I know myself. The rationale, the response, it all makes sense to me. Like the suicides of Vincent and James make sense to Li.

Of course, any insight I have to offer derives from inference and projection, not the marrow-sticking pain of lived experience. Our situations are an inversion: I lost my parent; she lost her children. The onus was not on me to keep my dad alive—but that is the most fundamental responsibility I have to my children. The drive to ensure the survival of our offspring (and of the species) is encoded in our DNA and manifested in the deepest, most reptilian quarters of our brains. How gut-wrenching it must be to feel like you’ve failed at this evolutionary mandate.

I don’t wonder whether I could have, should have, done more to stop my dad, not that I knew what was in the offing. Those questions are impossible for either of us to answer because, as Li puts it, “on this side of death no answer can be trusted.” It was also his life to end.

Li views her sons’ suicides in a similar vein. “It seemed to me that to honor the sensitivity and peculiarity of my children—so that each could have as much space as possible to grow into his individual self—was the best I could do as a mother. Yes, I loved them, and I still love them, but more important than loving is understanding and respecting my children, which includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives.”

That perspective, controversial as it is in a culture which places primacy on happy endings, may be necessary in retrospect. I agree, in part. I know better than to discount my fortune that my narrative as a parent continues in the present tense, while Li’s has crashed to its conclusion. I can love E. and S. here in front of me, hold them, project them into the future. I can still mother as a verb. To the end of my days, I hope. An essential aspect of that mothering involves the first part of Li’s sentiment: that we should honor our children’s peculiarities so that they can grow to be their own individuals. I couldn’t endorse that more. Our children are not carbon copies of us; they exist outside our experience. No one has argued this more eloquently than Andrew Solomon in Far from the Tree, in which he writes, “In the subconscious fantasies that make conception look so alluring, it is often ourselves that we would like to see live forever, not someone with a personality of his own.” 

In order to prop up those fantasies, adults often discount children’s self-awareness and identity formation. This comes into play when parents refuse to relinquish control over decisions as mundane as what their children eat, wear, and read—and even more insidiously when adults deny children the right to assert their gender identity. 

Today’s toxic climate offers countless examples of this diminishment, as adults from the White House, Supreme Court, and Elon Musk to local school boards and sports leagues deny the self-determination of trans and nonbinary kids and teens out of fear. They worry about what will happen if children are allowed to develop and grow without the pressure of their parents’ thumbs forcing them into the desired shape. This is far from a new concern in our culture: from the Fifth Commandment to Locke’s “blank slate” or even the lengths to which the Wormwoods go to quash precocious Matilda’s curiosity, the dominant narrative is that children do not, or should not, have agency. From fascists on down to patriarchs, parents, it’s all about control.

As the cisgender parent of a trans child, I have had to jettison any semblance of control from the moment my son came out to us in fourth grade. Transness is the epitome of what Solomon coins “horizontal identities”, those aspects of ourselves which are not handed down from our parents by nature or nurture but diverge from their own experience and, often, escape their understanding. Since then, my understanding has unfolded alongside E.’s transition—as has my determination to help others empathize and accept.

A piece of hate mail I received in response to my recent essay in HuffPost says the quiet part out loud: “Your daughter is going to regret the day she decided to transition and look to you as the adult who should have had her best interests at heart and exercised mature judgment with regard to life altering steps at 11 years of age. Do you recall when you were 11 years old? Unless you were a child prodigy, I seriously doubt you had the maturity to make any drastic decision about what you wanted to be as an adult.”

My son E. is smart, empathic, and mature beyond his years. When he came out, he’d only landed on the language to describe his transness a week or so earlier but arrived at the dinner table with a fully fleshed out understanding of his identity.

“Mama, there’s something I need to tell you,” he said while awaiting his cheeseburger, his serious tone incongruent with his broad smile. “I’m trans. My pronouns are he/him. And I’m changing my name.”

He looked happier than I’d seen him since kindergarten. His “best interests” are exactly what we acted on, when his dad and I embraced him as the person he knew himself to be. What hubris it would be to think we know him better than he does. 

To be human is to live with existential dread. Parenting magnifies that dread exponentially. But, in order to function, we must keep it tucked away in some inaccessible recess of our minds, must tell ourselves we are in control even when the evidence across millennia threatens that necessary delusion. One of the ways we maintain the pretense is by transforming experience into narrative. Shaping and sharing our stories. The storyteller exerts a mastery of causality, linking events into chains which seem to add up to truth. In the retrospective, however, one is left with the feeling that the story could have had a different ending.

This is especially true of stories that end in suicide. We perceive the act as a decision—which leaves open the possibility that the deceased could have chosen otherwise. That their survivors could have intervened to change the outcome.

From the moment I heard my dad had killed himself, however, I understood and respected it. Like Li in the wake of her sons’ suicides, I felt in the aftermath like that reaction was more sublime than love, or perhaps its ultimate manifestation. However, while Things in Nature Merely Grow offers readers Li’s philosophical musings on this, it fails to grapple with what James’s state of mind actually was, dismissing it as irrelevant or insignificant. In doing so, she creates the unintended perception that she felt neither responsible for it nor capable of trying to help.

“Parenting—is that not the ultimate effort to hold a place for children, so that, to the best of one’s ability, they can be given all they need to grow?” Li wonders, but quickly dismisses it as futile. “The children are bound to outgrow the space the parents provide.”

Yet even in light of that, we must do anything, everything, we can to protect our children and keep them alive. This is our most fundamental responsibility as parents—not just understanding them, and emphatically not asserting dominion over them—even if that alone can’t always prevent the worst from happening. Our limitations do not obviate the need to do whatever we can. They make it more important.

As fertile as I’ve found this foray into existential dread, I have to put it back on the shelf. Parenting in the present vs. the past requires that separation from the theoretical. The day-to-day takes place on a more physical and practical plane, and my children demand every ounce of functionality I can muster.

Still, beyond meeting their needs on the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy, it’s incumbent on me to make sure they have the space to imagine a life for themselves. A life that’s authentic and right to them—no matter the extent to which it exceeds my own imagination.

“It’s been my experience that adults…are extremely good at underestimating children,” Li writes. “A 10-year-old already has the capacity to understand life’s bleakness.” They also have the capacity to know themselves, if not always the words to express it.

But allowing E. to self-actualize is not only about honoring that ability. It’s also about the basic need to keep him alive. According to the Trevor Project, 46 percent of trans and nonbinary youth have seriously considered suicide in the past year and 16 percent made an attempt. Living in a supportive home reduces the incidence by a third. When E. came out, supporting him was our only option.

In this fractious climate, however, our support of his transition—social and then legal and medical—is insufficient. We must also ensure he can survive the bleakness, which is why my husband and I are doing all we can to help create a future our son wants to live in, not just imagine.

We have to hope that it’s enough.