‘Radical acceptance’: Yiyun Li lost both her sons to suicide. Her rigorous memoir reveals her as a very special writer
A primer for mourning
The terms very much in my own mind as I read this book were “clarity” and “precision”. Li applies both as she lays out the way such losses alter the world; or rather, alter one’s being in the world.
She reads copiously and cites widely – Euclid, Shakespeare, Euripides, Montaigne, C.S. Lewis, Albert Camus, Henry James, Wallace Stevens. And while she observes there may be consolations in writing and reading, she does not offer either as treatment, or panacea. Instead, she writes:
Writing, offering a transient refuge, is an approximation of salvation, nothing more. Who among us stands a chance facing an abyss?
There are no empty consolations, no promises of resolution. But there is a great deal of wisdom and discussion of how one might come to understand and accommodate loss. Manifestly, she loved and continues to love her sons. But “more important than loving”, she writes, “is understanding and respecting my children, which includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives”.
In this respect, the book is something of a primer for those who mourn. She models how she came to the point of radical acceptance, and offers insights and advice to the freshly bereaved. For example: get enough rest; eat, and exercise; work; find ways to live in this new state.
Because, she writes:
If an abyss is where I shall be for the rest of my life, the abyss is my habitat. One should not waste energy fighting one’s habitat.
Not consoling, but wise
Things in Nature Merely Grow is an essay as much as it is a memoir. An essay in what death can mean, and does mean, and might be. An essay on suicide; on the loss of a child or children; the complexities of parenting; the joys of loving.
It unfolds the paths that emerge from initial shock through to capacity to reflect on what this entails. It is – and I use the term advisedly – wise. It draws on literature, philosophy, maths: all that deep knowledge we humans have been collecting over centuries and millennia.
Do they provide consolation? Probably not. But they provide context. And context can bring at least an intellectual understanding – and hope that an emotional understanding, or at least an accommodation, might follow.
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