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Books|‘I Don’t Ever Want to Be Free From the Pain of Missing My Children’
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/books/yiyun-li-grief-things-in-nature-merely-grow.html
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The Great Read
Only by writing could the acclaimed novelist Yiyun Li grapple with the suicides of her two sons. But her new book is no ordinary grief memoir.
May 16, 2025Updated 11:59 a.m. ET
When four police officers arrived at Yiyun Li’s home in Princeton, N.J., late on a Friday afternoon last February, she didn’t wait for instructions to sit down. As soon as the detective spoke — “There is no good way to say this” — she sank into a chair in her living room, gesturing for her husband to join her.
Li already sensed the devastating news they had come to deliver, even though she couldn’t fathom it. The detective confirmed the worst. Her son James, a freshman at Princeton University, had died, struck by a train near the campus.
The policemen said they were investigating the circumstances surrounding his death and avoided calling it a suicide. But Li and her husband knew it wasn’t an accident — that James had chosen to end his life, in the same way his older brother had.
A little more than six years earlier, James’s brother Vincent died by suicide at age 16, also killed by an oncoming train nearby. That night in 2017, Li had arrived home to find two detectives waiting for her. The police suggested she sit down before they told her about Vincent, which is why she did so instinctively when they came to deliver the news about James.
After the officers left, Li and her husband, Dapeng Li, sat in their living room, stunned. She felt like time was collapsing around her, as though she was stuck in an eternal present.
The detective’s statement — “There is no good way to say this” — struck Li, an acclaimed novelist, as both a cliché and undeniably true. No words could capture the devastation she felt, losing both of her sons. Shattering, wrenching, aching: Words that came close felt meaningless. But Li knew that words were the only way to anchor her thoughts to reality.
