Both of my sons took their own lives. But I'm still a mother – they're just not here any more

Telegraph

21-05-2025

For more than 20 years, being a mother was the framework of Yiyun Li 's life. It was what she spent most of her time thinking about: what to feed her sons, how to entertain them when they were younger, and how to guide them as they grew into teenagers.
While she would eventually become a novelist, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and a professor of creative writing at Princeton, she was always a mother first.
'I still am. I just don't have my children here to be a mother,' says the 52-year-old with quiet acceptance.
In 2017, her son Vincent died by suicide, aged 16. Seven years later, in 2024, her younger son, James, also died by suicide, aged 19. They were both found at the same railway spot.
Ever since, life for Li has been experienced as a series of 'nows'. Time absorbed by one moment after another.
Where can we live but days? 'I recite that Philip Larkin poem to myself nearly every day,' says Li over Zoom. Morning light streams in through the windows behind her, illuminating the spring-green leaves of the trees outside. Nature and its rhythms have been a source of grounding for the writer since she lost both her sons.
How does one even begin to talk to a parent about such a terrible loss? It is something Li has thought about a lot.
'There's no good way to say this,' were the words uttered by the police officers on both occasions when they arrived at her home. It was a cliché, but actually Li admits: 'I don't think there's a better way to say those sentences.'
'Words fall short,' is another cliché now familiar to her.
There are the bad clichés, too. The crusaders for 'silver linings' who told her, 'You will reach the end of the tunnel.'
'Those are not for the mourning parent. They are platitudes,' she states.
To spend time with Li is to sit on the edge of the abyss of her grief. It's an awkward, but not unpleasant, place to be thanks to her generosity and warm spirit. Li has written a book, Things in Nature Merely Grow, an elegy for the two remarkable sons she lost to suicide.
They were close but very different. Vincent was vivid, flamboyant and intelligent. The 'feeling' brother. James, the 'thinking' one, didn't draw attention to himself. He spoke eight languages, having taught himself Welsh, German, Romanian and Russian on top of the Spanish, Italian and Japanese he learnt at school. His phone was set in Lithuanian. However, he was extremely quiet, almost non-verbal. In his senior year at high school, he read the five major works of Wittgenstein, including the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
When someone loses two sons to suicide, there are obvious questions. Human curiosity demands to know how such a terrible tragedy could occur.
The unease that suicide creates in others is now very familiar to Li. 'Suicide makes people uncomfortable,' she says. 'They think someone needs to be blamed. It's only human nature to say, 'Those parents must be monsters.''
She speaks from experience. Li and her husband have lost friends. Some of the harshest criticism has emanated from her home country of China. Mothers get even more of the blame, says Li: 'The urge people have to put me on a moral trial is sad, but fascinating too.'
The one question people don't ask, she has learnt from talking to other parents who have lost their teenage children to suicide, is how much these parents have done for their children.
The reality is that Li and her husband provided a safe and stable family environment for their two sons. Far safer than the ones they themselves grew up in. They each had a difficult parent. For Li, the experience of being raised by a physically and emotionally abusive mother meant that she was all too aware how harsh the world can be.
By contrast, Vincent and James's childhoods were cocooned in love. The family travelled: to Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Croatia. The Li parental philosophy was that they would spare nothing to bring the children to see the world.
As a society we talk about giving children the tools to live. Now, Li questions whether we have taught children how to suffer and go on living a meaningful life while tolerating those pains. 'Even I feel I didn't teach them well enough how to suffer,' she says.
They were both sensitive and unusual children. 'People expect children to fall into the norm and I think my children happened to be very different,' explains Li.
She recalls taking Vincent to soccer club when he was five years old. A normal thing for a boy his age to do. Vincent, though, had the words to penetrate the moment: 'You just want me to be like everybody else.'
While the family resisted a formal diagnosis of depression, he struggled with being a teenager. For instance, how cruel a locker room can be for middle-school boys.
'He was extremely perceptive and articulate and sensitive and all these things were probably in the end against him,' says Li. 'That combination of traits does not necessarily mean the world is going to be kind and accepting.'
Meanwhile, James, who had been uncharacteristically talkative with Vincent, and silent with the rest of the world, fell into a more pronounced silence after his brother died.
Does Li think he would have taken his own life if Vincent hadn't died?
'My belief is that James would have lived,' she says. 'It was a tremendous loss in his life which we could not help. He was closest to his brother. They were best friends.'
At the time, she and her husband couldn't understand quite how deeply he felt the loss. 'He was an introvert and did not interact with the world easily.'
Regret isn't something that fits into Li's world view. Alternatives belong to the world of fiction where characters start out with alternatives at the beginning of a novel and as it progresses, lose those alternatives.
'I don't think that's how life works,' says Li. 'If you say you have regrets, that means we go into the realm of alternatives. What if we signed Vincent up to the soccer club? It's against my principle to treat life as alternatives.'
Still, she admits, 'I wish I did this or that' thinking is inevitable for parents who have lost children.
For her it is the moment she did not speak to James about a line in Camus' play Caligula that he read obsessively in the months before he died. 'The first line was about suicide and I did not ask him how he felt at the moment.'
In the months since, she has chosen a path of radical acceptance.
'I let them grow and at some point, they sort of left this world. That's how I look at it, they made their decision to end their lives. It's very sad.' Li smiles, but the expression hums with pain.
Her wish is that suicide were better understood, that there were less stigma about it being a selfish act.
'People who die from suicide, it's not that they don't love themselves or the people they leave behind. They are in such extreme pain that there's no way for them to end that pain except by ending their life.'
Li speaks from experience. In 2017, she published Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, a memoir of her own battle with suicidal depression.
Even now, she must protect herself from that path: 'One thing I always say is you can be sad and depressed but you cannot be depressed and agitated at the same time. Agitation is not good for people.'
Her new framework acts as such a defence. It is one filled with gardening, swimming and taking piano lessons. There are also hours of reading and writing, of course.
'I feel exceptionally fortunate that I am a writer. I know people who have been through these things and they don't have words for,' says Li. 'I like the notion of being able to process through my own words.'
Loneliness is part of the deal. What she feels is something that only her husband can possibly understand.
They have well-intentioned friends who want her to stop feeling sad. And those who can sit with her in her sadness without trying to fix things. 'I will feel sad every day for the rest of my life,' she says.
But sadness is not unhappiness. She is not a dour person, 'heavy like a hippopotamus,' she smiles. 'I do take great pleasure in many things, accepting that I feel very sad about my life.'
There are visits to the farmers' market, lunches with friends, where there will be laughter. One question she never asks herself is, 'How could this be?'
'I have come a long way in life and realise many things are possible. Sometimes, things happen that are inexplicable.'
This is her habitat now. 'I don't want to waste my life, time and energy fighting my habitat if sadness is where I am at.' Instead she will remember her sons for who they were.
'Both my children had rich inner selves. They had such a deep understanding and feeling about the world. That will not be ended by their deaths. I always remember how they have lived so fully of being themselves.'