Things in Nature Merely Grow

To think our former state a happy dream:

From which awaked, the truth of what we are

Shows us but this: I am sworn brother, sweet,

To grim necessity.

Sometimes, walking around the house, among the objects I study closely or only glance at, I recite Richard II’s woeful words to myself. And yet I am not that dethroned king, our house is not a museum or a shrine, and our past is not merely a happy dream. I am not awakened, as I have stayed awake; I have been attentive and alert throughout all those years as the mother of my children. The necessity I face has no need of that adjective, “grim.” Necessity—my necessity—is an extremity: any adjective is an irrelevance when it comes to extremity.

When the New Jersey Transit detective expressed his surprise at not being able to find Vincent’s record, I only nodded as though to say such things were expected: life is a muddle, bureaucratically, factually, metaphorically. I was eager for him to leave so my husband and I could have the backpack to ourselves.

But sometimes—just sometimes—things make a little more sense upon revisiting. I wouldn’t have solved that small mystery about the police agencies had I not started this book for James. “The book for James”—for months I have been talking about it with my friends Brigid and Elizabeth, calling it “the book for James,” just as once I was writing “the book for Vincent.”

Inevitably there comes that moment when the book—which takes up one’s time, energy, mental space, even life—becomes a book. And then it’s no more than an object, bearing a title, going on its own journey, parting ways with its author. This has happened to every book I’ve written, including the one for Vincent.

That earlier book—“the book for Vincent”—arrived without any conscious planning. One night, I was reading an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel, in which a character addresses her mother as “Mother dear.” Mother dear—a phrase sounding archaic and yet ever lively and present—Vincent used to jokingly call me that when he wanted my attention. So the book arrived, opening with that phrase.

Vincent died at the end of September; by the end of November, I knew the book was finished. This time, I was conscious that I hadn’t written a single word for James in that time frame. I kept telling Brigid that I knew the book was there; only, I couldn’t find a way to write it.

Those who knew Vincent all knew that he would have loved the book for Vincent. He would have been proud and amused; he would have found fault with some of the sentences; he would have added a few adjectives and adverbs where I’d insisted on keeping sentences unadorned. The book, in which a mother and a dead child continue their conversation across the border of life and death, was as much written for Vincent as it was written by Vincent.

But in life James resisted metaphor and evaded attention. If Bartleby and Hamlet could merge into a singular being, James might have occupied that space with some comfort. (“‘Seems,’ madam? Nay, it is; I know not ‘seems’” and “I would prefer not to.”)

Brigid, quoting the opening line of a novel I had written some years ago—“Posterity, take notice!”—explained my difficulty to myself. A mother writes a book after her child’s death, and that book could become a child’s request for attention. James, Brigid said, is the antithesis of attention. It would be nearly impossible to write for James, she said; it feels as though you have to learn a new alphabet before you can write anything this time.

Learning a new alphabet—for weeks and months I’ve held on to that notion. James was a different child than Vincent, and James’s death left us in a different place than Vincent’s death. And yet a new alphabet can only be symbolic, as I have but this old language to work with. Words tend to take on a flabbiness or a staleness after a catastrophe, but if one has to live with the extremity of losing two children, an imperfect and ineffective language is but a minor misfortune.

There is no good way to say this: words fall short.

And yet these two clichés speak an irrefutable truth. Anything I write for James is bound to be a partial failure. Sooner or later there will come the moment when my understanding parts ways with his essence. I can ask questions—answerable or unanswerable—but it is likely that by the end of the book I will have failed to find the right questions, just as I will have failed to pinpoint the exact moment when James’s contemplation of suicide shifted from Vincent’s to his own.

II A Matter of Facts

There is no good way to say this. Facts are the harshest and the hardest part of life, and yet facts, unalterable, bring with them some order and logic.

Fiction, I’ve learned from writing it and reading it, tends to be about the inexplicable and the illogical. Sometimes my students complain about what they read in fiction—I don’t believe this would happen in life, or, I don’t believe any parent would do that to their children. What can I say to a young person who has strong convictions but a failure of the imagination? Not much, really. The world, it seems to me, is governed by strong conviction and paltry imagination and meager understanding.

In eighth grade, Vincent quoted C. S. Lewis in his application for a highly selective prep school in California—“I fancy that most of those who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years”—and went on to catalog the thinking he had done. Sometimes I give the Lewis quote to my undergraduates, and more than half of them—after having made it all the way to an elite university—express disbelief. When are you going to start thinking?—I try very hard not to ask the students, whose faces are cloudlessly young. They must be extraordinarily fortunate and extraordinarily clueless if they cannot believe it possible for them or for others to have done a great deal of thinking in the first fourteen years of their lives.

I have no doubt Vincent and James both did their share of thinking, which will remain a solace for me. And yet, one can always point out the opposite. No one commits suicide unthinkingly.

A few weeks before Vincent’s death, we decided to purchase a house we all liked (we had just relocated that summer to Princeton). Vincent pointed out what would be his “suite”—a spacious bedroom, a bathroom, and a small study with a dormer window overlooking a tree, which looked nondescript in the fall, but would be blooming when spring came again: a dogwood tree.

The suite could be separated by a door from “the parents’ living quarters,” Vincent pointed out, a perfect setting for him. He also envisioned baking in the kitchen and helping me improve the garden, which did not look too impressive: the couple who’d occupied the house before us, both economists, were not keen gardeners.

Vincent died on the day we put down the deposit for the house. Deposit, death, in that order, four hours apart. I would never have put those two things on the same day in a novel. In writing fiction, one avoids coincidences like that, which offer convenient metaphor, shoddy poignancy, and unearned drama. Life, however, does not follow a novelist’s discipline. Fiction, one suspects, is tamer than life.

Some fiction is tamer than some life, I should amend. And I confess that this is only a variation of a statement made by Clare Aubrey, one of my favorite characters in Rebecca West’s Saga of the Century trilogy. Clare, upon discovering her husband’s extramarital affair, rereads Madame Bovary and exclaims, “But art is so much more real than life. Some art is much more real than some life, I mean.”

In this life of mine, which makes some fiction feel pale and feeble, there are other facts that I need to establish before going on with this book.

Vincent and James were born three years, four months, and six days apart. The gap between their deaths: six years, four months, and nineteen days. These numbers and dates are carved into my mind more deeply than they could be into stone, but they convey very little.

To travel from Princeton to New York we have the choice of departing from either Princeton Station or Princeton Junction. This is an astonishing fact, though minor in the scale of things. I don’t think I’ve developed a preference between the two. I leave from one station or the other, depending on my schedule and also on how finicky the train service is on that day. My husband has a more consistent way of dealing with this small problem. So at least in one specific aspect of life, he has certainty.

My feeling, not only about the departing stations but about almost everything in my life, is something else altogether. Call it a combination of keen attention and “a profound indifference” (borrowing Camus’s words), or a combination of intense emotion and an equally intense apathy. The fact is, there is no word for this state I’ve found myself in, in which lucidity and opacity are one and the same.

The day after James’s death, I said to Brigid, “One has to muddle through this life.”

That statement was not accurate. There was something stark and piercing in me, which was much closer to clarity than to muddle, but calling it a muddle took less effort. It was as though I were averting my eyes from a mirror, which reflected my mind to me in such an unrelenting and sharp manner that I was startled by myself, frightened, even. By looking away one could imagine a muddled image, vaguer, softer, and less unsettling.

“But you’re not muddled,” Brigid said. For over twenty years she’s been the first reader of my writing, and she never lets a wrong word or a weak sentence slip past. “You’re the least muddled person at this moment.”

True, my mind was not—and is not—muddled. Only, language is limited. So here’s Exhibit A: a new alphabet and a new vocabulary cannot be found to describe how I feel.

Though I wouldn’t call myself a sworn sibling to grim necessity, nevertheless necessity has been in everything I do since James’s death. Gone are the days when I could afford some degree of automatic living in everyday life: shoes slipped on thoughtlessly (the pair of sneakers that used to be next to my shoes are in a different place now), a local detour taken without conscious thought (this road would lead to the corner where I last said goodbye to James), a quick stop at the university cafeteria (where my colleague and friend Ed and I both hid our faces when James, who was a freshman at Princeton, walked past us; he didn’t notice us).

Necessity dictates that attention should be given to all details in this after-time: everything is relevant, everything has weight, and everything leads to a moment in the past, which becomes a memory, which in turn becomes a narrative. When a line of coral-colored hyacinths called Gipsy Queen bloomed next to the garden fence in March, I reminded myself, every time I walked past, to slow down and study them. James was the one to have loved this specific hyacinth; I used to prefer Delft Blue.

Necessity also dictates that all the details should be noticed and filed away without any excessive feeling.

After Vincent died, I read and reread Grief Lessons, a collection of Euripides’s plays translated by Anne Carson, and Constance’s monologue in Shakespeare’s King John, after she lost young Arthur, who had been robbed of his throne and then his life. Those ancient Greeks sing their grief at the highest pitch, which, as Carson pointed out, is rage. Their grief and their rage are nearly untranslatable, as though feelings in extremity can only be physical sensations—the language assails the readers with a blind and blunt force. Constance, when chastised by Cardinal Pandulph for her lack of composure (“Lady, you utter madness and not sorrow”), retorts:

I am not mad: this hair I tear is mine;

My name is Constance: I was Geoffrey’s wife:

Young Arthur is my son, and he is lost.

I am not mad; I would to heaven I were,

For then, ’tis like I should forget myself.

Oh, if I could, what grief should I forget!

Preach some philosophy to make me mad,

And thou shalt be canonized, cardinal.

For, being not mad but sensible of grief,

My reasonable part produces reason

How I may be delivered of these woes,

And teaches me to kill or hang myself.

If I were mad, I should forget my son,

Or madly think a babe of clouts were he.

I am not mad. Too well, too well I feel

The different plague of each calamity.

The ancient Greeks and Constance might have said something I could not find words for after Vincent died, and yet this statement is not entirely accurate. Those mothers in the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies voiced their sorrows at a higher pitch than mine. I did not lose my words and I was not at a loss for words when Vincent died. I wrote a book for him.

I also, on one occasion, wept. A few weeks after Vincent’s death, Brigid and I went to see a production of King Lear in New York. By the time Lear finished his howling monologue, I was weeping; I went on weeping when we left the theater, sitting on the edge of a stone planter, in the center of which a small tree was shedding its last leaves. When I stopped crying, I said to Brigid, “There’s no surprise left for me. No one will ever be able to surprise me after Vincent.”

How one misspeaks, and how one misspeaks in extremity. James surprised me more than Vincent did, but this time, I know not to make any statement of finality.

This time, rereading Euripides and Shakespeare, I have a different reaction: make Constance’s words a hundred times shriller, make those Greek mothers’ cries a hundred times more piercing, and I would say, this is close to how I could express myself, too; only, I would prefer not to.

The truth is that however I choose to express myself will not live up to the weight of these facts: Vincent died, and then James died; through writing, I was able to conjure up a Vincent in the book written for him, but I will not be able to do this for James—I cannot conjure him up in any manner.

When Vincent was alive, we talked and we argued (sometimes affectionately and sometimes contentiously). It was only natural that our endless talking in life would extend itself to where reasons end, where across the border of life and death words retain their vivacity. The book for Vincent was published as fiction because it could only be called that: no dead child has ever come back to have an argument with his mother.

Two years after Vincent died, his friend Joy visited us and told me she had read the book. “It’s so uncanny,” she said. “All those things he said in the book were just the things he would’ve said. When I was reading it, I thought, Vincent is back!” She laughed and then broke into tears.

Vincent had many good friends, and many, when he died, said things along the lines that they would always remember him. Joy, however, uncannily prescient at sixteen, expressed her fear that as years went by, she would not be able to remember Vincent as clearly as she wanted.

At least I’d given Joy a book to go by, I thought then.

I once edited out a few adjectives from Vincent’s writing when he was in sixth grade, which led him to protest: “Adjectives and adverbs are my guilty pleasure!”

Well, then, words are my guilty pleasure. And my joy, too. And the only way I can make some sense out of this senseless life. Words are what I will do for James, too, even if I cannot learn a new alphabet and invent a new language, even knowing, right before starting, the inevitability of failing him.

James loved languages, though he was not a verbal child. He had been uncharacteristically talkative with Vincent, but with the rest of the world he had preferred silence. That silence became more pronounced after Vincent died.

The summer before James went to college, he confessed that he had done little in his senior year of high school but read five major works of Wittgenstein. I started to read Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, on James’s recommendation. A few weeks later, I told him that I had difficulty grasping what I was reading.

Oh, he replied with a single word, which could mean, not surprising, or, how could you not understand Wittgenstein, or, I don’t know what I can do to help you, or, simply, read on.

This morning, I reread the introduction to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which opens with this paragraph: “This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if there were one person who read it with understanding and to whom it afforded pleasure.”

It’s a solace to know that James found philosophical pleasure in language, different from the pleasure Vincent had got from language, which was poetic, musical, and sensual.

It’s an impossible task to write a book for James. It will have to be done through thinking, rather than feeling; that is how I will reach for an approximation of understanding James. Or of not understanding him—just as I might spend my days reading Wittgenstein, not knowing if I’ve got anything right.

III Found in an Abyss

(And a Disclaimer for Those Who Are Not the Right Readers)

A few weeks after James died, I wrote to Jane, a colleague who works in theater: “Our life seems to have entered the realm of Shakespearean dramas or Greek tragedies.” And she replied: “Your losses are indeed epic and unfathomably hard; no language of mine can meet that.”

And yet life is still to be lived, inside tragedies, outside tragedies, and despite tragedies. Writing this book is a way to separate myself from that strange realm while simultaneously settling myself permanently into that realm.

One can write about facts feelingly, one can write about feelings matter-of-factly, but one should never evade facts. So here I am, in a dire place, which few parents live in (at least in a contemporary setting, where life is not ravished by man-made or natural disasters). I’ve decided to write this book starting with a single established fact: I am in an abyss.

We—my husband and I—are in an abyss. But I shall keep his part to a minimum in this book. He is the only other person who has experienced these losses; losses for which people use the adjectives “unimaginable” or “unfathomable” to describe them. But my husband is a private person, and I believe in Marianne Moore’s words: “The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint.”

So, here’s the fact: I am in an abyss. I did not stray into the abyss. I did not fall into the abyss. I was not bullied or persecuted by others and thrown into the abyss. Rather, inexplicably and stunningly, I simply am in an abyss.

I am not lost. The feeling of being lost—a disorientation akin to despair—occurred briefly after Vincent died. I remember, after dropping off James at school, driving under a leaden sky, thinking that there was nowhere for us to go.

But that thought of having nowhere to go, just as the statement that no one would surprise me after Vincent died, was an expression of hyperbole, which is unavoidable in anguish: feelings, unexamined, present themselves as thoughts; even, facts.

This time I have been careful not to mistake feelings as thoughts or facts. My feelings: stunned, but not lost. My thought: I am found in an abyss.

Some people (especially in China) make a fuss about my using the word “die” when I talk about the deaths in my life, equating this linguistic decision to coldheartedness or evil.

Indeed there are euphemisms one could use. The word “euphemism,” coming from Greek euphēmismós and meaning the substitution of an auspicious word for an inauspicious one, may imply sensitivity, but it may also imply cowardice. It is the latter, rather than the former, that puts people in the mood to censor and demonize.

Death, particularly suicide, cannot be softened or sugarcoated. After Vincent died, a couple of mothers asked me if they could tell their children—Vincent’s peers—that he had died in an accident. That they preferred to lie to their children, even though the truth would surely reach those children through their friends, baffled me. I explained to the mothers that their proposal seemed to me a disrespect of their own children and a violation of Vincent’s memory. Not calling a fact by its name can be the beginning of cruelty and injustice.

A few days after James’s death, I told my friend Elizabeth, half-jokingly, that I would write a self-help book about radical acceptance. Radical acceptance was what sustained me then. The questions of whys and hows and wherefores or the wishful thinking of what-ifs: these questions naturally arise after any catastrophe, as they did after Vincent’s death. But this time it feels to me that those questions, which function as a series of counterarguments against a fact, are useless; even, a violation of James’s essence.

Those questions easily slip into the realm of alternatives. In writing fiction, one works with alternatives. “What E. M. Forster has called the ‘flat’ character has no alternatives at all”—Elizabeth Bowen said in her essay on novel writing. But in life, death does not come with an alternative.

My only grasp of the situation—then as well as now—is to accept that James, like Vincent, chose death, and James, particularly, chose the same way to die as Vincent. Reality, which can be conveyed in many ways, is better spoken of in the most straightforward language.

Elizabeth listened to my proposed self-help book and replied that most people would throw it across the room before finishing page 1. People would not want to read a book about radical acceptance, Elizabeth said; they would rather not imagine themselves in situations that require the practice of radical acceptance.

So, dear readers: if a mother using the word “died” or “death” offends your sensibilities (a journalist from China featured my word choice in a profile of me, which led to disapproval among Chinese readers); if you believe that “love” is a magic word that will make everything all right (as did one of my readers, who confronted me on a book tour, asking me how I could have attempted suicide if I had ever loved my children); if you think I’ve erred by not putting my life in the loving hands of thy god (as an ex-friend of mine believes, telling me after Vincent’s death that he was sent by God and taken away by God so there was no reason for me to feel too sad); if you think suicide is too depressing a subject; if the fact that all things insoluble in life remain insoluble is too bleak for you; and if you prefer that radical acceptance remain a foreign concept to you, this is a good time for you to stop reading.

This book is about life’s extremities, about facts and logic, written from a particularly abysmal place where no parent would want to be. This book will neither ask the questions you may want me to ask nor provide the closure you may expect the book to offer.

I’ve always refused to use the word “grieving” and I’ve rarely used the word “mourning”—for reasons I shall explain later. This is not a book about grieving or mourning.