Things in Nature Merely Grow

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 them, and this includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives.

And this, among other reasons, is why I am against the word “grief,” which in contemporary culture seems to indicate a process that has an end point: the sooner you get there, the sooner you prove yourself to be a good sport at living, and the less awkward people around you will feel. Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone. How lonely the dead would feel, if the living were to stand up from death’s shadow, clap their hands, dust their pants, and say to themselves and to the world, I am done with my grieving; from this point on it’s life as usual, business as usual.

I don’t want an end point to my sorrow. The death of a child is not a heat wave or a snowstorm, nor an obstacle race to rush through and win, nor an acute or chronic illness to recover from. What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word?

There is no real salvation from one's own life; books, however, off the approximation of it.

However, I do believe that we learn to suffer better. We become more discerning in our suffering: there are things that are worth suffering for, and then there is the rest—minor suffering and inessential pain—that is but pebbles, which can be ignored or kicked aside. We also become less rigid: suffering suffuses one’s being; one no longer resists.

My garden is not a metaphor for hope or regeneration, the flowers are never tasked to be the heralds for brightness and optimism. Things in nature merely grow. There is no suicidal or angry rose, there is no depressed or rebellious lily. Plants have but one goal: to live. In order to live they grow when they can, and go into dormancy if needed. They live until they die—and either they die as destined by nature or are cut down by other elements in nature. A garden is a placeholder. Flowers are placeholders.

Parents die, and children go on living. It is statistically sound to say that this is the case for the majority of the population. But sometimes children die before their parents. Children die, and parents go on living. Those parents go on living because they do not have many options they either live or follow their children down to Hades. Children die, and parents go on living. Those parents go on living 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.

Life, in an absolute sense, is worth living, just as art is worth pursuing, science is worth exploring, justice is worth seeking. However, the fact that something is worth doing doesn't always mean a person is endowed with the capacity to do it, or that a person, once endowed with that capacity, can retain it. The gap between worth doing and being able to do is where aspiration dwells for the young and decline lies in wait for the old.

Is this life, which may be worth living, worth suffering for? If life is worth suffering for, should there be a limit, or should one have to suffer unquestioningly, all in the name of living?

A mother can do all things humanly possible for children and yet cannot keep them alive.

Many objects outlive people—this thought has often occurred to me when I see in a museum an eighteenth-century pianoforte or a twelfth-century sword or a bowl from 500 BCE. All of Vincent’s belongings and all of James’s belongings have outlived them; not a single item has left our care. There are Vincent’s many paintings hung around the house. There is James’s collection of pocket watches on a shelf. Everywhere I turn in the house there are objects: their meanings reside in the memories connected to them; the memories limn the voids, which cannot be filled by the objects.

Words may fall short, but they cast long shadows that sometimes can reach the unspeakable.

Thinking about my children is like air, like time. Thinking about them will only end when I reach the end of my life.

Fiction, I've learned from writing it and reading it, tends to be about the inexplicable and illogical. Sometimes my students complain about what they read in fiction - I don't believe this would happen in real 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.

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.

I am not a grieving mother. I am the mother who will live, every single day, for the rest of my life, with the pain of losing Vincent and James, and with the memory of bringing them up.

Never feel that you’re obliged to show your pain to the world,” she said. “Very few people deserve to see your tears.

Writing, teaching, gardening, grocery shopping, cooking, doing laundry—all these activities are time-bound, and they do not compete with my children, who are timeless now. There is no rush, as I will have every single day, for the rest of my life, to think about Vincent and James, outside time, outside the many activities of everyday life.

I saw the news and have been agonizing over what to say to you. If there is anything I can do to ease your pain, let me know. You did everything you could to help James find his place in life, but he wanted to leave and one must let go. I, too, was unable to reach him in my very limited way, and I am devastated.

Why would a woman who knew suffering give birth to her children? That question from Vincent—I never had a good answer for him.

Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form; Then, have I reason to be fond of grief? Fare you well. Had you such a loss as I, I could give better comfort than you do. I will not keep this form upon my head When there is such disorder in my wit.

Children die, and they are not happy. And their parents can never know if those children died because they were not happy, or they were not happy because they sensed, too early, that they must face their own deaths.

A mother can cook every meal with great care, but a mother’s care, like a point in geometry, is essential to the order of things, insubstantial in the scale of things.

If one is destined to live as a Sisyphus in an abyss, there is good sense in distinguishing a meaningful boulder from insignificant pebbles. A Sisyphus making a boulder out of a pebble would only become a comedy. In the past few months I've developed a habit of scrutinizing my mind: is this thought a pebble of a thought, is this worry a pebble of a worry, is this question, seemingly unanswerable, only a pebble of a question?

Life in an absolute sense, is worth living, just as art is worth pursuing, science is worth exploring, justice is worth seeking.

When life is full of tasks, obligations, and events, time carries us, too swiftly it seems, for is it not our perpetual protest about life that there is not enough time for this or that? But those who complain about that - myself at different phases of life, too - forget how fortunate they are: Life does not guarantee that time has the capacity to carry us. Time flies, time is fleeting, but then there comes a moment when time, no longer nimble-footed, no longer winged, is for us to carry.

For six years before Vincent’s death, I had lived with a dread that one day he might choose not to live. There were days of concern and nights of anxiety, and there were occasions for despair, but these feelings, I believed, were better kept under a calm surface. The prospect of a fire does not mean one has to carry an extinguisher on one’s back around the clock.

I do believe that we learn to suffer better. We become more discerning in our suffering: there are things that are worth suffering for, and then there is the rest—minor suffering and inessential pain—that is but pebbles, which can be ignored or kicked aside. We also become less rigid: suffering suffuses one’s being; one no longer resists.

Now that I have a garden, I’ve come to understand Trevor’s point: gardening is good training for a novelist. One learns to be patient, one learns to make concessions, one learns to redefine one’s visions and ambitions, and one learns to stop being a perfectionist. A garden is good training for life, too.