When 4 law enforcement officials arrived at Yiyun Li’s residence in Princeton, N.J., late on a Friday afternoon final February, she didn’t look forward to directions to sit down down. As quickly because the detective spoke — “There isn’t any good solution to say this” — she sank right into a chair in her front room, gesturing for her husband to hitch her.
Li already sensed the devastating information that they had come to ship, though she couldn’t fathom it. The detective confirmed the worst. Her son James, a freshman at Princeton College, had died, struck by a practice close to the campus.
The policemen mentioned they had been investigating the circumstances surrounding his demise and prevented calling it a suicide. However Li and her husband knew it wasn’t an accident — that James had chosen to finish his life, in the identical means his older brother had.
A bit of greater than six years earlier, James’s brother Vincent died by suicide at age 16, additionally killed by an oncoming practice close by. That evening in 2017, Li had arrived residence to seek out two detectives ready for her. The police instructed she sit down earlier than they advised her about Vincent, which is why she did so instinctively once they got here to ship the information about James.
After the officers left, Li and her husband, Dapeng Li, sat of their front room, shocked. She felt like time was collapsing round her, as if she was caught in an everlasting current.
The detective’s assertion — “There isn’t any good solution to say this” — struck Li, an acclaimed novelist, as each a cliché and undeniably true. No phrases may seize the devastation she felt, dropping each of her sons. Shattering, wrenching, aching: Phrases that got here shut felt meaningless. However Li knew that phrases had been the one solution to anchor her ideas to actuality.
