tuls

“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.”
― Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow

“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?”
― Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow

“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.”
― Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow

“I think the heart is kind of like a string.

It's difficult and hard, and there are times it can't be helped. And that's because it hurts as if a string, stretched across the chest, is being torn apart. Like strumming a guitar string tightened to its limit.

Sometimes it snaps, and you think it can't be fixed anymore.

But, if you put a new string like this, and have someone fix it for you, won't the wound heal, even just a little bit?”
― Natsuki Kizu