Carolin

“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.”
― 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

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