A Reflection on Yiyun Li and the Grief We Were Never Meant to Finish.

Some books teach. Some books inspire. Some books comfort.

Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow does none of those things — at least not in the ways I expected. I picked it up because she lost two sons, and I wanted to sit with how she was processing that and perhaps find some sense of closure in my own process. Her loss seemed, from the outside, far greater than my own. I lost my son Nick to cancer. I came to this book carrying that.

I quickly realized it was not written to bring me closure or comfort. It was written to challenge me to think of grief in a completely different light:  We cannot close the impact of death. We adapt.

What I found was a rare and raw commitment to telling the truth far more honestly and authentically than I expected.

Written after the deaths of both of her sons, this is not really a book about grief. In fact, one of its most striking qualities is Li’s discomfort with the words grief and grieving themselves. She seems to recognize that those words carry some assumptions about recovery, healing, acceptance, and closure. The culture expects grief to be a process that will culminate in some kind of destination. Li refuses that framework entirely.

I have long appreciated the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — with “meaning” added as another stage years after her first book. I have always believed those stages were never meant to be sequential, and I’ve resisted the complaint that people have about it being too linear.  I’ve always known that stages to be like dimensions of grief, not steps in a ladder. But we read them as a ladder. We work through the stages. We arrive at acceptance. We find meaning. We close the chapter.

Li refuses that architecture entirely and does so with great candor

As I read, I began noticing how saturated our language after loss really is with the assumption of an ending. We say things like moving on with my life or laying down my burdens or finding peace with it or getting back to normal. These aren’t malicious phrases. They reflect a deeply human hope. But they build a scaffolding around grief that doesn’t hold.

Understanding that was freeing, not frightening.

What Was and What Is

Li does something simple by naming the obvious. Her sons were her sons, and still are. She was their mother, and still is. Death changed the relationship. It did not end it.

That landed harder than I expected, because I know it to be true.

On the drive home the day after Nick died, I felt his presence with me in a way that was unmistakably real. I remember thinking that he now knew more about me than I had ever particularly wanted him to know — and somewhere in that, somehow during that drive, Nick and I both laughed about it.

That is not the same as acceptance. Acceptance, for me, happened much earlier. I watched the team at Nick’s hospital work a code like I’ve watched dozens of times before. I was in a clinical mindset and knew the steps they were taking, the risks and rewards they were weighing. And then, suddenly, I realized, “This is my son.”  That shift — from observer to father, in a single breath — made this different from any other time I’d witnessed.  I was immediately filled with emotions, and then I realized that his death had already happened.  I was at the bedside when he took his last breath, and I knew that he had high quality CPR within seconds of that happening, yet I knew there were no signs that those steps were likely to bring him back.  After several minutes, I accepted that he had died. Some might argue that I was in denial until that moment, but I have come to understand that acceptance was my first stage.  It was reality, and my grief was anything but over.  

Kübler-Ross was right that acceptance is not the end. Li helped me understand why: acceptance is not a resolution. It is a moment. It comes and goes. It is not something you achieve and keep. Even when Kübler-Ross added Meaning as a stage, it was not intended to mean that we can find a final closer in making meaning from what happened.  Even after that, the other stages return again and again.  

Meaning-making is different. It has always seemed essential to me — not as a stage to pass through, but as an ongoing spiritual practice. The way I understand spirituality is fundamentally relational: a quality of connectedness running through everything and everyone around us, living and dead. The metaphors we use — heaven, resurrection, transcendence, karma, reincarnation — all point toward the same reality. That connectedness does not end at death.

Nick was my son. He is my son. I was his dad. I am his dad. That is not a sentiment. It is simply what is true.

Sitting with It

In meditation practice, I have learned that when something troubles you, the most useful thing you can do is sit with it — because in sitting with it, you discover that it is related to you but also, somehow, separate from you. That makes it possible to release it, even if only for a while. It may come back, but you can simply sit with it and release it again. That is not resolution; that is life.

Li seems to live in that same register. The effect, finally, is a book that reads less like a grief memoir and more like a meditation on love. The breadth and depth of it. The fears that come every day. The love that remains anyway.

Much of what we read about grief assumes that healing is the goal. Li offers something rarer: permission to stop trying to turn loss into a story of recovery. Her sons were her sons. They still are. Parenthood, like love itself, does not get cancelled by death. The question underneath this entire book — What does it mean to remain a parent when your child is no longer alive? — never gets a tidy answer. That is the point.

Less about Closure; More about Initiation

If you come to this book looking for comfort and meaning in the conventional sense, I want you to be prepared. It is not desperate or despondent. It is not practical or encouraging in the way that most grief books try to be. It does not offer steps or promises.

It is real, authentic, and in places, quietly difficult.

But that difficulty is not a flaw. Some losses are not problems to solve. Some sorrows are not wounds that close. And sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is acknowledge what is true and learn to live within that reality — not beyond it.

Things in Nature Merely Grow will not give you closure. But it may give you something better: company in the long walk of a love that never dies.

© 2026 J. Mark McDonald. All rights reserved. You are welcome to quote and share with attribution. Please link to SubStack.