The Shape of Loss

Trigger warning: This piece discusses suicide and the death of children. Please take care while reading.

Two years ago I attended a workshop with Charlotte Wood at the Canberra Writers Festival. Her work Stone Yard Devotional had just been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (side note: it was my personal favourite and I was very sad to see it not take out the prize). Wood shared extremely useful gems on writing. The one that stayed with me the most was: find what captures your attention. If something is seeking heat, it needs to be written. This brings me to my point.

I read a book over the weekend, Things in Nature Merrily Grow by Yiyun Li. Words from Li’s book lit a furnace in the back of my mind. This piece had to be written. Li’s book is a memoir about the suicide of both her sons: Vincent, who took his life at the age of sixteen, and James, who ended his life when he was nineteen.

In her memoir, she bravely touches on the lives of her sons, and the experience of living with losing them both. The book is a set of essays that talk briefly about Vincent and James, how they lived, and questions motherhood in the absence of children, the nature of living with loss and how it appears to others.

‘Children die, and parents go on living,’ says Li in her book. But what do parents become when they have had children who no longer exist? This made me think about what it means to be a parent. When children decide to stop living and take their own lives, do they also take parenthood with them? It really made me think about what happens when all you have left is the story of a child’s life that is left incomplete. Partway through the book, you turn a page and suddenly there is just a blank page. But this doesn’t mean you are no longer a parent. You hold onto the part of the book which will always exist, and just like you will always be its reader, you will continue to be the parent of the child who wrote half a book.

Next is the question that lingers for the parents who go on living when the children die: how do they go on? Friends, relatives, acquaintances try to empathise in the ways they feel best. But what is best for them may not necessarily be what the grieving parent needs. For Li, there were those who viewed her loss through their own lens and attempted to help her through acts of consolation they saw fit. This also meant that they tried to give shape to her grief and experience to fit their personal mould. However, Li speaks about something other than grief: an abyss, a feeling of emptiness. That whatever she was going through, she might live with it, and unlike how others felt grief, she felt it differently, and experienced it as a feeling that did not have an expiration date. It was not something she could magically recover from, as if it were a sickness with a cure. She will not one day be okay with the thought of her children no longer being alive. People were also uncomfortable with Li’s experience of her loss and her insistence on calling a death what it was: a death. Does naming it something other than death make the loss more bearable or acceptable? Or does avoiding the word ‘death’ make the grave reality easier for others?

There is a social reluctance to the idea of processing loss in a way that is far from everyone’s expectation of what one should look like when a tragedy strikes them (tragedy is not a word that even comes close to what Li and her husband went through), and how one should talk about it in a way more palatable to others. The point is: what are the social norms around loss? What is grief? What are its parameters and who decides them? I think that the process of going through a loss cannot be a performance and cannot be questioned if it doesn’t fit someone’s ideas of what is socially acceptable. A person experiencing loss is not obliged to eventually say that they are healing or recovering. After all, who would they be saying it to and for whose comfort? They do not owe anyone a narrative that conforms to their expectations or reassures others.

There are losses that one does not recover from. Some things cannot be fixed and death remains death. You carve a life around a hollow and learn to live with it. That unlike the unfinished book of children who no longer exist, an abyss may never end.

This essay was first published on Substack on 12 August 2026.