Losing a child to suicide is unbelievable tragedy, and so, what description would weigh heavy enough to accurately describe losing both of your children this way? It is a rare, profound occurrence when a person is faced with such a life and decides to give us art, like this writing. I can only think of a handful of other titles which reckon with such loss in profundity, such as Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl or First They Killed My Father by Loung Un.

Suicide is one of the only things treated as a genuine infohazard in our society. We learn there is reckless danger and risk in discussing the topic, and that it spreads as social contagion. Research clearly shows this is a myth and the opposite is true: talking about suicide reduces, rather than increase, suicidal ideation. Talking about things in the open leads to better mental health.

This matter-of-fact memoir is meant for Li's second son, James, who she consistently refers to as her son that thinks. This is in contrast to her first son, Vincent, the son that feels and for whom she wrote Where Reasons End for after he ended his own life. Vincent receives a fictional heartfelt novel, and James an autobiography of facts and truths. It is a dichotomy she returns to again and again: how life is comedy for those who think and life is tragedy for those who feel. She notes how James read Camus' Myth of Sisphyus shortly before his death. She wonders outloud how he may have thoughtfully, calmly even, decided to act simply after coming to the conclusion life was not livable. And he came to that conclusion on a Friday like any other Friday, after his Japanese undergrad class at university.

In a way, it can be said this book is anti-grief. Li considers grief as having an end-point, as though there could be a finite amount that can be felt when both of your children, all of your children, choose death instead of life. There is no end point—as she quotes Plath, there is only "now and now and now", and Larkin, for "where can we live but days"? We endure the abyss only within the mundane, present moment. Another one of her mantras is that children die while parents simply go on living—in the abyss.

In that anti-grief, there is an emotional compartmentalization and detachment, which I would say is necessary for continuance. Li is stoic, having already found a way to continue after suffering severe abuse in her childhood. Li is a loving mother, and yet she could not save either of her only children. Having such an abusive mother herself, Li believed she was better off dead than to force her own children to suffer and endure a mother so mentally unwell. She writes about her own suicide attempt a few years before Vincent's death, causing her to be institutionalized for a period, and questions if her actions "thinned the partition between life and death" for her sons. There are other deep-wounded questions gnawing at Li throughout the book, despite how careful and persistent she is.

And what choice does she have? As she writes, life is stubborn, and we must be more stubborn. Distraction is at times the only alternative to being pulled into the unlivability of life. One thing I deeply appreciate is that Li is both an author and a professor of creative writing at university, and she explicitly states how naive somebody has to be to think writing is difficult. Writing is not difficult, living is.

So, how does she reckon? It is really a question we must all ask ourselves: how do we reckon with this life? With this world that's so full of pain and suffering? Intellectualization is both an impressive talent and a maladaptive coping mechanism. There was far more thinking than feeling during my own suicide attempt in May of 2025, when I secretly ended up in an emergency room getting my stomach pumped. Though I have not endured tragedy anywhere close to Li, I have found myself in a similar position to her: I am persisting. I am, as Anishinaabe theorist Gerald Vizenor coined, survivance. And I think it is important to note that 90% of medically-serious attempt survivors do not attempt again. Ideation of escape and the totality faced at death are two radically different things. Life, waywardly, is worth it.

There is no neat conclusion of hope or revelation to be found. We are always in the process, and in the now. Near the end of the book, Li (rightfully) chastises others who write to her to express sympathies, but in reality try to centre themselves in her grief. Those who attempted to send her their manuscripts and asked for tips for finding a publisher shortly after she lost her children. Or others who tell her of a religious or spiritual silver lining to her situation. There is none. There is only the present moment, where things simply continue, and where things in nature merely grow.