Two books about death—Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov and Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li—were the highlights of my reading over the past few weeks.
Gospodinov looks at his father’s death with a quiet serenity, understanding it as a natural process, yet still searching for ways to live with the pain. The garden his father left behind becomes one such way of acceptance. Growth and decay coexist there; one cannot exist without the other, and Gospodinov seems to grasp this deeply.
Yiyun Li’s loss is of an entirely different order. Both her sons—astonishingly brilliant minds—were lost to suicide. No mother can ever accept such a fate, yet Li attempts to use reason and logic to understand the hows and whys. At the very outset, she states that she will not write a book offering salvation, closure, or solutions. Compounding her grief is relentless scrutiny—from the media, from her family, and from the overbearing Chinese community. She was once told that her second child had an Einstein-level IQ and needed an exceptional environment; instead, she chose to raise him normally.
One of the most devastating realizations for Li is the slow understanding that her younger son’s suicide at sixteen may have been linked to his older brother’s death four years earlier—the older brother having been his only true friend. She turns the inquiry inward: what was her role in this? What could she have done differently? The answer she arrives at is the most painful one—there was nothing they could have done.
Gospodinov’s father, on the other hand, spent his prime years under an oppressive communist regime, restricted in almost every aspect of life—from buying an apartment to moving to a better neighborhood. Forbidden by his parents from playing basketball, he turned instead to farming and gardening. His journals—especially his meticulous gardening schedules—form some of the most compelling passages in the book, reminding me of Lars Gustafsson. Through them, his personality shines. He suffered, and he died.
In both books, the reactions of friends, family, and the wider world to these deaths are fascinating. Both authors were well known, which drew media attention, but in Li’s case the Chinese media was especially cruel. She chooses to address her detractors directly in the book—a choice that surprised me, but also reveals the raw pain of a mother enduring the worst imaginable loss. I still wonder what kept her going: she continued her music lessons, returned to work, and carried on.
Gospodinov, too, moves forward, but his father’s garden remains. He himself doesn’t know how to tend it—his brother takes on that role—but he writes that while his father was a gardener in life, in death he became the garden itself. That feels like a profound way of accepting grief.
In Yiyun Li’s case, there are no such consolations—neither for the writer nor for the reader.