All There Is with Anderson Cooper - Yiyun Li: ‘The Wound That Won’t Heal’

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

Author Yiyun Li lost both of her children to suicide. Vincent at 16. James at 19. She talks with Anderson about why she doesn't use the words "grief" or "process," instead describing her pain as "an abyss," and a "wound that won't heal." Host: Anderson Cooper Showrunner: Haley Thomas Producers: Chuck Hadad, Grace Walker, Emily Williams Associate Producer: Kyra Dahring Video Editor: Eric Zembrzuski Technical Director: Dan Dzula Bookers: Kerry Rubin and Kari Pricher  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to all there is. Wherever you are in your grief, you're not alone, and I'm glad you're here. It's my brother's birthday in a couple days. It's another one of those days on the calendar that I've always dreaded. Carter Cooper would be turning 61 on January 27th. He killed himself when he was 23. It's incredible to me that it has been 38 years, and still how he died, the horror of it, the violence. It overshadows everything about his life for me, and I wish that wasn't the case,

and I hope that one day it won't be. I spoke recently on All There Is Live, my streaming show on CNN.com slash all there is with a mom named Chrissy Kay, whose son Forrest died by suicide six years ago, and she talked about how her grief this year has changed in a way that allows her to see her son again as he was, not just as he died. this year, like a change happened. It wasn't like there was like this precipitating event like, oh, now things are different. This year, I entered September without my gut twisting, without having this feeling of dread. And I was like, this is curious. I, what's going on here?

and then I continued to feel not just okay, but like good, that I was feeling him in ways that I haven't been able to and not like signs, but just like love. Like it just, I'm like, oh, I can, I can reach you now. I can find you here however you appear. I find you in my heart. And before I feel like it was, the anchor to him ended up being like, find him. him. That was the anchor. That tether was like the closest memory of him that I had. That wouldn't fade because trauma likes to make a nice little bond there. And this year, I think I finally realized, I don't need that to remember him because he was more than how he died or finding him or all those feelings tied with it. It's really about what it felt like to be with him. And knowing how much he loved us. And I escaped my grasp this whole time until this year.

And I can't tell you why, but it's here. And it's a gift and it feels amazing. I hope one day with work, I can see my brother Carter in that same way. My guest today on the podcast is an acclaimed writer, E.U. and Lee, who lost both her sons to suicide and writes about it in a new book, Things in Nature Merely Grow. we'll be right back. Welcome back.

Today's podcast includes mentions of suicide, and if you're in crisis or distress, you can call 9-88 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. It provides free and confidential support 24 hours a day. My guest today is Iyun Lee, an award-winning author and a professor of creative writing at Princeton.

She's written a number of highly acclaimed novels and memoirs. Her latest is called Things in Nature Merely Grow, and it's about the death of both her children by suicide. Her son, Vincent, killed himself in 2017 when he was 16. Her son James was 19 when he died in 2024. Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, she writes, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone. I don't want an end point to my sorrow, she says.

The death of a child is not a heat wave or a snowstorm nor an obstacle race to rush through and when 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. Thinking about my children, she writes, is like air, like time. Thinking about them will only end when I reached the end of my life. I sat down with Iyun Lee earlier. The thing about children died from suicide is, I think, most people, the first thing they would say is, what wrong did these parents do to the children?

What kind of monsters are they? And that's a very natural question. The question that nobody asks is, what have those parents done to help the children before they lost the children? I talked to parents who lost their children to suicide after Vincent died, and all these parents, All of us, we saw signs. We knew things were going on in our children's minds. We did as much as we could. But we parents were limited. We're always limited.

I think being a parent is the most limiting job. Sometimes people feel spooked by us, and there's a discomfort. And I accept no one knows what to say. I would not have known what to say either. But I think when people don't know what to say, they find the worst things to say. Or say nothing. One of the mothers said, oh, it's okay, you don't have your children. My children, they're in college too.

We don't see our children often either. And I just thought, you just lie to me so you can feel better. You don't want to feel uncomfortable. So you said, oh, we're in the same boat. But they're a friend who can just acknowledge. There's nothing I can say. or do for you, but can I just sit here with you in your pain? You don't like the word grief, or you don't use the word grief?

I don't use the word grief the way people use it. I think grief is becoming a shortcut for many things. For instance, people talk about their grief as a process, as though there's an end of that process. It's a state that we're going to be in forever and ever, and we just have to live in that state, and I choose to be here. You choose to be. Yes, because the alternative is you forget your children.

You forget your lost people. And I don't want to forget. I think remembering is more important than processing. I sort of wonder if somebody listening to say, oh, you're stuck. I don't feel stuck because I am living from day to day I'm doing. But I think the word stuck or the word grieving or process. They sort of make demands of people. I think these demands are not realistic.

These are the demands for those people's comfort who make the demands. If you're not stuck, people feel better, less awkward around you. People feel that they can talk about other things. But that tells me so much about other people rather than me or us or people who are experiencing these pains. I experienced loss very early on, and I didn't allow myself really to feel those losses. And it's only in the last few years, two years or so, that I've begun to really feel them. Right. Can I ask you why originally you did not allow yourself to feel?

Well, when my dad died, I was 10. And it was so terrifying for me. My dad was everything to me, so his loss was, and still is, extraordinarily, painful. The trajectory of my life and my brother's life was forever altered. Did you dream about him when you were younger? Not that much. And my brother and I never talked about him again. And I think how crazy that is now, we never discussed anything. And the loneliness of that is so sort of heartbreaking. I think that always puts people in a very lonely place. Can you tell me about Vincent and about James? Well, I had never met two people who were so amused with each other.

They were close, they were the closest brothers. And Vincent was this fantastic boy with long hair, poetic, musical, talented, moody. Vincent lived life at a very high pitch and feeding things very acutely, pains and joys. So his death wasn't a surprise. His therapist said, you must prepare. This could come any day. You had been worried for, I think you said, six years that he might die by suicide. When he was 10, I looked at him, I thought, oh, I need to do everything I could to keep you here.

What a 10 did you see? Just this acuteness of feeding everything in life, most children feel. But children don't often articulate their feelings. And I think Vincent Aten articulated his feelings about the world, about how bleak it was. But also how much he felt about everything, both good and bad. And I just, I suppose I saw the sign. He wrote poetry about death. Sometimes I would sneak into his bedroom to make sure he did not die.

To make sure he hadn't died. To make sure he was there. He did not run away or did not die. Both your children seem brilliant. You said James would teach himself several languages, Welsh, German, Romanian, and Russian, on top of Spanish, Italian and Japanese, the languages he took at school. His phone, I once found out by accident,

was set in Lithuanian. It's very odd to have those brilliant children, but it was also very, very good. I think in a way I... never thought of them as children, but I thought of as their own individuals from the very beginning. What was it that Vincent said? When he was five, his best friend, Mari, decided not to marry him because she thought she might marry her brother.

Okay. And Vincent came home and stayed in bed for four hours not moving. He was inconsolable. Yeah, just staring at the seating. I just thought, how could a child feel so much? So then he set up and he started to write song lyrics as like big letter, oh, oh love, oh love, oh heartless love for your heart through your life. And I just thought, where did this come from?

So I respected that intensity of feelings he felt. And James felt intensely but didn't speak. He was not a verbal child, but he was extremely eloquent with. Vincent, which when Vincent died, he sort of stopped talking. Yeah, I think that spoke of his loss. Because Vincent was the person he talked to. Vincent was pretty much the only person he talked to nonstop. He talked when he was little with me,

but I think after Vincent died, he started to be even less verbal about the world. At six, James said something to you. He said, you know, Mommy, I'm still suffering from monophobia. Monophobia. Yes. Which is... Extreme fear of loneliness. How did he even know what that word was at six?

I don't know. He probably looked up in the dictionary to find the exact word to describe his situation to me. The fact that he said, I'm still. I'm still. That this had been going on for a long time. Yes. The only sign you really had with James in terms of his reaction to Vincent's death was that he never cut his hair again for the six years. after Vincent's death.

Yes. He let his hair grow long, which is the way Vincent had his hair. So I think that's a sign of remembering, at least, or acknowledging, without having to speak a lot, the message, I think. There was a line you wrote, it seemed to me that to honor the sensitivity

and peculiarity of my children so that each could have as much space as possible to grow into his individual self was the best I could do as a mother. Yes, I love them, and I still love them, but more important than loving is understanding and respecting my children, which includes more than anything else,

understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives. It's an extraordinary thing to say, to feel. I think that's the best I can do for them as their mother is they made a decision. I'm sure you have talked to people who had suicide attempts. I attempt to suicide too and it's not that you don't want to live for people who commit suicide

it's not you don't want to live or you don't love people you don't love your mother or you don't love your friends it's the pain and you're experiencing there's no way to stop the pain but to wipe your body out that's the only way so so I think when Vincent made the decision I've

I had watched him suffer for six years and I thought I must respect you know he's I mean he tried and so I think I want I just want to respect and say yes you have tried six years and James died six years after Vincent died and those six years he was lonely and that kind of loneliness was not something a mother could do. That's why I asked you about losing a brother, because when two brothers were so close, one brother died.

I suppose whoever remains, part of this person also died with the brother. So when James died, I wanted to respect his decision. I would respect both their decisions, because I need to think on their behalf, rather than on our behalf. Parents, I think, suffer. But that is doable, manageable.

I think loving children seems to me the only thing we can do for our children. It's very little. But if we can understand them, it's more than little. So I want to believe I understand my children and I understand their decisions. You talked about a concept radical acceptance.

You said a few days after James's death, radical acceptance was what sustained me then. The questions of wise and hows and wherefores or the wishful thinking of what ifs. These questions naturally rise after any catastrophe as they did after Vincent's death. But this time it feels to me that those questions which function as a series of counterarguments against a fact are useless. Even a violation of James's essence. My only grasp of the situation then as well. well as now is to accept that James, like Vincent, chose death, and James particularly chose the same way to die as Vincent. Reality, which can be conveyed in many ways, is better spoken of

in the most straightforward language. Yes, that to me is radical acceptance. You start with a fact rather than wishful thinking or questions. I borrow that term from Martha Lennon's the menu, the DBT menu, if I feel pain or if I feel momentarily, settled. I'm going to come back to the fact first, and the fact is, Vincent died, and then James died, and they both chose death. I must accept that fact. You don't argue with that fact. You don't say, but I don't like it, or, but I don't want this. No, that doesn't help. I could scream, but it would not change the fact. I live with this fact, but this fact cannot defeat me. Was it important for you ever to

try to completely understand Vincent's thought process or James's thought process or in my case, I mean, I spent a lot of time trying to understand what was my brother thinking, why did he do this, was this a choice, was this a compulsion, was this a voice in his head? And there are times I still go down that rabbit hole, and there's not any way to get an answer. Right. There are questions that cannot be answered. and also how can we not ask those questions? I ask those questions all the time too. But I think I accept not being able to find the answers.

I'm a new father. I have a three and a five-year-old, and I love them so much, and I wanted to be enough to protect them from everything. And I kept thinking of that while reading your book, having these two brilliant children and loving them so much, and yet not being able to take away all the hurt. I think that's one sad thing about parenting

is we cannot take the heart away from them. On the other hand, I remember when Vincent was in preschool. There was a piece in the newspaper, how to prepare your children for the future. And the preschool teacher was quite upset. She said, what do you mean prepare them for their future? they are living their lives now. And I always remember that because your children are living their lives now.

That's for sure. When Lizan was five, I realized he was living in his life, expressing his feelings, wishes, dislikes. Very fully, it seems. Very fully. When I asked him to go play soccer, join the soccer club, he said, you want that for your happiness. Not my happiness. And he was five. And so I do believe children live there in their own lives.

We're going to take a short break. We'll be right back. More with E. and Lee in a moment. Welcome back to my conversation with author E. Eun Lee. You don't use the word grief. You talk about the abyss.

Yes. I use abyss as a, as the precise word to describe how I feel about my life is I'm in an abyss. You're in it right now. Yes. And we will always be in this abyss because we'll always be parents who have lost two children

and nothing in life is going to change that. So I don't want to say I want to get out of this abyss. What I want to do is to live in this abyss a little better. So it doesn't feel abysmal. And each person lives in his or her own abyss and I never want to go out.

I don't think it's possible to get out. Though it's painful. It is painful. One wants to hold on to these memories, however painful they are. People always think pains are not good. There's nothing good or bad about pains. They're just facts. They're the facts in your life.

My husband and I, we are in pain. We have to pain, but that doesn't stop us from laughing. I think that pain or that abyss is you coexist rather than getting rid of. And I think what we do is how to live with that pain a little bit more wisely or better or cheerfully. Was there a time after the death of Vincent and after the death of James that you laughed again and it just shocked you? Yeah. Yeah, I think it took us a long time after Vincent's death to start laughing again. And I remembered the precise moment. My husband and I were talking about something.

Very trivial. And we both just broke into laughter. And I just thought, oh, we regain that ability to laugh. It's nice that the first time you both laughed was with each other. Yes. It was quite astonishing, I think. With James, it took a little less time. You go through it once.

It seems like you learn how to do things a little better. You learn how to suffer better? I think so. I like that, really. You suffer better the second time. After my brother died, my mom lay in her bed for days, and I'd lay on the bed with her and friends of hers, and my brothers would come,

she would tell over and over again the story because he killed himself in front of her. And I remember her saying to me at one point, this was several days later, she said, you know, it will get better. And I said to her, it already is. Oh. And she looked at me and she said, oh, you're right. Oh, yes.

And I mean, it was in that little tiny increment of better. Yes. But it was better than it had been two days prior. Yes. And, yeah, that was meaningful. I know. That's very good. See, that's the other thing about after you lose someone, these pains come back.

like in an acute form sometimes. I go to teach at Princeton. Every time I go on campus, there's a moment. It just hit me so hard. It's just acute pain. And then I can sort of take stock and say, oh, this pain, and then it stops. But it never goes away.

That's the other reason I think. It doesn't work to say it's a process. 20 years later you would still be thinking about this thing, right? For me, thinking about my brother is still very painful. There's so much sort of unsaid between us. Can you think about Vincent and James without pain? Oh, that's a good question. So far, it has not happened.

No, I don't think. I don't think it's possible to think about them without pain, because we are parents, right? When we think about our children, it's not only about their past, but also about their future. But when I think about my children, there's no future for them. That's the pain that will always be there. I think about their past. Sometimes I find little things. Sometimes I open an old book.

There's a note from James saying, By the way, you owe me two dollars. I have no idea where it came from, when it came to my book. There was a moment of intense joy seeing those words, but then also intense pain. But both are, I think, I can live with.

After James's death, you had a piano lesson, and you went to do your piano lesson. Yes, three days after James' death. Can you talk about that? Because when I read that, I was kind of stunned by it. I just started learning piano. I thought, well, I either have to cancel the lesson or I go to the lesson.

But canceling would just mean another hour of not knowing what to do. So I thought I would just go to the piano lesson. I mean, my piano teacher, she's a brave, so she came with these flowers. We didn't know what to say. She said, let's go into the piano. She started me on the drill. It was up and down, up and down the keyboard. So we just had the lesson and later she said,

how could you do that? How could you come to the lesson? If I were you, if my child died, I would have stayed in my bed all day long. But I think it offered a sort of comfort. You just have to move your fingers. You have to move your body. You have to use your brain entire.

brain entirely in that moment. It's such a basic thing, but it's important. It's just to keep your body physically active because it's very easy to slip into depression when you lose someone or when you experience this monumental loss and you stop moving and then time really stands still. So I feel that I learned something from that piano lesson. If you just do it, you can do it. You had one person who came to your house and complained that Vincent had not sent a text to her daughter before he died. Yes. He had sent a text to two friends, not to her daughter. And she came to tell you she was upset by that.

She said, well, she always treated Vincent as a best friend, and he texted to other girls, without texting her. And again, you cannot write these things into fiction, but I felt for her because I thought, you felt so hurt by something so tiny, and you have to make the complaint about this.

Vincent had texted you. He did, he did. And I knew he was going to die when he texted me. So. What did you do? I caught back. I text. I said many things in my text, trying to stop him from doing it, I suppose.

But what if belongs to fiction? Because in fiction, you can say, what if I did this? What if I did that? You can change the course of life. But in real life, you cannot talk about what if? It's about what now? things happen, what now. And that's for the living.

Yeah. My mom, at the oddest times, at the oddest times, my mom would suddenly, out of nowhere, suddenly say, what if I had hit him in the head

with an iron from the fire? What if I had knocked him out somehow? But it was so interesting to me that, you know, my brother died in 1988 and in 2017, my mom suddenly turns to me in the middle of a sunny day and says, what if I had hit him with something from the fireplace? Right. It's not a process, right?

There's not an end point. We think about them all of the time, I feel. You said, children die and parents go on living. Those parents go on living because that's the only way for them to go on loving, their children whose deaths easily turn them into a news story one day and gossip the next day and then eventually statistics. Children die and parents go on living except they go on living in a different way than they did before. It's like living with a new knowledge of reality. I love that idea that parents go on living. It's the only way for them to go on loving their children.

We parents are the only people who will remember every single day of their life to our death and we're going to carry them. ask you about anger because you say you're not angry. No. Do you think James was angry at Vincent? I think that's the most interesting question. I suppose there's always when you are the one left behind, it's natural to have anger. That question, though, why am I the one left behind?

Is something I understand well? Do you think about that? All the time. Yes, I think that's what James was thinking about. Yeah. Yes. That's why I say, I have lost children, so I know how parents. who feel who have lost children,

but I don't know how siblings feel. Do you feel guilty? I feel, yeah, I feel guilty in that I was not mature enough or I was able to save myself, but I wasn't able to save my brother. Had I been able to communicate or talk openly with my brother, I think it would have been helpful for him. He was not able to do it with me. to do with me. But I saw the photo of him last year. I was taken probably a year before he died

and right when he graduated Princeton and I didn't recognize the person in the photo. I looked at him and I was like, I don't know who this person is. And that's a very sad thought. Right. You talk about objects and you said, objects don't die. Their journeys in this physical world up to a certain point are parallel to the trajectories of the humans to whom the objects belong then comes the moment when separation happens. Vincent phone became a phone, James' backpack, a backpack. All of Vincent's belongings or all of James' belongings have outlived them.

Not a single item has left our care. Everywhere I turn in the house there are objects. Their meanings reside in the memories connected to them. The memories lend the voids, which cannot be filled by the objects. I have not known what to do with the objects. I find that very difficult, even just to think about what to do with the objects, because they are all I have of my children. When we moved James stuff back from the dorm from Princeton,

I just couldn't open the suitcase, the suitcase still not opened. I just, I think objects are very difficult. What do you do? what do you do? Well, first let me read what you wrote about James's clothes. You said, for months I had been walking into his bedroom, thinking that I should return the clothes to the closet and his underpants and socks to the chest of drawers.

I cannot do it. The only thing I did was to pick up some loose clothes hangers and hang them in his closet free of any clothes. All the same into some small measure of order I brought to this life of extremity. I think objects are the most concrete, reminders of this life extremity. There are days

I can just say, you know, I get up, I do these things, it's life. But then you turn around, it's Vincent's painting on the wall. And what do you do with that? No, I don't know what to do with that. And yet you have Vincent's paintings

on the wall. Yes, because because he was a good artist. He was a very good artist. I think the objects are the one thing that I haven't figured out about this life. I will say sitting here with you

it's the one time you seem to have doubt. I think you're probably right because I realize I'm not when earlier you asked me if I get stuck or I feel stuck I don't feel stuck but maybe I am stuck with objects.

Are there rooms? They have their own. Yes, the rooms is the same. Do you go into them? I always have to prepare myself if I go into them because I know it's extremely painful. You just have to have a moment of gathering courage and say, I want to see those things.

And I would go in and see those things. Oh, yes, it's very painful to see them. But I still want to see them. You know? I think you keep them for so long as I think at some point, I've been told, at some point they've become less charged. And I've noticed that a little bit with some things. Like, they become less charged with emotion and pain.

For the person listening to this, who's wondering, how do you go on? How can I go on? What do you say? There are only two options. one is not to go on. The other option is we go on living. Day by day, when Vincent died, we were thinking about Vincent all the time.

I remember my husband's therapist and my therapist both said this to us. In six months, you're going to think about him 18 hours out of 24 hours. And at a time, I thought, oh, this is a very interesting way to look at it. You're not going to say, I'm not going to think about Vincent.

You have those six hours of doing other things, and yet you're still thinking about Vincent. I don't think we will ever feel that we can heal the wound, but you go on living, acknowledging this is the pain, and this is the wound that won't heal. You said, I've replied to Friends Queries with this line, our life is never going to be all right again, but we're doing all right.

I still say that we're doing all right. We do. All right. Yes, I suppose we will never be all right again. And I'm fine with that, too. That's all right. That's all right. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. Our next podcast comes out in two weeks, Thursday, February 5th. And next week on Thursday, January 29th, you can join me from my live streaming show. All There Is Live at 9.15 p.m. To watch, just go to CNN.com slash All There Is. If you miss the live stream, it'll be posted the following day for a week on the site. Also, if there's something you've learned in your grief that you think would be helpful for others, or you want to tell us about your own experience with loss,

feel free to leave us a voicemail at 1404-827-1805. You can also send us a video message and email it to us at All There Is at CNN.com. or send it to us on Instagram at All There Is. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week. Do you ever find yourself lying in bed with your thoughts racing and your brain just won't turn off? That's the kind of thing that Catherine Nicolay helps with on her podcast, nothing much happens.

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