ALEXANDRA ALTER2025年5月22日 When four police officers arrived at Yiyun Li’s home in Princeton, N.J., late on a Friday afternoon last February, she didn’t wait for instructions to sit down. As soon as the detective spoke — “There is no good way to say this” — she sank into a chair in her living room, gesturing for her husband to join her. 去年2月的一个周五下午，当四名警察来到李翊云位于新泽西州普林斯顿的家时，她没等有人提示就自己坐了下来。听到警官说到“这件事不知该如何开口”，她身子一沉，坐在起居室的椅子上，示意让丈夫过来。 Li already sensed the devastating news they had come to deliver, even though she couldn’t fathom it. The detective confirmed the worst. Her son James, a freshman at Princeton University, had died, struck by a train near the campus. 李翊云已经感觉到他们带来的消息将是个晴天霹雳，尽管她无法想象是什么。警官证实了最坏的情况。她的儿子詹姆斯，普林斯顿大学的大一新生，在校园附近被火车撞死。 The policemen said they were investigating the circumstances surrounding his death and avoided calling it a suicide. But Li and her husband knew it wasn’t an accident — that James had chosen to end his life, in the same way his older brother had. 警察说正在调查他的死因，并避免称其为自杀。但李翊云和丈夫知道这不是意外——詹姆斯选择结束自己的生命，用了和他哥哥一样的方式。 A little more than six years earlier, James’s brother Vincent died by suicide at age 16, also killed by an oncoming train nearby. That night in 2017, Li had arrived home to find two detectives waiting for her. The police suggested she sit down before they told her about Vincent, which is why she did so instinctively when they came to deliver the news about James. 六年多前，詹姆斯的哥哥文森特自杀身亡，年仅16岁，同样死于附近一列迎面而来的火车。2017年的那个晚上，李翊云回到家，发现两名警官在等她。警察建议她先坐下来，然后再告诉她文森特的事，所以，当他们来告知詹姆斯的消息时，她本能地坐了下来。 After the officers left, Li and her husband, Dapeng Li, sat in their living room, stunned. She felt like time was collapsing around her, as though she was stuck in an eternal present. 警察离开后，李翊云和丈夫李大鹏（音）坐在客厅里，目瞪口呆。她觉得时间在她身边崩塌，仿佛她被困在永恒的此刻。 The detective’s statement — “There is no good way to say this” — struck Li, an acclaimed novelist, as both a cliché and undeniably true. No words could capture the devastation she felt, losing both of her sons. Shattering, wrenching, aching: Words that came close felt meaningless. But Li knew that words were the only way to anchor her thoughts to reality. 警官的这句话——“这件事不知该如何开口”——对李翊云这位广受赞誉的小说家来说，既是陈词滥调，又是无可否认的事实。失去两个儿子给她带来的悲痛无法用言语表达。震惊、痛苦、疼痛：任何接近的词语都感觉毫无意义。但李翊云知道，只有文字才能将她的思想与现实连接起来。 李翊云2007年拍的一张家庭照，照片中她的丈夫抱着他们的儿子——文森特（左）和詹姆斯。 Three months after James’s death, Li started writing “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” a memoir about James, Vincent and how their lives and deaths intertwined. In direct and unsparing reflections, Li confronts not only the loss of her children but the limits of language, as she tries to convey anguish that defies description. The closest she can come to relaying her loss is to say she lives in an abyss, a murky place where no light can penetrate. 詹姆斯去世三个月后，李翊云开始写《自然万物只是生长》(Things in Nature Merely Grow)，这是一本关于詹姆斯、文森特，以及他们的生与死如何交织在一起的回忆录。在直接而无情的反思中，李翊云面对的不仅是失去孩子，还有语言的局限，因为她试图表达无法描述的痛苦。关于她所失去的，她能说出的最接近的语言是：她生活在一个深渊，一个黑暗的地方，没有光亮可以穿透。 “All the words that have come to me: Many of them fall short; some are kept because they are needed to hold a place for James,” she writes. “Words may fall short, but they cast long shadows that sometimes can reach the unspeakable.” “我想到的所有词语：其中许多不尽人意；有些被保留了下来，因为需要用这些词语为詹姆斯保留一个位置，”她写道。“言语或许是乏力的，但它们投下的长长阴影，有时却能抵达无法言说的地方。” In some ways, Li’s memoir is a radical rebuke of the conventions surrounding grieving. Early on, she warns those who expect a narrative of healing or solace to stop reading: This is not a story about overcoming loss or moving on. 在某些方面，李翊云的回忆录是对有关悲伤的传统观念的激烈抨击。一开始，她就警告那些期待治愈或安慰叙事的人不要再读了：这不是一个关于克服痛失所爱或继续前行的故事。 “I don’t ever want to be free from the pain of missing my children,” Li told me when we met on a sunny day in April at her home near the university, where she teaches creative writing. “This pain is in my life for ever and ever, and I don’t want to do anything to mitigate the pain, because to mitigate it means that’s something bad, it’s an illness or affliction.” “我永远都不想摆脱思念孩子的痛苦，”4月一个阳光明媚的日子，我们在她教授创意写作的那所大学附近的家中见面时，李翊云这样对我说。“这种痛苦永远在我的生活中，我不想做任何事情来减轻痛苦，因为减轻痛苦意味着这是一件坏事，是一种疾病或折磨。” Li was at home with her husband, a software engineer, and their dog Quintus, a white cockapoo with cloudy cataract-filled eyes, who bounded into the living room, still exuberant at 13. Quintus joined the family when the boys were 7 and 10; Vincent chose his name, Latin for “fifth,” because he was the fifth family member. 李翊云和她的丈夫——一名软件工程师——以及他们的狗昆图斯在家里。昆图斯是一只白色的贵宾犬，患有白内障，眼睛浑浊。他在孩子们分别七岁和10岁时加入了这个家庭；是文森特给他起的名字，在拉丁语中是“第五”的意思，因为他是第五个家庭成员。 Li made me a cup of green tea and led me to the sunny sitting room off her garden, where she spends endless hours tending to plants and flowers. She had just planted some Japanese anemones that wouldn’t bloom until the fall, and the yard teemed with vibrant daffodils, hyacinths and tulips. With a hint of pride, Li said she had planted 1,600 bulbs and was pleased that around half of them had sprouted. She fretted about the fate of hatchlings in a wren’s nest nestled low in a rose bush. “You just worry about those little birds,” she said. 李翊云给我泡了一杯绿茶，把我带到她家花园旁边那间阳光明媚的起居室，她在花园里花了无数的时间照料花草。她刚种下了一些秋天才开花的日本海葵，院子里到处都是生机勃勃的水仙花、风信子和郁金香。带着一丝自豪，李翊云说她已经种下了1600个球茎，令人欣慰的是其中大约一半已经发芽。她为低矮的玫瑰丛中鹪鹩窝里的雏鸟的命运担忧。“你就是会担心那些小鸟，”她说。 Li, who was born in Beijing in 1972, has a round, youthful face and speaks softly and deliberately. Though she comes across as serious and cerebral at first, she frequently broke into smiles and laughter. She joked about what a bad swimmer and mediocre piano player she is, and gently mocked people she calls “silver liners,” well meaning acquaintances and strangers who have tried to assure her there’s life beyond grief. 1972年出生于北京的李翊云有着一张圆圆的、显年轻的脸，说话温柔从容。虽然一上来会给人一种严肃理智的印象，但她经常会突然露出笑容，发出笑声。她开玩笑说自己游泳技术很差，钢琴也很弹得平庸，还温和地嘲笑那些她所谓的“银边人”——这些好心的熟人和陌生人试图向她保证，悲伤过后人生还会另有一片天地。 “People always say, you’re going to overcome this,” she said. “No, I’m not.” “人们总是说，你会克服这一切的，”她说。“不，我不会。” Li told me she often senses that her circumstances make people uncomfortable, especially other parents. She’s also keenly aware that her easy, quiet demeanor and her way of coping by sticking to her schedule — she went straight back to teaching and writing in the days after the deaths of her children — fails to match most people’s assumptions about the devastating aftermath of losing a child. 李翊云告诉我，她经常感觉自己的处境使别人感到不舒服，尤其是其他父母。她也敏锐地意识到，她从容、安静的举止，以及她坚持自己日程安排的应对方式——在孩子死后的日子里，她直接回去教书和写作——这不是多数人心目中一个刚刚经历丧子之痛的人应有的样子。 “People expect a grieving mother to behave a certain way, and I never think I can live according to other people’s narrative,” she said. “There is the expectation you will open yourself up, show your vulnerability, show your progress, all these things I don’t do.” “人们期望一个悲伤的母亲以某种方式行事，我从不认为我可以按照别人的说法生活，”她说。“人们期望你敞开心扉，展示你的脆弱，展示你的进步，这些都是我不会做的。” What’s perhaps most surprising about talking to Li is witnessing her ability to exist in two realities that seem incompatible: one where she’s living in a desolate state she calls the abyss, and another where she finds fulfillment, amusement and even joy in her work, her friendships and her marriage, in little moments and memories. 与李翊云交谈时，最令人惊讶的也许是目睹她在两个似乎不相容的现实中生存的能力：一个是她生活在被她称为深渊的荒凉状态中，另一个是她在工作、友谊和婚姻中，在一些细微的瞬间和回忆中找到满足、娱乐甚至快乐。 “To live with pain is possible, you do things in everyday life, you garden, you listen to music, but you’re thinking about,” she said, trailing off, leaving the unspeakable unsaid. “带着痛苦生活是可能的，你在日常生活中做一些事情，你在做园艺，你在听音乐，但你还在思考，”她说，她的声音越来越小，没有说出那些难以言说的东西。 Vincent and James remain a tangible presence throughout Li’s quiet, spacious home. The walls of her light-filled office off the living room are lined with Vincent’s bright, whimsical artwork. Above the mantel is a large painting he made as a young boy, of a child standing in a field with three brown barns and an emerald green pond, against a golden sky. She discovered it after his death, and figured he hid it in a closet because he misspelled his name in his signature. 在李翊云安静宽敞的家中，文森特和詹姆斯的身影无处不在。她那间光线充足的办公室离客厅较远，墙上挂着文森特色调明亮、异想天开的艺术品。壁炉架上挂着一幅他小时候画的巨幅画作，画中一个孩子站在田野里，有三个棕色的谷仓和一个翠绿色的池塘，映衬着金色的天空。她在他去世后发现了这幅画，并认为他把它藏在壁橱里，是因为他在签名时拼错了自己的名字。 Elsewhere around the house are family photos, school portraits and knickknacks that reflect the boys’ quirks and obsessions. She keeps James’s collection of pocket watches, the origami animals he folded and the stuffed lamb, named Marmalade, that he got during a vacation to Ireland. She has Vincent’s collection of 47 stuffed penguins. 房子里的其他地方还摆放着家庭照片、学生肖像和小摆设，反映了男孩们独特的个性和兴趣。她保存着詹姆斯收藏的怀表、他叠的折纸动物，以及他去爱尔兰度假时得到的名叫橘子酱的毛绒小羊。她保留着文森特收藏的47只企鹅毛绒玩具。 Li and her husband have held onto all of their sons’ possessions, among them items that were returned by the police — Vincent’s phone, fractured at the corner, and James’s backpack, which held a pencil that had snapped in half. Even mundane objects have become treasures. James’s retainers are in a box on his desk; Vincent’s are on his shelf. 李翊云和丈夫一直保留着儿子们的所有物品，其中包括警方归还的东西——文森特的那部碎了一角的手机，詹姆斯的背包，里面装着一支断成两段的铅笔。即使是平凡的物品也变成了珍宝。詹姆斯的牙套在他桌上的一个盒子里；文森特的牙套在他的书架上。 “I cannot do anything about them,” Li said of her sons’ belongings. “It’s quite painful even to move an object. We have our human limits.” “我不能去动这些东西，”李翊云说到儿子的遗物。“即使是移动一个物体都是很痛苦的。我们有我们凡人的极限。” When James was born in 2005, Li’s literary career was taking off. She had abandoned a Ph.D. in immunology to pursue writing, and after enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she’d published some short stories. In 2005, she released her debut story collection, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.” She followed with highly praised novels like “Kinder than Solitude” and “The Vagrants,” which explored the oppression and paranoia of life in Communist China, and went on to accumulate a string of prestigious awards, including a Whiting Award and Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. 2005年詹姆斯出生时，李翊云的文学事业正处于起步阶段。她放弃了免疫学博士学位，转而追求写作，在加入艾奥瓦作家工作室后，她发表了一些短篇小说。2005年，她出版了首部小说集《千年祈祷》(A Thousand Years of Good Prayers)。随后，她创作了《比孤独更善良》(Kinder than Solitude)和《流浪者》(The Vagrants)等备受赞誉的小说，探索共产主义中国生活中的压迫和偏执，并获得了一系列著名奖项，包括怀廷奖、古根海姆奖和麦克阿瑟奖。 Even as she won accolades for her work and had a fulfilling home life with two bright, curious children, Li fought the pull of depression. During a breakdown in 2012, she felt herself “slipping into unreality” and attempted suicide twice, a bewildering experience she describes in her memoir, “Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life.” 即使她在工作上获得了荣誉，有两个聪明、好奇的孩子，家庭生活也很充实，但李翊云还是备受抑郁症困扰。在2012年的一次精神崩溃中，她觉得自己“陷入了不现实的境地”，两次试图自杀，她在回忆录《亲爱的朋友，在我的生活中给你的生活写信》(Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life)中描述了这段令人困惑的经历。 She has wondered if her near suicide influenced Vincent, and how Vincent’s death influenced James, but she refuses to dwell on those questions; the only people who could answer them are gone. 她曾经想过她的自杀是否影响了文森特，以及文森特的死如何影响了詹姆斯，但她拒绝细想这些问题；能回答这些问题的人都已经不在了。 In a devastating coincidence, Li was working on her novel, “Must I Go,” which centers on a woman who lost a daughter to suicide, when Vincent took his life in September 2017. 2017年9月文森特自杀身亡时，李翊云正在写她的小说《我该走了吗》(Must I Go)，故事的中心人物是一个自杀身亡的女人的母亲。这是一个令人心碎的巧合。 After Vincent’s death, Li immediately began writing down imagined conversations with her son, telling him about the cheesecake she baked, her clumsy attempt to knit a scarf from the yellow yarn he left behind. The dialogue became Li’s novel “Where Reasons End,” a spare, intimate conversation between a mother and her brilliant, funny, eccentric son who has died by suicide and speaks to her from a vague afterlife. Vincent’s voice came so readily, it felt like he was speaking to her, Li said. “I wanted to have him around for a little bit,” Li said. 文森特去世后，李翊云立即开始写下想象中与儿子的对话，给他讲她烤的芝士蛋糕，她笨拙地试图用他留下的黄色纱线织一条围巾。这段对话后来成为李翊云的小说《理由的尽头》(Where Reasons End)，讲述了一位母亲与她聪明、有趣、古怪的儿子之间零星且亲密的对话。儿子自杀身亡，从朦胧的阴世与她交谈。李翊云说，文森特的声音如此自然地出现在小说中，感觉像是他在与她交谈。“我想他在我身边多待一会，”李翊云说。 But after James died, Li found it impossible to conjure him at first. Unlike Vincent, who was artistic, expressive and outgoing, James was introverted, governed by logic rather than feelings. 但詹姆斯去世后，李翊云起初发现自己无法让他在文字中浮现。与文森特不同，詹姆斯性格内向，支配他的是逻辑，不是情感。 Li felt any attempt to capture James in writing was doomed to be “a partial failure,” she said. Still, she decided she would rather fail than not try. 李翊云曾觉得，任何用文字刻画詹姆斯的尝试都注定是“一种不完全的失败”，她说。尽管如此，她还是决定宁可失败也不能放弃尝试。 “I had all these thoughts after James died, but those thoughts are nothing unless I think them through in writing,” Li said. “詹姆斯死后，我脑子里全是这些想法，但除非我把它们通过写作记录下来，否则这些想法就什么都不是了，”李翊云说。 It took her several months before she found the right language to write about him, but once she started, the words came quickly. 她花了几个月时间才找到了描述詹姆斯的适当语言，但一旦她开始下笔，句子就很快形成了。 “By the time I started writing, I knew it was going to come out all right,” she said, then quickly corrected herself with a quiet laugh that caught in her throat. “I keep saying all right, as though everything is going to be all right, nothing is all right.” “开始动笔的时候，我就知道一切都会很顺利，”她说，然后她很快用不出声的轻笑纠正了自己。“我老是说一切顺利，好像一切都会好起来，没有什么会好起来。” Vincent’s death was shocking, but not entirely unexpected. Even as a young child, he was prone to depression and despair. His fourth grade teacher sent a concerned email to Li about poems he wrote, painful verses reflecting on life and death. A therapist treating him warned Li that he might act on his suicidal thoughts and told her she should be prepared. 文森特的死令人震惊，但并非完全出乎意料。即使在孩提时代，他就容易陷入抑郁和绝望。上四年级时，文森特的老师给李翊云发了一封充满担忧的电子邮件，是关于他写的诗的，他写了一些反思生与死的痛苦诗句。一名为他治疗的心理专家曾警告李翊云，文森特可能会把自杀的想法付诸行动，并告诉她应该有思想准备。 There were no similar warning signs from James, who was also in therapy and came across as stoic and resilient, and didn’t exhibit his brother’s emotional extremes or crippling perfectionism. 詹姆斯没有类似令人警惕的表现，他也曾接受心理治疗，给人以能默默承受、适应能力强的印象，没有表现出哥哥那样的极端情绪，或令他自己崩溃的完美主义。 James loved philosophy, linguistics and science. He sometimes stunned his family as a young child, when he would offhandedly explain mysterious quantum particles or the behavior of obscure deep sea invertebrates at the dinner table. He excelled at languages — he studied Spanish, Italian and Japanese, and taught himself Welsh, German, Romanian and Russian — but often kept his thoughts to himself. In kindergarten, James came home one day wearing a sign he’d written that said, “IM NOt TaLKING Becuase I DON’t WaNT TO!” 詹姆斯热爱哲学、语言学和科学。小时候，他有时会在餐桌上漫不经心地解释神秘的量子粒子、或鲜为人知的深海无脊椎动物的行为，让家人大吃一惊。虽然他的语言能力出类拔萃——在学校学了西班牙语、意大利语和日语，并自学了威尔士语、德语、罗马尼亚语和俄语，但他总是把想法藏在心里。上幼儿园时，有一天他身上戴着一个自己写的牌子回了家，牌子上写着：“我不说话因为我不想说！” Sometimes Li wonders if she failed to notice a downward spiral because James was so self-contained. 有时候李翊云会想，她没注意到詹姆斯陷入不幸的漩涡，是否就因为他如此地自持。 A few weeks before his death, James told his mother that he was reading “The Myth of Sisyphus,” by the French philosopher Albert Camus, which opens with the question of whether life is worth living. Li recalled a conversation she and James had around that time, when she told him that most people endure the monotonous or painful parts of life for moments of pure joy. The last time Li and her husband saw James, when they dropped him off at his dorm after dinner the weekend before he died, Li asked what he was reading. James said that he was rereading “The Myth of Sisyphus.” 詹姆斯在去世几周前曾告诉母亲，他正在读法国哲学家阿尔贝·加缪的《西西弗斯神话》(The Myth of Sisyphus)。这本书在开篇处提出一个问题：人生是否值得活下去。李翊云回忆起当时和詹姆斯的一次对话，她告诉儿子，大多数人忍受人生中单调或痛苦的部分，为的是享受由衷快乐的时刻。李翊云和丈夫最后一次看到詹姆斯是他去世前的那个周末。他们晚饭后送他回宿舍，李翊云问儿子在读什么书。詹姆斯说，他当时正在重读《西西弗斯神话》。 Looking back, Li wonders if she sensed something then. But she doesn’t allow herself to dwell on whether his death could have been prevented, a trap she fell into when Vincent died, she said. 回过头来看，李翊云在想自己当时是否感觉到了什么。但她不允许自己老去想詹姆斯的死是否可以避免的问题，她说，文森特去世后，她曾掉进那个陷阱。 “When people die from suicide, family who are left behind usually ask, what if? Why?” Li said. “This time I thought, we don’t want to start with those questions, we want to start somewhere else, which was just to accept this is a fact. This was his decision, he died, and there was a reason for him to make this decision.” “有人自杀身亡后，身后的家人通常会问，‘要是……会怎么样？是因为什么？’”李翊云说。“这一次，我觉得我们不要从这些问题开始，我们要从别的地方开始，那就是接受这是事实。这是他的决定，他死了，他做这个决定是有原因的。” One thought kept resurfacing: Li was certain that James trusted in his parents’ ability to survive his death. That unshakable certainty is one of the things that keeps Li grounded and able to go on living. 一个不断浮出的想法是：李翊云确信詹姆斯相信父母在他死后有能力活下去。这个坚定的信念让李翊云保持了理智和活下去的能力。 “He was aware that we would endure this, because we endured it once,” she said. “I thought, we must respect his understanding and we must respect his choice.” “他知道我们会承受这件事，因为我们曾经承受过，”李翊云说。“我觉得，我们必须尊重他的领悟，我们必须尊重他的选择。” Experiencing a devastating loss for a second time, Li knew she needed to ground herself in routine, she said. 李翊云说，再次经历痛苦的失去，她知道自己需要过有规律的生活。 保持规律的生活帮助李翊云度过了儿子去世后的痛苦日子。她最近已完成了一部新小说的初稿。 Hannah Yoon for The New York Times She knew she needed to sleep, stay hydrated, get exercise every day, and to stick to her schedule, continuing with her lap swimming, her weekly piano lessons, her classes at Princeton. She threw herself back into writing, which she does for two or three hours every morning, and recently finished a draft of a new book, a historical novel about a group of musicians, set in early-19th-century Europe. 她知道自己需要睡眠、喝水、每天锻炼，并坚持自己的时间表，继续去游泳池游泳，继续每周上钢琴课，继续在普林斯顿大学教书。她把自己重新投入写作，每天早上写作两三个小时，最近完成了一部新小说的初稿。这是一部关于一群音乐家的历史小说，故事背景设定在19世纪早期的欧洲。 Li and her husband have continued to travel, something they loved to do with the boys, and to celebrate their sons’ birthdays with homemade cakes. “There’s only one person who knows how I feel — it’s him,” Li said of Dapeng, who prefers to remain private and doesn’t give interviews. 李翊云和丈夫已在继续旅行，那是他们喜欢和儿子们一起做的事情，他们还自己做蛋糕庆祝儿子的生日。“只有一个人知道我的感受——那就是他，”李翊云指的是大鹏，注重隐私的他没有接受采访。 Li has found support from her closest friends, among them the writers Elizabeth McCracken and Mona Simpson, who organized meals for her and her husband for several months, and the editor Brigid Hughes, who came to stay with Li the weekend after James died and helped with the task of alerting Li’s friends and colleagues. A friend later told Hughes that she couldn’t make sense of the message at first, and thought a draft of an old email about Vincent’s death had been sent by accident. 李翊云得到了来自她最亲密朋友的支持，他们中包括作家伊丽莎白·麦克拉肯和莫娜·辛普森，她们为李翊云和丈夫安排了几个月的餐食；还有编辑布里吉德·休斯，她在詹姆斯去世后的那个周末到李家住了几天，帮忙将这个噩耗告知李翊云的朋友和同事。一名朋友后来对休斯说，她收到消息后一开始觉得一头雾水，以为是意外错发了关于文森特去世的旧邮件草稿。 That weekend, Li asked Hughes a painful question: Wasn’t she the worst mother in the world? Hughes quickly replied that they both knew the question was outlandish. One thing Li doesn’t doubt is the depth of her love for her sons, who she always encouraged to be fully themselves. She’s tried to extend that acceptance to not only their lives but their deaths. 那个周末，李翊云问了休斯一个痛苦的问题：难道自己不是世界上最糟糕的母亲吗？休斯很快回答说，他们两人都知道这个问题太荒谬了。李翊云毫不怀疑的是她爱儿子的程度之深，她总是鼓励他们做真实的自己。她尽力将这种接纳扩展到不仅是他们的生命，也包括他们的死亡。 “As their mother, I always respected them and tried very hard to understand them,” she said. “作为他们的母亲，我总是尊重他们，并努力去了解他们，”她说。 While writing “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” Li had doubts about whether she should finish it. 在写作《自然万物只是生长》时，李翊云曾犹豫要不要完成这本书。 At one point, she asked McCracken to read an early draft and tell her if it was worth publishing. McCracken assured her it was. 她一度请麦克拉肯读了初稿，并告诉她书是否值得出版。麦克拉肯向她保证值得出版。 “I was astonished by what a work of clear thinking it was, about things that seem impossible to think about,” McCracken said. “To have lost two astonishing children, it’s a life sentence.” “令我惊讶的是，这是一部思路如此清晰的作品，探讨了一些似乎不可能去思考的东西，”麦克拉肯说。“失去两个如此出色的孩子，这等于被判处了无期徒刑。” Sitting in her sunroom, Li told me that there’s something she wishes she’d known earlier in her life, so that she could have shared it with her children: that it’s possible “to suffer better,” to be both sad and happy. It’s a place she’s arrived at in recent months. When she’s gardening, when she’s reading, or writing, or listening to music, or taking a walk in the woods with her husband, she feels happy, she said. 李翊云坐在家中的阳光房里对我说，她宁愿自己能早点明白一些事情，这样她就能和孩子们分享：“更好地受苦”是有可能的，既感受悲哀、也感受快乐。这是她近几个月逐渐得出的看法。当她做园艺、阅读、写作、听音乐，或与丈夫在林间散步时，她会感到快乐。 “We’re sad, we’re very sad, but we’re not unhappy,” she said. “So long as we live, we carry our love for the children, even though they’re not here.” “我们悲伤，非常悲伤，但我们并非不快乐，”她说。“只要我们活着，我们就怀抱着对孩子们的爱，即使他们已经不在人世。” If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. 如果你有自杀的想法，请拨打988或发短信，与988自杀与危机生命线联系，或访问SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources，以获取更多资源。 Alexandra Alter为时报撰写有关书籍、出版和文学界的报道。 翻译：纽约时报中文网 点击查看本文英文版。