Where Reason Ends: What would my dead son say to me?

WORTH READING, especially if you, too, have lost a child.

I started this spare, heartrending book over again as soon as I finished it. Not because it told a gripping story; it didn’t, which would usually make me lose interest. But it is a deep book whose meaning is murky and I thought a second reading might reveal more to me. As it turns out, the book has taken on an impossible task, trying to illuminate the mystery of how we communicate with the dead, and because it can’t really do that, it left me dissatisfied. 

I started it over hoping I would get it’s profound message more clearly the second time. But ultimately, I think that searching is the book’s lesson: once it’s the dead with whom we are communicating, we are always going to be dissatisfied. 

Li’s 16 yo son died by suicide and this book, called a novel but really a sort-of memoir, is about a mother talking to her dead 16 yo in “the after time.” Her son is biting, pragmatic, and sarcastic; she doesn’t put comforting words in his mouth just because he’s dead. He doesn’t regret killing himself because he ended the suffering of perfectionism that was tormenting him. And the mother seems intent on not burdening him with her own pain so she does no angry railing at him. He isn’t in heaven now nor anyplace that might comfort her. It’s not clear where he is, only that Li can conjure him with words.  

When my son died of an overdose four years ago, I could conjure him with words, too. I wrote to him. In panicky moments I shrieked for him (usually, though not always, in my head), and invariably he was with me immediately. “I’m right here,” he would assure me. He *was* sorry but more for me and others he’d left behind than for himself. He accepted his death as an inevitability and seemed to want to help us view it that way, too. One of the last times I heard from him, he told me that his sister and I should have more fun. Our open line of communication lasted only a few months. Now I rarely feel him near me. I’ve told his sister I think he crossed over or went beyond the veil, whatever that means. But I was grateful he stayed nearby in the early days of my grief. 

Li, like me, has no faith in an afterlife, but this conversation is taking place just three months after her son’s death (which is also when she wrote this book), when that line of communication still feels open. His abrupt departure left her with so many questions and such a yearning for him that she conjured him the only way she could, with words, the tool with which she makes her living. 

And many passages are so poignantly beautiful - and Li’s prose throughout so lean and poetic — that the book is worth reading (and even re-reading) despite its failure to reach any conclusions. One of my favorite passages comes early in the book,when the son tells the mother he lives now in time, not days, and says he is sorry for her that she has to live in days: 

“Days, the easiest possession, requiring only automatic participation. The days [my son] had refused would come, one at a time. Neither my allies nor my enemies, [the days] would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into a friend or an enemy to myself.” That passage struck me as searingly true.