The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons | The New Yorker

The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons
两个儿子的死亡和生活

The second time, having guessed the news about to be delivered, I did not give the sentence a moment’s thought. I did not wait for the detective to ask me to sit down, either. I indicated a chair in the living room where my husband should sit and took the other chair. My heart began to feel that sensation for which there is no name. Call it aching, call it wrenching, call it shattering, but they are all wrong words, useless in their familiarity. This time, the four policemen stood.
第二次，我猜到了即将传递的消息，没有多想这句话。我也没有等侦探叫我坐下。我指了指客厅里的一把椅子，我丈夫应该坐在那里，然后坐了另一把椅子。我的心开始感受到那种无名的感觉。称之为痛苦，称之为痛苦，称之为破碎，但它们都是错误的词，在他们熟悉的意义上毫无用处。这一次，四名警察站了起来。

Few objects speak. The phone and the backpack were reticent, so they could do little to illuminate the last moments of my children’s lives.
很少有物体会说话。电话和背包都很沉默，所以它们几乎无法照亮我孩子们生命的最后时刻。

Many objects outlive people, this thought has often occurred to me—when I see in a museum an eighteenth-century pianoforte or a twelfth-century sword or a bowl from 500 B.C.E. All of Vincent’s belongings and all of James’s belongings have outlived them; not a single item has left our care. There are Vincent’s many paintings hung around the house. There is James’s collection of pocket watches on a shelf. Everywhere I turn in the house, there are objects: their meanings reside in the memories connected to them; the memories limn the voids, which cannot be filled by the objects.
我经常想到，许多物品的寿命比人长——当我在博物馆里看到一架 18 世纪的钢琴、一把 12 世纪的剑或一个公元前 500 年的碗时。文森特的所有物品和詹姆斯的所有物品都已经过去了;没有一件物品离开了我们的照顾。房子周围挂着文森特的许多画作。书架上有詹姆斯的怀表收藏。我在房子里翻来覆去，到处都是物品：它们的意义存在于与它们相连的记忆中;记忆限制了空虚，而这些空隙无法被物品填补。

There is no good way to say this: words fall short.
没有好的说法：言语不够。

Still, these two clichés speak an irrefutable truth. Anything I write for James is bound to be a partial failure. Sooner or later, there will come the moment when my understanding parts ways with his essence.
尽管如此，这两个陈词滥调还是说出了一个无可辩驳的事实。我为 James 写的任何东西都注定是部分失败的。迟早会有我的理解与他的本质分道扬镳的时刻。

I also, on one occasion, wept. A few weeks after Vincent’s death, Brigid and I went to see a production of “King Lear” in New York. By the time Lear finished his howling monologue, I was weeping; I went on weeping after we left the theatre, sitting on the edge of a stone planter, in the center of which a small tree was shedding its last leaves. When I stopped crying, I said to Brigid, “There’s no surprise left for me. No one will ever be able to surprise me after Vincent.”
我也有一次哭泣。文森特去世几周后，布里吉德和我去纽约看了《李尔王》的演出。当李尔完成他嚎啕大哭的独白时，我已经哭泣了;我们离开剧院后，我坐在一个石头花坛的边缘，继续哭泣，花坛中央有一棵小树正在脱落它最后的叶子。当我停止哭泣时，我对布里吉德说：“我没有什么惊喜了。在文森特之后，没有人能给我带来惊喜。

The truth is that however I choose to express myself will not live up to the weight of these facts: Vincent died, and then James died; through writing, I was able to conjure up a Vincent in the book written for him, but I will not be able to do this for James—I cannot conjure him up in any manner.
事实是，无论我选择如何表达自己，都无法承受这些事实的重量：文森特死了，然后詹姆斯也死了;通过写作，我能够在为他写的书中想象出一个文森特，但我无法为詹姆斯做到这一点——我无法以任何方式想象出他。

When Vincent was alive, we talked and we argued (sometimes affectionately and sometimes contentiously). It was only natural that our endless talking in life would extend itself to where reasons end, where across the border of life and death words retain their vivacity. The book for Vincent was published as fiction because it could be called only that: no dead child has ever come back to have an argument with his mother.
当文森特在世时，我们聊天，我们争论（有时是深情的，有时是争论的）。我们在生活中无休止的谈话很自然地会延伸到理性结束的地方，在那里，跨越生死的边界，文字仍然保持着活力。文森特的书是作为小说出版的，因为它只能被称为：从来没有一个死去的孩子回来和他的母亲吵架。

It’s a solace to know that James found philosophical pleasure in language, different from the pleasure Vincent got from language—which was poetic, musical, and sensual.
令人欣慰的是，詹姆斯在语言中找到了哲学的乐趣，这与文森特从语言中获得的乐趣不同——语言是诗意的、音乐的和感性的。

My husband, referring to the picture recently, commented that, as a family, what the four of us shared was our belief in, and our respect for, free will.
我丈夫最近提到这张照片时评论说，作为一个家庭，我们四个人的共同点是我们对自由意志的信仰和尊重。

I thought for a moment and replied that, despite our not knowing enough of James’s thinking, what we could be certain of was this: he knew that we would respect his decision to take his own life, and he trusted that we would endure his death, for we had endured his brother’s death.
我想了一会儿，回答说，尽管我们对詹姆斯的想法了解得不够多，但我们可以肯定的是：他知道我们会尊重他结束自己生命的决定，他相信我们会忍受他的死亡，因为我们忍受了他兄弟的死亡。

And yet, for those who go on living, few can afford simply to be, and very few can be all right. The border between “all right” and “all wrong,” like the border between life and death, is not solid. In recent months, I have replied to friends’ queries with this line: “Our life is never going to be all right again, but we are doing all right.”
然而，对于那些继续活着的人来说，很少有人能负担得起，而且很少有人能过得好。“一切都对”和“全错”之间的界限，就像生与死之间的界限一样，并不牢固。最近几个月，我用这句话回答了朋友的询问：“我们的生活永远不会再好起来了，但我们做得很好。

I was full of admiration for Vincent. I felt unease, too. We parents could only do so much for our children, to raise them to be bold and free, but the world outside this bubble we called our family was often not a kind place.
我对文森特充满了钦佩。我也感到不安。我们父母只能为孩子做这么多，把他们培养成勇敢和自由的人，但这个我们称之为家庭的泡沫之外的世界往往不是一个善良的地方。

What can parents do but give their children the space to be, and allow them to do what they need so that they can become more fully themselves?
父母能做的是什么，只能给孩子一个空间，让他们做他们需要做的事，这样他们才能更完整地成为自己呢？

And yet, despite the parents’ efforts, and despite all the beings and doings that occur as the children grow, some among them die before their time.
然而，尽管父母付出了努力，尽管孩子们在成长过程中发生了所有的事情和行为，但他们中的一些人还是提前去世了。

Children die, and they are not happy.
孩子们死了，他们不快乐。

And their parents can never know whether those children died because they were not happy, or whether they were not happy because they sensed, too early, that they must face their own deaths.
他们的父母永远无法知道那些孩子是因为不快乐而死，还是因为他们过早地感觉到自己必须面对自己的死亡而不快乐。

When Vincent was around the same age, he asked, pointedly, “You understand suffering, and you write about suffering so well. Why did you give birth to us?” A question for which I never had a good answer.
当文森特差不多年纪时，他尖锐地问道：“你理解苦难，你把苦难写得那么好。你为什么生我们呢？这个问题我从来没有一个好的答案。

And I was not the only one to have known it. My husband must have, too. And Vincent’s therapist in California, who explained that Vincent was not a child who would take a few pills and call all his friends to announce that he was planning to kill himself. “You must be prepared,” the therapist said on the phone. “If Vincent decided to do it, it would be so sudden that no one would expect it and no one could stop it.”
而且我不是唯一一个知道它的人。我丈夫也一定有。还有文森特在加利福尼亚的治疗师，他解释说文森特不是一个会吃几片药然后打电话给他所有的朋友宣布他打算自杀的孩子。“你必须做好准备，”治疗师在电话中说。“如果文森特决定这样做，那将是如此突然，以至于没有人会预料到它，也没有人能够阻止它。”

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 loved them, and I still love them, but more important than loving is understanding and respecting them, and this includes, more than anything else, understanding and respecting their choices to end their lives.
在我看来，尊重我孩子的敏感和独特性——这样每个孩子都能有尽可能多的空间来成长为他自己的自我——是我作为母亲能做的最好的事情。是的，我爱他们，我仍然爱他们，但比爱更重要的是理解和尊重他们，这比其他任何事情都更重要的是，理解和尊重他们结束生命的选择。

If I train my mind on the happy moments, the framework for living seems sturdy enough. And yet it is not an indestructible shelter from catastrophes. A mother dedicating herself to the framework for living is like a shipbuilder building a vessel, not asking whether the voyage is to be through calm seas or tempests, not pondering whether there will be a tomorrow or not.
如果我在快乐的时刻训练我的思想，生活的框架似乎足够坚固。然而，它并不是一个坚不可摧的避难所。一位母亲全身心地投入到生活框架中，就像造船厂造船，不问航程是要经过平静的海面还是暴风雨，不去思考是否会有明天。

Seeing is believing, but a mother must restrain herself from foreseeing. To foresee is to give too much weight to intuition; foreseeing might be waving a white flag prematurely.
眼见为实，但母亲必须克制自己不去预见 。预见就是过于重视直觉;预见可能过早地挥舞着白旗。

I did not feel any anger when Vincent died—not at him, and not at life, either. But I did feel baffled and wounded by life. That a mother could do all things humanly possible and sensible for a child but still not keep him alive—this was the fact that I would have to live with, I thought, every single day, for the rest of my life. It was Vincent’s death that made me begin to use that phrase, “every single day, for the rest of my life.”
文森特死后，我没有感到任何愤怒——不是对他，也不是对生命。但我确实对生活感到困惑和受伤。一个母亲可以为孩子做所有人类可能和明智的事情，但仍然不能让他活着——我想，这就是我余生每天都必须忍受的事实。正是文森特的去世让我开始使用这句话，“每一天，我的余生”。

I had not lived with the same dread for James when he was alive. My parental anxiety about him was largely about his future. Then, one day, he walked out of the world in the same way that Vincent did.

And yet one wonders, in retrospect, what prompted the conversation about the probability or improbability of James feeling suicidal, which had been a recurring topic in the therapist’s office. Was it intuition or paranoia that led to the discussion shortly before James died—a premonition I couldn’t explain? It doesn’t matter, as the facts remain irrefutable: I did not anticipate that James would choose suicide; I did not detect any sign. For six years before Vincent’s death, I lived in dread that he would. For the six years between the two boys’ deaths, James, too, was pondering suicide—Vincent’s, and then, at some point, his own. I did not know when that shift happened; I did not even think that shift would happen, as I worried only about James’s life, not about his death.
然而，回想起来，人们想知道是什么促使了关于詹姆斯有自杀倾向的可能性或不可能性的对话，这一直是治疗师办公室里反复出现的话题。是直觉还是偏执狂导致了詹姆斯去世前不久的讨论——一种我无法解释的预感？这并不重要，因为事实仍然无可辩驳：我没有预料到詹姆斯会选择自杀;我没有发现任何迹象。在文森特去世前的六年里，我一直生活在恐惧中，害怕他会这样做。在这两个男孩去世之间的六年里，詹姆斯也在考虑自杀——文森特的自杀，然后在某个时候，他自己的自杀。我不知道这种转变是什么时候发生的;我什至没有想到这种转变会发生，因为我只担心詹姆斯的生命，而不是他的死亡。

Through their entire lives, at every school drop-off, every time they were leaving for a party or a playdate, every time I was leaving for a trip, and with each exchange of text, the last thing I said to Vincent and James was inevitably “I love you.”
在他们的一生中，在每一次放学时，每一次他们去参加聚会或玩耍时，每一次我去旅行时，每一次短信交流时，我对文森特和詹姆斯说的最后一句话都不可避免地是“我爱你”。

No matter how long we get to parent our children, there are only limited numbers of “I love you”s we can say to them. That, too, is a fact. ♦
无论我们能养育孩子多长时间，我们能对他们说的“我爱你”都是有限的。这也是事实。♦