The mother who wept for the wrong son
A question, before any of this
When something is lost, what exactly are we grieving?
The obvious answer is: the thing. And for most of a life that answer holds up fine, so there is not much reason to look at it closely.
This week's story looks at it closely. It is two sentences long, it concerns the deaths of two children, and it is the hardest thing in this course. I am not going to make it lighter than it is.
A word about how to hold it before you read. This is not a story that exposes a bad mother. Nothing in the text condemns her, and nothing in this session will either. What the story does is take something almost everybody does — quietly, constantly, without ever putting it into words — and set it down in daylight where it can be looked at. The reason it is hard is not that she is strange. It is that she is not.
If you have lost a child, or are carrying a fresh grief of any kind, you may want to come back to this one later. It will keep. Session 6 is about a man buying advice from a stranger and is considerably easier company.
The storyTwo sentences — read it before anything below
A new volume this week. Fascicle 45 is "Ordinary Women," the companion to the one we have been reading. You want number 6.
6. A Mother's Two Sons Drown, and She Weeps for the One Who Could Swim
The title tells you the whole plot. The story is about her answer when somebody asks her why.
Read it →Come back when you have finished.
Three momentsIn a story with only about five
1 · The first son gets one clause
"A mother bore two sons. One could not swim, and fell into the water and died, and the mother did not weep at all. One who could swim also fell in and died, and the mother wept and grieved for him."
Read the first son's whole existence in this story. He is born, he cannot swim, he drowns, and his mother does not weep. Four clauses, and one of them is his death.
The Chinese is even flatter than the English: 母都不哭 — the mother simply did not cry. Not that she grieved privately, or was too shocked to cry, or wept later. The text says she did not, and offers no softening at all.
And notice that the story's own shape matches her attention exactly. One line for the child she did not mourn; then it moves briskly on to the one she did. Even the telling gives him less room. If you read quickly you will have skimmed past a dead boy, which is the story's first quiet trick on you.
2 · Somebody asks, and she is not embarrassed
"Someone said: for the first son you did not weep, and for the second you weep — why? The mother said: the first could not swim and so it was fitting; the second was skilled at swimming, and for him it was a wrong."
Two things here, and the second is the important one.
First: she answers immediately. No hesitation, no defensiveness, no attempt to explain that she loved them both. Somebody asks her the most exposing question a person could be asked and she replies at once, as though the reasoning were obvious. Because to her it is.
Second, and this is what makes the story worth a week: her answer is coherent. It is not madness or callousness. She has a principle, she applies it consistently, and if you accept the principle the conclusion follows. The two words she uses are doing all the work — 宜, fitting, what accords with how things should go; and 枉, a wrong, something bent out of true, a thing that should not have happened.
One death fit. One death did not. She wept at the one that did not fit.
3 · Both sons are equally dead
This is the moment the story does not write down, and the reason it only needs two sentences.
She is not, on her own account, grieving her son. She is grieving a breach of the expected order — a swimmer who drowned, a rule that failed to hold. The boy who could not swim went into the water and the world behaved as advertised, so there was nothing to protest. Her tears are attached to the unexpectedness, not to the child.
And the child who received no tears is exactly as dead as the one who did.
- "He was so young." — a statement about sequence, not about him.
- "She had just retired." — about timing.
- "And they did everything right." — about a rule that was supposed to hold and did not.
- Every one of those is true, every one is said with real love, and every one is a sentence about the shape of the story rather than the person who is gone. That is not a fault in the speaker. It is simply what grief reaches for when it needs somewhere to put itself.
The story's whole method is to run that instinct out to the end and let you watch it arrive. It does not tell you that grieving the broken rule is wrong. It does not say she should have wept for both. It puts two drowned boys side by side, gives one of them a mother's tears and the other one clause, and stops — leaving you to notice that the difference between them was not in them at all.
There is a second question hiding under the first, and it is the one that tends to follow people home: not "have I grieved the wrong things," but "is there something I never grieved because it made sense?"
One thing to tryThis week · take it gently
Choose a loss of your own — and please choose an older one, not a raw one. A person, a job, a friendship, a capability, a place you cannot go back to.
On the right: what rule was broken. The reasons you have given other people, or yourself, for why this one was hard. "Too soon." "Not fair." "After everything." "Just when it was going well."
Then look at which list is longer, and which one you can write more easily. Neither answer is a failure. The left-hand list is usually much harder to write, which is worth knowing about yourself.
If you have the appetite for the harder half: think of something you lost that made sense — the expected death, the relationship everyone saw coming, the job that was never going to last — and ask whether you ever grieved it, or whether it went past you in one clause.
Five questionsClick an answer for immediate feedback · nothing is recorded
One question, left open
Which of your losses made sense — and did you ever grieve it?
Most people can name the losses that broke a rule. They have been told about those, and told about them often, because they are the ones other people know how to be sorry about. The other kind goes by without a word: the death that was expected, the ending everyone saw coming, the thing that simply ran its course. It was fitting. Nobody asked how you were. And it is exactly as gone as the rest.
Session 6 · Buying wisdom
Something considerably lighter. A man hands over good money to a stranger for a single piece of advice — the kind of sentence you would be annoyed to have paid for — and it later saves his life. The question is what a piece of advice is actually worth, and when you find out.