An Experimental Cure for Sorrow
by Laura Sergeant
I drive the dimpled rental car, a white fleck against the black ribbon of asphalt that mimics the sky; the highway is diamond-crusted sparkle, sullen charcoal or spilled ink, not unlike my mood. Clouds hang like raw wool: puffy unfinished edges. They arise without origin and move rapaciously. On the horizon, I spy sunlight leaking onto periwinkle folds of land. A finger has propped open the gray shutters. I accelerate toward the light. My camera is cajoling me from the passenger seat. Toward the mirage, a future minute that I deem better than the present minute.
I slip Iceland under my tongue like a tab of medication, an experimental cure for sorrow. My grief counselor reminds me beauty is restorative. My computer becomes the pharmacy where I shop for destinations: a week-long migration away from my chipped brick house, mewling job list, and grief. At work, I watch parents trail their ashen children through hospital halls like limp balloons. Passengers on a listing ship, vigils in waiting rooms or bedside, staring out plexiglass portholes at the mundane—the indifference of an ordinary day—blinking fast food, kneeling traffic, dangling white earbuds, the world in orbit. They bargain silently, they keen palpably, they would trade anything. Children who are dying and don’t want to. Children who are alive and don’t want to be. I work with the latter. Every family broken in half. I wonder if it’s my sadness, my desire to return to an ordinary day that I recognize, observe enacted.
I try not to think about being told. The moment when spring bent back to winter. I’m pulled out of staff training by a clinical manager. He looks pained and I wonder if I’m being fired.
“One of your patients made a significant attempt. They’re actively dying.”
As a social worker, I see youth discharged from the hospital following an attempt or plan to die by suicide. Yet I’ve only faced this prickly sickness one other time. Kids swim into focus. “Kids” being too familiar; they are patients, yet it’s the language of my brain. My kids. Who? Don’t tell me a name. Don’t tell me a name. Let me go back in the lecture hall. Before my boss opens his mouth, there’s a suspended second; a world where everyone is alive. In that pause, you aren’t dying. The anvil strike of a name and the crushing sorrow. I tell myself to appear professional, coherent, when I want to cry out. Shock serves us well. I wonder if I seem stoic, unmoved. My colleague is gentle. “You don’t have to stay, do whatever you need.”
The unassuming afternoon is split raw. How a sentence dismantles any semblance of order. Words spread like a murky stain through clean water. The expectation of routine, the small pleasures I was contemplating on the lip of the weekend collapse. Plans to amend the veggie garden with compost, wearing my “trying-too-hard” jeans, anticipating a nightly dose of Mad Men. I race the wheezy theme music while heating up coffee—the black silhouette tumbles through a maelstrom, the bass guitar heartbeats against a snare drum and we land on our respective couches at the same time.
I drive back to work, not home. I’m speeding. As if I can reverse time. As if I can stop you from dying. The car feels too hot. Questions spraying like a nail gun. I’m accelerating to keep pace. You weren’t a client I worried about for suicide. Running scenarios in my mind. What did I miss? Trying to remember our last session. What space were you in? No—you were okay, actually. There’s a leap, a divide in consciousness, territory I can’t enter, can’t know. What happened? I need you to tell me. Which seems stupid and selfish.
Parking illegally, I hustle into the familiar building made strange by adrenaline. I’m wobbly with emotion and mounting shame. Head bent as I pass a cohort of colleagues who are ribbon-cutting for a new mental-health play space. Of all the days. Do they know? I’m paid to stop this from happening and I didn’t.
I come to Iceland for repair. I’ve traveled alone. Landscape as a pumice to slough off layers of sadness and regrow my skin. Beauty as an antidote to despair. To hike. To take pictures. To be diminished by the scale of what surrounds me: a land heaving and collecting itself, fissure-cracked, fomenting and pristine. I’ve been leaking at work. I blink back the sting until I can escape into grubby stairwells. I see you in the clinic rooms and registration desk, smiling, hanging around while I’m with other patients. Unprotected when the phone rings. I brace, expecting another death notification. Grief reverberates like a swallowed bullet.
My rearview is eclipsed into blackness by trucks and tour buses. Metal grills loom, curse my rental plates, and hurtle past me. I’m unnerved, partly by the threat and partly by being “that driver,” but I don’t speed up and remind myself to keep breathing.
Blur explodes into an unrelenting chorus, swirling lyric over organ grinder guitar.
Girls who are boys
Who like boys to be girls
Who do boys like they’re girls
Who do girls like they’re boys
Always should be someone you really love.
A song as old as my career. The kids I see these days. The kids I used to see. Listening to a pile of curated CDs as I commuted to my first job; driving through thinly populated communities to do home visits. Terrified by the responsibility.
Five radio stations punctuated by gray static; I’ve settled on one that loops cover versions of ’90s Brit-pop. Stout wild ponies flick their hair, sidle up to metal gates. My parents inhabit me in the car. The quarrelling starts: “Pull over! That’s a winner of a picture.” My mom swallows landscape with 35mm eyes, she blinks in rectangular clicks, her Rollei dangling from one wrist. She’s yelping at my dad. The urge to stop is visceral but I’m driving like he would, pragmatic and exasperated—“We can’t stop here, there’s nowhere to stop. Honestly, Donna, we’re on the highway!” Tense with impossibility, he would reposition himself. I draw up his rounded shoulders and weather her disappointment.
When it’s safe to stop, I skid into a gated driveway, turn off the engine. Fake Coldplay and dead parents hush. It takes both hands to exit the car safely. I’ve been warned the wind can turn doors into shrapnel, snapped out like baby teeth, white Chiclets the rental company won’t insure. I tramp backwards in a highway culvert hoping I’m not crushing sensitive habitat or a footfall away from geothermal burns. Is it loneliness or friendliness that compels me to chatter to the glossy horses as I snap pictures? As if they understood English or spoken language at all.
Weather-beaten. My cheer can be transient, vulnerable, attached to the sunlight. I whoop in the bright wash, a lucky blue sky that will flatten to pewter mist. A deserted black beach. Shocks of gold sedum. Spent lupin. Bent into a wet breeze, I shelter my camera, walk until the beach ends in a cluster of slippery black rocks. Coal teeth in a dark jawline; as the tide moves in, they sink into the ocean’s black throat. A young couple from the Netherlands—he of an oiled moustache and she of oversized amber glasses and pilling sweater. “Hey!” They’re excited for a two-week trip around the ring road, sighing about their ambitious itinerary. “We are one night only in each town.” I agree that could be a grind. Her paper coffee cup offers a cozy warmth I feel in my hands. “So sad” they’ve missed the migrating puffins by just a few days.
“It’s supposed to snow midweek!” I share the emailed warning from my rental car company. They thank me and we part, the light contact between travelers. Though I worry about them when the storm hits. I tack across the beach toward the parked car. How I must look from above—a dot of orange confetti, a puffin’s beak, against the monochromatic Rothko canvas—aqua, black, and emerald slashes. A country flustered by the currency of tourists. Colorful stamps pressed on disquieted envelopes. We affix ourselves to you.
Iceland’s mercurial weather is persistent with wisdom and metaphor. No certainties. As I leave the Dutch couple, the brooding clouds turn to lashing rain. Instead of driving further, I pop into the shelter of the cavernous building where I’d parked—a rest stop that’s part wool factory, part restaurant—primarily a massive outlet store. There are stunning, even useful souvenirs, lava scarves streaked with unspun wool, sea salts, and licorice, traditional sweaters with charming silver latches, heavy books and jam jars.
Three years after emptying my parent’s house, I remain without desire for material things. An echo of my mom. “I’m never taking another picture,” she said. We were crowded together in my grandmother’s mirrored closet, how many years earlier, surrounded by photo albums, stuffed shoeboxes, and slide carousels. Discarding the markers of travel, milestones and connection while we raced an expiring lease.
“But you love photography!”
“What’s the point? Look at this.” Pointed with her chin, no space to wave an arm. “It’ll all end up in landfill. You kids will just have to throw them all out.”
“It doesn’t matter. We can deal with it.”
I was scared to see the flattening of mood, the shrinking of appetites.
The rain hits the metal roof in an indiscriminate roar, there’s no rhythm, no counterpoint. I’m stuck for a bit and watch tourists rifle through racks of windbreakers and mittens and facsimiles of the outdoors. Shopping to remember the beach they didn’t stand on.
I search the face of the woman standing opposite me at a sweater rack, her deft wrist whipping hanger against hanger, pausing to frown at price tags through her readers. I see myself in the battered paper bag face, the freight of her camera slung across a puffy jacket with creeping disdain. It’s not the markers of age, but something in her weary intensity that I recognize and want to disavow. Dull entitlement. Strip-mining. Iceland reduced to a tick box, an item to be stuffed in a shopping bag. Her movements are perfunctory. Playing the role of a tourist without inhabiting the place.
Is that me? Is my hunt for scenic landmarks any different than hers for “Ice-wear”? I want to reassure myself I’m somehow more soulful, mindful in my travel. Taking pictures helps slow me down, helps me notice the tiny details in the present moment. But I get distracted by the buzz in my brain and fight to stay grounded. I get preoccupied by chasing perfect light and what I’ll see tomorrow and how to keep my camera dry and if I can get back in the Airbnb with impossible locks and work the cooktop that’s a glowering red orb I can’t shut off.
At night, in the scrubbed whiteness of my room, I scribble what I remember from the day. What’s behind my urge to capture and transport a minute spent in Iceland back home? An insulation against forgetting? I grab experience in my beak, flap away in a fury, bounty in my mouth, forgetting I have to let go to pick up the next thing. I can’t hold everything. I can’t build an impenetrable nest. My desire is to use memory, the comfort of the past, as insulation against future suffering. Trip pictures as salves for a heart-stopping workday, or a month when the sun doesn’t come out, or when grief punches me in the forehead. A desire to stretch some moments to infinity.
I’m left with grain, pixels, words, the chasm of trying to harness this country into a light box or a story. I’m never equal to the casual question “How was your trip?” Stammer, gather images, my mouth opens and closes. A wan distillation: “It was awesome.” I wince as friends flick through photos on my iPad, worried that they’re bored. What’s the human threshold for waterfall pictures?
I sag into the twilight, the melancholy of a finished day. A red church roof. Crosses planted behind a mossy wall high above the sea. You should be starting school this month: a glassy phone slithering from your pocket, flicking bangs, ankles plunging out of pants like stilts. Adolescence as myopic. Depression as myopic. Never seeing the gift you are or will become. Scratched and distorted lenses that I can’t polish or correct.
Looking at a map, I decide that Iceland is shaped like a human heart. Keflavik airport anatomically sits like the inferior vena cava or venous return—a recycling depot where depleted blood arrives for renewal. Planes dump turgid clumps of tourists, who decant into rental cars and tour buses, hoping to pink up in the days ahead. The main highway is a ring road, peripheral. I wonder about the impenetrable interior of Iceland gripped by the thought of an uninhabited, untouchable core. My modest plan was a skid along the southern coast. Was it the same with you? I didn’t predict or prevent your death. The trip as metaphor for my failure as a therapist. I skirted the edges and never met your interior.
Avoiding eye contact, I walk past the celebratory huddle and log into my work portal. Sitting in the dark, lit by the screen, I reread my treatment notes. In long shuddering pauses I have a conversation with your aunt. Reposition fragments of your last day, a collection of moments strung up backwards, trying to make a story. Stopping. It doesn’t matter. It won’t bring you back.
In the days that follow, I think in loops, in figure eights. To solve the narrative with blame. I should have plunged my hands into your slushy heart and found the wound. Stopped the bleeding. I should have seen it coming. A reckoning I tolerate for a few moments at a time, a dark drowning. I thrash up from under the violent wake. I need to hurl your death as far from me as I can. I decide someone else failed you. Someone else is “the why.”
Shame is unrelenting. I avoid eye contact. I pretend I’m okay. Terrified that postvention rounds will become a crucifixion. I wonder if colleagues trust my work. What happens if another patient dies? Shame follows me home from work, into the garden and the gym. Insistent nighttime hissing: if anyone else had been the therapist, you would still be alive.
My care is reviewed: chart audits, team rounds, debriefing. Despite formal reassurance and gentle gestures—knowing nods, kind emails and hugs—there’s no consolation. You’re still dead. Where did I fail? What didn’t I ask? I replay our last appointment. Every time, I decide you’re safe to leave the clinic. And I learn you are upbeat in the days that followed. Your risk undiscerned. I don’t feel absolved. Somehow, I missed something fundamental. Somehow, I didn’t give you enough armor for this world.
How do other clinicians understand suicide? I look online for companions, answers, statistics. Providing mental-health care at a tertiary hospital means treating “the least well of the least well.” Articles remind me that over a career it’s not if but when a patient will die by suicide, though there’s no community for condolence. Maybe confidentiality? Maybe stigma? I wonder what surgeons, oncologists or pediatricians expect their patient mortality rates will be? Not zero. Why have I applied a zero-mortality rate to my career?
It’s inevitable and unspeakable to admit some youth will die. A dialectic. I have to believe death by suicide is preventable and know it isn’t. I don’t abandon hope. I extend it to every patient and abide in the panic of not knowing what will come next.
There’s no mapping of the soul. The science is liquid and soft: no staging or grading of existential pain. Vibrating space we fill with questions and intuition—feeling blind and clumsy. I wonder if death by suicide represents a raw margin of illness—ungraspable suffering? Every day is a paradox, clinically confounding. Youth with risk profiles that terrify me don’t die. Profound relief. They show up in clinic weekly for sessions. They survive. I’m blindsided by your death.
I write letters to you.
I try writing a letter back. An unexpected greening. Unexpected grace.
You don’t blame me.
I believe you.
I drive toward God’s black knuckles rising from basalt beaches, the shaggy fat lambs flung like grains of rice on upturned pea-green bowls, crimson-lipped craters with aqua bellies, the casual white muscles of water flexing, the Easter egg brine and the phosphorescent sky.
A world so beautiful. A world so hard to live in.
It’s close to dusk when I reach the lava fields, reborn from carbon: the corkscrew curls, rusted crowns, pink cornices unfurl in olive hillocks and recede into aubergine distance. The beauty is staggering. Another involuntary gasp—I’ve spent the week gasping. An experience of awe. The balm of being diminished by nature. I park beside a mud-spattered camper van and scamper along the spongey trail with a child’s delight. I want to remember. A protective instinct, like gathering for drought, I try to scoop everything up with my camera. Fistfuls of water.
Forehead pressed into a plexiglass wedge, a backward keening, last looks before cumulous, before ether. When I open my hands at home, the water is gone. My palms are empty. I can’t hang on to any of it. Helpless. Moments I can’t stretch to infinity: a moonscape of tumbling moss, a curve of black beach, an ordinary Thursday, beaming at you arriving for session.
A Zen koan:
Even what disappears can fill me.
Even what disappears remains.
Laura Sergeant is a pediatric social worker who specializes in child and youth mental health. She has worked in community and hospital outpatient settings in southern Ontario, Canada. She has previous publication in the Globe and Mail, Dreamers Creative Writing, and first runner-up in the 2018 Grit-Lit literary. Most days she unwinds in her garden, on the Bruce Trail or by exploring Hamilton’s burgeoning coffee scene. Mortality and Canadian Public Broadcasting podcasts will prevent her from getting through her “must-read” book list. She is currently working on a collection of life stories.