To Hold Oneself Together

On the Aland Islands in Scandinavia, the beauty and calm of the archipelago’s blue skies and seas are deceptive. Isolation encourages contemplation — but can it, as one grieving mother wonders, offer respite as well?

- Yiyun Li

“The Aland Islands — where?” It was the first question my friends asked when I told them of my plan to travel there. “An archipelago in the Baltic Sea,” I would say, “between Sweden and Finland.” But that didn’t quite seem to explain the place. “There are more than 6,700 islands there, and around 65 of them are inhabitable.” Then their interest would be piqued: “How did you find it?”

The same question was also asked by the Alanders I met. “I found it on the map,” I said. What better way to discover a new place than to rotate a globe — these days digitally — and to set one’s heart on an unfamiliar or unheard-of destination? (In 2018, 93 million American citizens travelled abroad. The same year, a total of 520 of them stayed on Aland.)

The archipelago is far geographically from my home in Princeton, N.J., though I was also searching for a different kind of distance. Two summers ago, I lost a teenage son to suicide. Two seasons ago, I was next to my father when the doctors took him off life support. “The only thing grief has taught me,” Emerson wrote in 1844, in “Experience”, after the death of his young son, “is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality. . . . An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists.”