Glacier Mystery, tome 3 : The Weight of Night

I think the history and energy of the place where you grow up never completely leave you. They continue to move through you like deep ocean undercurrents.

For me, I think of how the proud, opportunistic Vikings built Sandefjord on whaling profits. I imagine how they did whatever it took, ethical or not, to survive in a stark, cold land, and I sense that Montanans did the same: they trapped for fur, mined for gold, and fought the Indians using whatever tactics they could. I can sometimes feel the desperation and grit from those ancestors and the Natives riding on the mountain winds into the valley just as I could feel the echo of the pain from my people and the whales they killed gusting off the North Sea into Sandefjord Bay.

Yes, Gretchen, yes. I do think you'll find a way. Find some resolve. Others have."

I still think about those early conversations with Dr. Haugen. I hang on to them because just when it seemed I couldn't bear one more moment of my self, of my life, along came his kindness--a certain sweetness--that changed nothing really at all, but somehow gave me a thin rope to grab onto during my free fall into that black hole and allowed me to go on another minute, another hour, another day.

It would take years for me to learn that only the slow daily passage of time could help a person cope with matters of the heart, and that in the end, it was just you and the thoughts bleeding in your head. And bleed they did-endlessly, minute after minute, hour after hour-into cracks of self-doubt and self-hate unless you worked hard to not let that happen.

I could sense something contained, something deeply buried, but I respected that. I had my own things that needed emotional burial-most people did. But damn if I wasn't curious. If there's one thing I understand about myself, it's that I like order, and part of maintaining that order involves me figuring out what makes people tick.

but my therapist instructed me to decline, telling me that people love to get a glimpse of people's pain and trauma: Skadefryd, he said. Schadenfreude. But there is a reason high school and colle ge kids cold-shouldered by social media and excluded from their communities sometimes got so desperate that they commit suicide.