Elf’s gravestone

Elfrieda Von Riesen’s gravestone is imagined through a series of tentative proposals rather than a settled inscription. As her ashes are buried beneath an enormous tree in Winnipeg, her husband, Nic, and her sister, Yolandi Von Riesen, consider what a stone should say—or whether it should say anything at all. Their discussion turns the memorial into a place where grief, love, and disagreement over how to remember Elfrieda remain visible but unresolved.

Burial and the question of place

Nearly Christmas, Nic calls from Winnipeg with an idea for the headstone: lines about sleeping peacefully beneath grass and a vaulted sky. The proposal arrives after Elfrieda’s death, when the family has already had to decide where her remains will rest. Yolandi had wanted to bring some of Elfrieda’s ashes back to Toronto, but Nic opposed dividing them. They are instead buried beneath a large tree at Elmwood Cemetery in Winnipeg.

Their choice rejects another possible resting place. Yolandi’s mother had suggested burying Elfrieda with her father, Jake Von Riesen, in East Village. The cemetery could accommodate three urns, the cemetery representative explained, a detail that also implied a possible future place for their mother. Nic refused: Elfrieda had expressly said she did not want to be buried in East Village. He compares returning her there to giving Louis Riel’s body back to the Canadian government as a souvenir, making the burial question one of honoring Elfrieda’s wishes rather than simply reuniting family remains.

Yolandi proposes the backyard because Elfrieda had been a homebody. Nic answers that there would be legal problems and that Elfrieda was not a cat. The exchange briefly lets their humor coexist with the practical limits on what the living can choose for the dead. The ashes remain together at Elmwood Cemetery, while the headstone discussion continues separately, as an effort to find a form of remembrance that does not contradict Elfrieda’s wishes.

Poetry, labels, and the blank stone

Nic’s first proposal gives the stone a poem’s promise of undisturbed rest. When they later consider a John Clare poem, however, the possibility carries unwanted asylum associations. A woman poet might seem more fitting, but Nic notes that many of the great women poets died by suicide, bringing another association the two want to avoid. Their hesitation is not simply about literary taste: they do not want to label Elfrieda even after death.

A blank stone, bearing only her name and dates, becomes one possible answer. The proposal leaves the memorial free of a diagnosis or an explanation of how she died, but it does not erase the poem’s appeal. The original image still holds for Nic in the phrase “let me lie,” followed by the grass and vaulted sky. In this exchange, the verse can remain meaningful as an image of rest even if the family decides against placing a poem on the stone.

Grief and responsibility

The gravestone conversation takes place alongside a painful disagreement about what might have been done to keep Elfrieda safe. Nic tells Yolandi that she did everything she could and that no one was to blame. She cannot fully accept that reassurance: she thinks Elfrieda would have been able to talk her way out of the ward, and she wonders whether taking her to Zurich might have allowed her to die peacefully and not alone. Yolandi describes herself as having failed her sister.

Nic, in turn, says he should have fought harder to keep Elfrieda in the hospital. Yolandi insists that he could not have fought harder. Their exchange does not settle responsibility; it shows each survivor directing blame toward themselves while trying to release the other from it. The proposed inscription therefore sits beside, rather than resolves, their private accounting of what they did and did not do for Elfrieda.

Music and an undecided memorial

Later, Nic suggests engraving a line of music on the stone, with no words at all. The idea shifts the memorial away from poetry and its associations toward a form of expression connected to Elfrieda’s musical life. The text records the suggestion and their long telephone conversation about which musical line to use, but it does not say that they chose one or that the stone was completed with it. The name-and-dates stone, the poem, and the music remain alternatives rather than a confirmed final design.

As Nic and Yolandi discuss the engraving, Yolandi wants to tell him that Elfrieda had asked her to take her to Switzerland. She fears that telling him would imply that Elfrieda did not trust him or that he had not understood her; she also knows he is already alone. She cannot find a way to raise it, and wonders whether she herself is the lamb, the butcher, or merely the knife. The conversation leaves the gravestone open-ended: an object meant to mark Elfrieda’s resting place, but also the point at which the survivors’ love, silence, and uncertainty gather.