Jakob Von Riesen’s suicide

Jake Von Riesen’s suicide, when he stepped into the path of a fast-moving train, is a formative loss in the family’s history. Yolandi remembers it through both its stark circumstances and the ordinary details that followed: a bag of belongings, a small amount of money, and a tune she had repeated to herself before he died. The memory later returns against another train death in the family, linking private grief to a pattern that resists easy closure.

The Death and Its Immediate Aftermath

Jake died beside trees on the railway tracks. The account does not explain what led him to the track; its emphasis instead falls on what his death left behind and on the family’s effort to go on living with it.

Afterward, police gave Lottie a bag containing the things Jake had with him. His glasses had survived the impact, but crumbled when she took them from the bag; his watch was also damaged, and his wedding rings were badly battered. These objects make the event tangible without explaining it: items associated with seeing, time, and marriage return to his family altered by a death they cannot undo.

Jake had seventy-seven dollars on him. The family used the money for Thai takeout, an ordinary meal made possible by money that had belonged to the dead. Recalling Julie’s practical reminder that people still have to eat, Yolandi places survival beside grief without suggesting that one cancels the other.

Yolandi’s Childhood Memory

The death is also preserved as a before-and-after in Yolandi’s memory. In the days before Jake went into the path of the train, she repeatedly hummed a familiar refrain and sang herself to sleep. Recalled later, the small ritual carries the weight of a child trying to soothe herself in the time leading up to a loss she could not prevent.

That recollection gives the event a delayed, personal form: the account does not reconstruct the moment on the tracks, but shows how Yolandi remembers the days around it. The contrast between a repeated song and the sudden finality of the train makes the memory both intimate and incomplete.

The Death’s Return in the Family Story

Years later, after Elf dies by train, the resemblance to Jake’s death becomes explicit in Yolandi’s response to her sister’s body. She recalls her father’s death as a parallel, and asks where violence goes if it does not pass back into the family’s blood and bones. The comparison does not make the two deaths identical; it shows how the earlier loss shapes the family’s understanding of the later one.

Jake’s suicide therefore remains active in the narrative through memory and repetition. The returned belongings, the meal bought with his money, and Yolandi’s childhood song each preserve a different scale of the loss: material, domestic, and remembered. When another train death occurs, those details help explain why the family experiences it not as an isolated tragedy but as an echo of a wound already present.