Julie

Julie is Yolandi Von Riesen’s second cousin, childhood companion, and most dependable friend. Raised alongside Yolandi in East Village, she remains a constant presence through marriages, children, family illness, and bereavement. Her support is practical as often as it is emotional: she can talk through an impossible decision, hold a hand in the hospital, or arrive with the equipment needed to get someone safely out of trouble. In a story shaped by family crisis and the limits of what one person can do for another, Julie represents a form of loyalty that does not promise to solve everything; it keeps showing up.

Identity and Background

Julie and Yolandi grew up together in East Village. They are second cousins, and their mothers are best friends; the family network surrounding their friendship is close enough that their mothers’ bond reinforces their own. Their shared childhood becomes the ground for a relationship that lasts into adulthood, even as both women acquire complicated lives of their own.

As an adult, Julie works as a letter carrier for Canada Post. The job is physically demanding: she walks about fifteen miles a day carrying two twenty-pound mailbags. She is also conspicuously unwilling to treat workplace rules as sacred. On rainy days, she has been known to sit inside a green street mailbox, smoke, and listen to BBC News podcasts, an improvisation that has earned reprimands. Other acts of insubordination include rolling up the waistband of her uniform skort. Suspensions lasting from one to three days suit her well enough when they let her spend time with her children instead of getting them up before dawn and taking them to a neighbour’s home in their pyjamas.

Julie has two children, a boy and a girl, who are eight and nine in one remembered scene. She shares custody of Shadow, the family dog, with them. After separating from her husband, a tall sculptor and oil painter, she makes use of the Canada Post health plan to see a therapist. Therapy is not presented as evidence that her life is falling apart: Julie says she is happy and values having a space to talk about her feelings, plans, hopes, and disappointments. Her therapist describes her as exceptionally optimistic, while her dreamless sleep puzzles him. Her optimism is a characteristic, not a denial that life can be painful.

A Friendship Made of Ordinary Care

The friendship between Julie and Yolandi includes unguarded talk as well as shared family history. On Julie’s porch, they drink inexpensive red wine and eat cheese and crackers while deliberately avoiding discussion of Elfrieda Von Riesen. Yolandi describes Elfrieda as a subject she cannot grasp but which nevertheless has a powerful hold on her. The conversation turns instead to motherhood: both women worry intensely about their children’s well-being and blame themselves for their unhappiness. They also speak about former partners, the fear of being unwanted or alone, and the uncertainty of whether they have done anything right. Their answer is modest but consequential: they have kept their friendship and expect to remain there for one another.

They even imagine a shared future after their children have grown and their parents have died: a house in the countryside where they might chop wood, pump water, fish, play piano, and sing together. The plan is half comic, half promise. Its details show how Julie’s friendship gives Yolandi a picture of continued life beyond the immediate demands of family care, without pretending that either woman can control what the future will bring.

Julie’s care also takes an unmistakably practical form. During an ice storm, Yolandi becomes stranded on the slippery bank of the Assiniboine River after trying to use it as a shortcut. Unable to climb the frozen slope in smooth-soled shoes, she calls Julie, who is nearby on her mail route. Julie takes off her spiked boots and throws them down to Yolandi, allowing her to climb to the sidewalk. While Yolandi makes her way up, Julie stands on her mailbag to keep her feet dry and smokes. They go for coffee and a Boston cream doughnut afterward. The episode distills their friendship into action: Julie answers, comes, and brings exactly what the situation requires.

In another period of their lives, Julie has bought a house and is fixing it up. Her home life is lively and unpolished: Shadow is there, bicycles and guitars occupy the kitchen, and Julie makes mint smoothies alongside perogies and salad. She once played bass guitar in a band called Sons and Lovers. These details place her friendship with Yolandi within a full, changing life of work, parenting, music, a new home, and relationships beyond the family.

Standing Beside Yolandi in Elfrieda’s Crisis

When Elfrieda’s condition becomes an acute hospital crisis, Julie joins Yolandi in the intensive care room. Elfrieda has a breathing tube and a machine is breathing for her. Julie and Yolandi sit on either side of her, hold her hands, and stay quiet when they have no words. When Elfrieda taps her face, Julie recognizes that she is asking for her glasses. Julie goes to look for them, offering Yolandi an interpretation that gives the gesture a practical meaning and Elfrieda something she wants to see. This is a small act, but it matters in a scene where communication is constrained and the family cannot make the crisis disappear.

Julie’s presence also extends beyond the hospital room. When Yolandi is frightened and unsure what to do, she goes to Julie’s porch and asks for wine. They sit together late into the night, walk toward the riverbank, and look toward Ste. Odile Hospital in the distance. Yolandi wonders which window belongs to Elfrieda. Their conversation turns to whether Yolandi could take Elfrieda to Switzerland to seek assisted death. Julie challenges the idea that Yolandi could simply carry it out, and the discussion brings fear of being caught together with the possibility of lifelong guilt. Julie does not supply a clean resolution; she stays with Yolandi while the question remains unsettled.

That companionship continues in later conversations about the Swiss option. Julie tells Yolandi that legality does not by itself make the choice right and argues that the option seems intended for people who are already dying. Yolandi responds that Swiss law also recognizes mentally ill people who experience weariness of life. Julie remains uncertain rather than becoming a simple opponent. At one point, as Yolandi tries to make plans around a family hospital visit, Julie urges her to eat and presses a frozen steak to her forehead. The gesture is both comic and caring: while the ethical argument remains abstract and immense, Julie attends to the exhausted person in front of her.

Grief, Continuity, and Narrative Role

After Elfrieda’s death, Yolandi calls Julie and asks her to go to Lottie’s apartment and wait there. Julie’s son answers and relays the message while Julie is out with Judson; Yolandi sends love to Julie and to the family members around her. The exchange shows that their friendship remains woven into the practical network of care even when grief scatters the family and Yolandi has to reach people one call at a time.

The friendship is particularly visible on Christmas Day, when Julie and Yolandi discover that it is the first Christmas either has spent alone. Julie’s children are with their father, Will is with his girlfriend’s family, Nora is with Dan, and Lottie is in hospital. The two women drink Scotch in their separate living rooms and tap their glasses against their phones. Yolandi tells Julie that she is the strongest person she knows, while privately trying to change her own beliefs about what strength and survival mean. They talk for hours, through the night and into Boxing Day, and are glad when the holiday has passed. Their call does not undo the losses or loneliness that brought them together; it makes those hours bearable through shared attention.

Julie’s narrative importance lies in the contrast between the enormity of Yolandi’s questions and the small, repeatable forms of care Julie can offer. She cannot decide for Yolandi whether to pursue assisted death, cannot repair Elfrieda’s illness, and does not claim certainty about what is right. What she can do is listen, disagree without withdrawing, answer a late call, lend her boots, recognize a gesture, bring food, and remain present after a death. The book makes this durable friendship one of Yolandi’s means of continuing: not an answer to grief, but a relationship that survives alongside it.