Lottie

Lottie, the mother of Elfrieda Von Riesen and Yolandi Von Riesen and the wife of Jake Von Riesen, is a caregiver whose care rarely looks like simple compliance. She can meet family strain with humor, resist the rules imposed by the East Village Mennonite community, and make room for people who have nowhere else to turn. Yet when her daughters’ needs conflict, she cannot make the conflict disappear: she sometimes withdraws, sometimes keeps showing up, and remains part of a family learning to live with grief and uncertainty.

Family life and resistance

During a camping trip in the Badlands of South Dakota, Elfrieda Von Riesen complains that camping is an exercise in setting up and dismantling a makeshift life. Lottie answers that the experience is meant to alter their perception, then turns the family back toward its immediate task: cooking their food together. Her response joins an imaginative idea to a practical insistence on being a family in the present. It is a small instance of her characteristic humor and of the limits of what reassurance can accomplish: she offers a different way to look at the discomfort without pretending that her daughter enjoys it.

Her resistance to the church’s authority is more consequential. When the bishop arrives with a group of elders to challenge Elfrieda Von Riesen’s plan to study music at university, Lottie deliberately stays in the kitchen rather than welcoming them with the expected coffee and homemade food. She and Jake Von Riesen have argued about how to receive such visits: she has urged him to say that the timing is inconvenient, while he has felt unable to confront the men. Lottie has agreed not to take over that confrontation, but refuses to wait on the visitors as they discuss her family’s future. Their visit concerns a fifteen-year-old girl’s wish to pursue higher education, which the elders regard with suspicion. Lottie’s absence from the living room is not indifference to her daughter; it is a refusal to furnish warmth and hospitality to an authority she believes has no right to march into their home.

Care in a family crisis

When Elfrieda Von Riesen stops eating and pleads with her family not to call a doctor, Lottie phones Yolandi Von Riesen in Toronto and asks her to come. At the bedside, Yolandi decides to call for medical help despite her sister’s objections. Lottie remains at the dining-room table, her back turned, unable to support one daughter’s choice over the other’s. Her withdrawal leaves Yolandi to act, but it also records Lottie’s predicament: she cannot resolve the disagreement between a daughter seeking to refuse intervention and another determined to protect her.

Three days later, Nic and Yolandi have made Lottie leave for a Caribbean cruise. She takes a tiny suitcase containing heart pills and mystery novels, and continues to phone for news of Elfrieda Von Riesen. Her accounts from the ship combine concern with an almost comic confidence in survival: she reports a bartender praying for the family in Spanish, a street musician’s piano CD intended for her daughter, a conversation with the captain about burials at sea, and a fall in her cabin from which she believes the railings or a lifeboat would have saved her. The stories do not make her concern for her daughter less real. They show a mother capable of turning even a frightening possibility into an assurance that rescue remains possible.

When Elfrieda Von Riesen is in the psychiatric ward, Lottie visits with Yolandi. A nurse reports that her daughter has eaten breakfast and taken her medication. Lottie responds without celebrating the change: she sees that Elfrieda is following instructions, but wants her to want treatment for herself. She believes in struggle and resistance, even as she wants her daughter to eat and accept care. The distinction captures the family’s recurring difficulty: survival may depend on intervention, but compliance alone cannot settle what a person wants or restore a sense of agency.

Education and work as care

After Elfrieda Von Riesen leaves for Europe, Lottie makes a change of her own, enrolling in university classes in the city to become a social worker and then a therapist. By the time she graduates, the church elders have turned away from the Von Riesen women. Lottie converts a spare bedroom into an office, and Mennonites who are sad or angry come to see her, often secretly because therapy is deeply stigmatized in their community. Her work creates a place for people to speak outside the authority that has helped make their distress difficult to acknowledge.

Many clients cannot pay her in money. The household instead receives frozen meat, chickens, and eggs; a client may repair a car transmission, while another woman mows the lawn or waters the flowers with her children. Lottie does not demand payment from people who cannot afford it, and clients insist on repaying her through the work and goods they can offer. In one case, a client asks her to keep two bullets so that the client will not be tempted to harm herself or her daughter. The episode brings the stakes of Lottie’s practice into the family home: the spare bedroom is not merely a professional office but part of a network of practical, confidential care.

Roles, loyalty, and family loss

Lottie’s daughters understand their family roles differently. During an argument, Elfrieda Von Riesen tells Yolandi that she had to be perfect so her sister could make mistakes, and that she was the one who showed empathy toward their father’s sadness. Lottie is included in Elfrieda’s complaint that neither parent took on that role. This is Elfrieda’s account of an unequal family arrangement, not a neutral verdict on Lottie; it nevertheless shows how the family’s care could be divided unevenly, with one daughter feeling responsible for the father while the other was free to fail.

That division also shapes the crisis over assisted death. Elfrieda asks Yolandi to take her to Zurich and insists that their mother and Nic must not know, because she believes they would prevent her from going. She attributes to Lottie a hope grounded in God or in the odds, and a refusal to give up. Yolandi does not agree to take her to Switzerland. Lottie is not present in this private appeal, but her daughter’s expectation reveals the force of her continuing attachment: Elfrieda understands her mother’s hope as a barrier to the choice she is asking her sister to make.

Lottie’s bond with her sister Tina becomes especially visible after Tina dies. Tina had come to Winnipeg to be with Lottie and help her, but died there. Lottie writes the eulogy on her balcony at night; she is often asked to write such tributes because her style can be breezy and playful with details while still striking deeply. Yolandi leaves her alone to write. At the same time, the family’s inheritance history places Lottie and Tina within a wider inequality: the daughters in their family line receive little of the wealth passed from fathers to sons. The story does not reduce their sisterhood to that imbalance, but sets their mutual care against the material order surrounding them.

Continuing care and limits

The family’s care for Elfrieda Von Riesen continues through practical arrangements. Nic and Yolandi try to assemble a team of caregivers for her release; Lottie is expected to visit every day, while a friend is arranged to stay with her for several hours. The proposed team remains uncertain, and Yolandi worries that Elfrieda may be scheduled for a five-city concert tour before she is well enough to travel. Lottie’s presence is one of the dependable parts of a plan that cannot guarantee recovery.

Before leaving Winnipeg with Yolandi to attend Tina’s funeral in Vancouver, Lottie is at the hospital with Elfrieda. Yolandi tells her sister that she will return, invites her to stay in Toronto, and acknowledges the painful difference between wanting to live and wanting to die. The sisters embrace, but no agreement resolves their opposing positions. Later, Yolandi considers the Swiss option in private, researches costs, and asks a bank about a loan; she does not tell Lottie. That concealment marks the distance that can persist even inside a family organized around care. Lottie’s significance lies partly in this unresolved tension: she keeps returning to her daughters and to those who seek help, while the novel refuses to make devotion a guarantee that she can protect everyone from loss.