“a lightness come over me”

“A lightness come over me” is an image of forgiveness imagined as a future physical sensation, not a verdict delivered in the moment. In Yolandi Von Riesen’s account, the phrase first offers the possibility that a stranger may one day understand her outburst; later, Yolandi’s own recollection of family trauma makes that promised lightness seem unreachable. Its meaning shifts from consolation to painful refusal.

A sign sought in uncertainty

On Julie’s porch, Yolandi tries to decide whether she should take Elfrieda Von Riesen to Switzerland. She fixes her attention on the porch’s peeling yellow paint, torn screen, bicycles, roller skates, bag of fresh soil, and tiny ceramic elephant, then invents a test: if nobody walks down the sidewalk in ten seconds, perhaps the trip is a bad idea. A cat passes. The sign confuses rather than guides her. She deletes an email from Dan with the subject heading “Remorse,” and counts again, but Julie returns with more wine before the second count is finished. In this scene, an external sign is asked to settle a decision that remains emotionally unresolved.

Forgiveness imagined as a bodily event

Later, at the hospital, Tina tells Yolandi that Elfrieda is awake and off the respirator. Yolandi confesses that she told a woman in a parking lot that the woman’s child had been conceived with a monster, among other things. Tina responds that the woman may eventually understand that the outburst was not really about her, her husband, or her child. That understanding may come only years later, and silently, without the woman ever telling Yolandi.

Tina pictures the recognition arriving during an ordinary walk: Yolandi might feel able to walk for miles, and that sudden ease would mark the moment the stranger had understood and forgiven her. The phrase makes forgiveness delayed and indirect. It cannot be requested or confirmed; its imagined evidence is a change in the body. Yolandi asks whether this is forgiveness, and Tina calls it “Forgiveness, sort of.”

The promise reversed

On the drive back to the hospital, Yolandi revisits the parking-lot outburst as part of her past. She connects it to the inherited terror and religious condemnation experienced by her family: the persecution of Mennonite children, the history of flight and hiding in Russia, and the damage done when people are terrorized and then called evil for destroying themselves. Her reflection refuses to treat that history as an excuse for frightening an innocent stranger, but it also places the outburst within a longer inheritance of fear and accusation.

Against Tina’s imagined future, Yolandi declares that she will never walk down a street and feel that lightness, and will never fly. The expression therefore holds two opposed possibilities without resolving them: compassion may arrive too late to be heard, while the person who needs it may be unable to believe it is coming. Its movement from the porch’s uncertain omen to the hospital-bound drive gives the image its force: what first appears as a sign to be found outside becomes a measure of whether Yolandi can imagine release from the past.