Border collies

Border collies are represented by Lefty, a dog whose herding instinct gives Yolandi a concrete way to speak about behavior that feels difficult to control. The remembered scene is domestic and specific: while children play in the backyard, Lefty gradually gathers them into one corner, without their noticing. Yolandi recalls the incident while trying to explain her anger during a conversation about suicide and the limits of what one person can understand about another’s choices.

Lefty and the Backyard Memory

Lefty is identified as a border collie and as one of Yolandi’s family dogs. When Yolandi’s children were young, their friends would come over to play in the backyard. On one occasion, she looked through a window and found them all crowded into a corner, still playing as though nothing unusual were happening. Lefty had herded them there. Yolandi attributes the behavior to the dog’s nature as a herding dog, not to a deliberate plan to disrupt the game.

The memory gives the breed a recognizable action in the story rather than a detailed portrait of the dog’s appearance or life. Lefty’s presence is conveyed through what she does: children who remain absorbed in play are gradually gathered together by an instinctive pattern of behavior.

The Analogy in a Difficult Conversation

Yolandi tells the story after a friend objects to continuing their discussion of suicide, worried that it could damage their friendship. Yolandi insists that the subject will remain between them, and the conversation grows tense. The story of Lefty lets her frame her frustration through the contrast between conscious intention and an action driven by instinct: the dog herds because that is what her nature impels her to do.

The analogy arises amid Yolandi’s efforts to understand Elfrieda’s wish to die and the responsibility involved in helping her. Yolandi has researched the possibility of assisted death in Switzerland and considered other options, while remaining uncertain about what to tell Elfrieda and how that might affect her hope of living. In this setting, Lefty’s herding behavior does not settle the human question. Instead, it supplies Yolandi with an image for thinking about compulsion and control as she argues with someone who wants the subject set aside.

Narrative Role and Limits

Lefty’s remembered behavior also changes the tone of the conversation. After telling the story, Yolandi asks her friend to understand why she is angry; the dog’s instinct becomes a way to express that anger without reducing it to an abstract argument. The memory draws on an ordinary family scene, but its placement gives it weight in a discussion shaped by fear, responsibility, and disagreement.

The novel presents Lefty through Yolandi’s recollection, so the dog is not given an independent point of view. Her role is nevertheless more specific than a generic symbol: she is a border collie whose herding gathers children into a corner, an action Yolandi remembers and uses to articulate a difficult idea. Later, after becoming drunk, Yolandi phones her friend to apologize and changes what she is about to say from an assertion about the friend’s ability to die by suicide to an expression of confidence that she can endure. The earlier story remains part of the same unresolved effort to speak about instinct, choice, and care.