Elfrieda’s suicide attempt by refusing food

Elfrieda Von Riesen’s suicide attempt by refusing food becomes a defining test of Yolandi Von Riesen’s love for her sister: when Elfrieda begs her not to call a doctor, Yolandi calls for an ambulance anyway. The intervention preserves the possibility of Elfrieda’s survival, but it does not settle what either sister wants. Instead, the attempt makes their opposing wishes explicit and leaves Yolandi with the consequences of choosing intervention over consent.

The Crisis at Home

The attempt is recalled as the last time Elfrieda tried to kill herself. Yolandi’s mother phones from Winnipeg to say that Elfrieda is not eating and is pleading with her and Nic not to contact a doctor. They are desperate, and Yolandi travels from the airport directly to Elfrieda’s bedroom. The urgency is practical as well as emotional: Yolandi arrives knowing that medical help may be needed, while Elfrieda is asking her family not to summon it.

Yolandi kneels beside her sister and tells her that she has come to call a doctor. Their mother remains at the dining-room table with her back turned. She cannot support one daughter’s position over the other’s, so she withdraws from the decision rather than resolve it. In the bedroom, Elfrieda pleads, promises that she will eat, and asks their mother to intervene. Yolandi does not change course; she tells Elfrieda that an ambulance is coming. At the open screen door, the smell of lilacs belongs to the ordinary world outside, even as the family confronts an emergency inside the house.

Intervention and Its Cost

When the paramedics arrive, Elfrieda says she will not go and calls again to their mother for help. Their mother remains silent. As Elfrieda is loaded into the ambulance, she gives Yolandi the finger, a small, forceful refusal directed at the sister who has overridden her request. The gesture does not undo the rescue; it makes visible the anger and hurt that accompany it.

At the emergency room, Yolandi stands beside Elfrieda’s stretcher, crying and holding its railing. Elfrieda takes her hand. The sisters acknowledge, for the first time, the conflict that has been governing their actions: Elfrieda wants to die, Yolandi wants her to live, and they have become enemies who still love one another. Their embrace is tender but awkward because Elfrieda is in a hospital bed attached to medical equipment. The scene refuses an easy division between care and harm: Yolandi’s choice is an act of protection, but from Elfrieda’s perspective it is also a violation of what she asked for.

Janice and the Hospital Encounter

The hospital crisis is also the first time Yolandi meets Janice. Janice has a furry creature hanging from her belt loop and asks to speak with Yolandi away from Elfrieda’s stretcher. In a small beige family room, she gives Yolandi a box of tissues and reassures her that calling the ambulance was the right thing to do. Rather than treating Elfrieda’s anger as proof that the sisters’ relationship has collapsed, Janice helps Yolandi understand it as anger at having been saved. She then hugs Yolandi, a close embrace from someone she has only just met. Left alone afterward, Yolandi picks at her fingernails and cuticles until they bleed, a physical sign of distress that follows her out of the immediate decision.

Back in emergency, Elfrieda reports overhearing a doctor disparage her intelligence because she is not grateful to be alive. She understands the remark as evidence that the staff have confused a wish to die with stupidity. Yolandi shares her anger at the doctor, but the exchange reveals a wider tension surrounding the attempt: Elfrieda is not merely being treated as a patient in crisis; she is also being judged for how she responds to rescue. The sisters’ disagreement over survival thus meets a medical setting in which gratitude and a desire to live are treated as if they should be the same thing.

From Rescue to the Swiss Question

The earlier attempt remains present when Elfrieda later asks Yolandi to take her to Switzerland. Yolandi refuses, rejecting the request as a final task she should carry out. Later, after learning that Nic is going to Spain, she searches for information about Nembutal and assisted death. Her research leads her to understand that Switzerland allows assistance in suicide under certain conditions, including for people who are not Swiss citizens, provided the helper has no selfish motive. She also considers Mexico as another possible route, while recognizing that either plan would involve the cooperation of Nic and their mother and difficult questions about her own responsibility. These are Yolandi’s developing calculations, not a resolution of Elfrieda’s request or an outcome of the starvation attempt.

The question returns when Yolandi tells a friend that she has searched for the cost of a clinic in Zurich. The friend doubts that Elfrieda should pursue it, believing it may be intended only for people who are already dying; Yolandi counters with her understanding that Swiss law also recognizes mental illness and weariness of life. The attempt by refusing food therefore marks more than a past emergency. It establishes the painful pattern behind Yolandi’s later choices: she has already intervened to keep Elfrieda alive, yet she continues to confront the possibility that her sister’s suffering will not be answered by rescue alone. The episode leaves that conflict open, with love expressed both as the effort to prevent a death and as the burden of deciding what help can mean.