Elfrieda’s suicide attempt by taking an overdose

Elfrieda Von Riesen’s suicide attempt by taking an overdose turns an already recurring crisis into a hospital emergency and draws her younger sister, Yolandi Von Riesen, into an even more direct role in her care. The attempt is marked by an intimate contradiction: Elfrieda’s note asks to be released from life, yet names all the people she loves. In the days afterward, her wit and affection persist alongside her vulnerability, while Yolandi struggles to respect her sister’s wishes without accepting her request for help in dying.

The note and the discovery

This is not Elfrieda’s first suicide attempt, but this time the method is pills. Before the attempt, she writes on a sheet torn from the same kind of lined yellow legal pad she had used years earlier to devise her distinctive signature, AMPS. The note expresses hope that God will receive her and says there is no time left to make her mark. In green marker, Elfrieda lists the people she loves; all of the family are included. She asks them to understand and to let her go. The note also contains a quotation that Lottie cannot decipher, perhaps by David Hume. Its obscurity leaves Yolandi wondering whether Elfrieda believes in God, even as the note itself shows her addressing the possibility of divine reception.

When Yolandi asks where Elfrieda got the pills, Lottie has no answer. The uncertainty extends beyond the source of the medication: the account offers no clear explanation for how the attempt was prepared. Instead, it moves from the note and the family’s questions to the immediate fact of Elfrieda’s unconsciousness at home.

Lottie finds her daughter unconscious in bed. By the time Elfrieda wakes in hospital, Yolandi has flown from Toronto and is standing beside her. The sequence makes the family’s response concrete: Lottie discovers the emergency, while Yolandi crosses the distance to be present at the first moment of recognition.

Waking in hospital

Elfrieda wakes slowly and smiles at Yolandi. She recognizes that her sister has come, jokes that they must stop meeting this way, and introduces her to the emergency-ward nurses and to the woman assigned to watch her. Because her hands are secured with cotton ribbons, she points Yolandi out with her chin and calls her by the childhood name Yoyo. Yolandi corrects her—her name is Yolandi—and greets the observer. Even under close supervision, the sisters’ exchange retains its familiar mixture of affection, correction, and humor.

Elfrieda says she looks like the older sister, a reversal Yolandi recognizes as a familiar impression. She also reports that she and the observer have been discussing Thomas Aquinas. The observer responds with a grim smile and explains that Elfrieda still has a great deal of medication in her system. Elfrieda answers that there is not quite enough, then reassures Yolandi that she is joking. The scene gives no simple measure of recovery: Elfrieda is still affected by the drugs, but remains alert enough to tease, manage an introduction, and make a joke with her sister.

When Elfrieda falls asleep, Yolandi finds Lottie in the waiting room, reading a mystery beside another patient. Yolandi tells her about the Thomas Aquinas conversation. This small report carries the sisters’ characteristic humor into the family’s vigil: even in the hospital, Elfrieda’s unexpected interests and Yolandi’s attention to them become material for connection.

The psychiatric ward and its limits

After Elfrieda is moved from the emergency ward to the psychiatric ward, she falls in the washroom. Nurse Janice confirms that staff found her on the floor, holding her toothbrush. Another nurse says Elfrieda needs to start eating so she will have the strength to avoid falling, and needs to be more aware of her surroundings. The ward’s practical concerns—food, balance, observation—sit beside the larger crisis that brought her there.

Yolandi wants to return to Elfrieda’s room and share the nurse’s remark, hoping they might roll their eyes together. She also considers telling her about a patient who dislikes television, as a possible opening to friendship. But Elfrieda has asked Yolandi to leave. Yolandi decides that at least some of her sister’s requests are reasonable and should be honored. Her resolve is qualified rather than effortless: she wants Elfrieda to know that she still regards her as a wise, if alarming, older sister and will listen, even while she remains unsure how far respect for a request can extend in a psychiatric ward. The episode makes that uncertainty part of the aftermath rather than resolving it.

From the attempt to the Swiss request

The overdose does not end Elfrieda’s wish to die. In a later conversation, she asks Yolandi to take her to Switzerland as one last favor. Yolandi refuses, objecting to the finality of the request. She later researches the law and learns that assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland under conditions, including the absence of a selfish motive on the part of the person assisting; she also finds that Swiss citizenship is not required. This information changes how she understands her sister’s appeal and makes the refusal harder to treat as a settled answer.

Yolandi weighs whether to help Elfrieda reach a Swiss clinic in Zurich, while recognizing that a doctor might judge her suffering insufficient. She is also unsure whether raising the possibility would extinguish any remaining wish Elfrieda might have to live. The legal option therefore does not resolve the family’s dilemma: legality, medical assessment, Yolandi’s responsibility, and Elfrieda’s stated wishes remain distinct questions. In a later discussion, Yolandi says she has looked up the cost of the Zurich clinic. Lottie remains opposed, believing it should be for people who are already dying; Yolandi counters that Swiss law also applies to people with mental illness and describes Elfrieda as weary of life. The attempt’s aftermath thus extends beyond survival in hospital. It becomes the point from which the sisters and their mother confront, without agreement, what care and respect can mean when Elfrieda continues to ask for an end to her suffering.