Elmwood Cemetery

Elmwood Cemetery is the final resting place of Elfrieda Von Riesen’s ashes. The choice of site followed disagreements among her family about whether to divide her remains and whether she should be buried near her father; the cemetery thus marks both a settled destination and the limits of what her surviving family could decide for her.

Burial and Setting

After Elfrieda died, Yoli wanted to bring some of her ashes back to Toronto and keep them there. Nic opposed dividing them, and all of the ashes were instead buried beneath an enormous tree at Elmwood Cemetery in Winnipeg. The account identifies the tree as the burial’s defining feature, making the place a single, shared resting site rather than a portion of Elfrieda’s remains kept apart by her sister.

The Family’s Choice

Lottie had proposed burying Elfrieda with her father in East Village. The cemetery there could accommodate three urns, a possibility that also implied Lottie might eventually be buried with them. Nic rejected that plan because Elfrieda had expressly said she did not want to be buried in East Village. He compared overriding that wish to returning Louis Riel’s body to the Canadian government as a souvenir. The disagreement makes the burial location a question of fidelity to Elfrieda’s stated preference, not simply family convenience or proximity to her father.

Grief and the Unchosen Alternative

Yoli also wondered whether she should have taken Elfrieda to Zurich, where she believed Elfrieda might have died peacefully and not alone. She regarded her failure to do so as her own failure, even as Nic told her that she had done everything she could and that no one was to blame. Elmwood Cemetery therefore holds the remains after a choice the family could make, while leaving unresolved the question that grief returns to: whether another course might have spared Elfrieda’s loneliness.