Elvira Toews

Elvira Toews is the family’s steady, sociable centre, but her care does not make her immune to grief or disagreement. A Mennonite mother shaped by a conservative prairie community, she loses her sister Tina Loewen while supporting Yolandi Von Riesen in Winnipeg, and later faces the death of Elfrieda Von Riesen. Her choices around assisted death, cremation, and burial show love expressed not as easy agreement but as sustained presence amid decisions no one can make painless.

Family and Background

Elvira is the mother of Yolandi and Elfrieda, and the sister of Tina. She has spent most of her life in one of the country’s most conservative small towns before moving, at seventy-six, to Toronto. The move brings her into unfamiliar surroundings, but the novel presents her as curious rather than cowed: she asks questions, laughs readily, and seeks to learn how her new world works. Her love of the Toronto Blue Jays gives her an immediate point of connection with strangers.

A childhood memory of the family supper table reveals her insistence on fairness within the household. When her husband, Jake Von Riesen, tried setting the table as a modern man, Elfrieda mocked the result; Elvira had just been reminding him about contemporary advances in women’s rights and the rights of others. The moment is comic, but it also places Elvira in the role of challenging old expectations, even within a Mennonite home.

Caregiving and Loss

Elvira comes to Winnipeg to help Yolandi. During that visit, Tina undergoes heart surgery that first appears to have gone well, only for her organs to fail afterward. Elvira loses her closest sister. After Tina’s death, she leaves the waiting room and presses her forehead against a concrete wall, a brief gesture that conveys the force of the loss without turning it into a speech.

The family immediately divides the practical work of death. Elvira takes Nic’s car to a funeral home on Main Street to speak with her Mennonite acquaintance Hermann about an urn and cremation. Yolandi later overhears her explain that she had come to Winnipeg to help her daughter and that Tina had died there. The description makes the visit’s double burden plain: the person who came to give care must also mourn the sister who was still part of her own support system.

At Tina’s funeral, Elvira enters the Mennonite church with Yolandi. Seeing the disapproving congregation gathered at one side, she sighs; Yolandi urges her not to engage, and Elvira squeezes her daughter’s hand as they walk to the women’s side. The family sings hymns in four-part harmony. The funeral and the informal sharing of memories place Elvira’s private bereavement inside a communal ritual, even as the family’s history makes the gathering feel like one more encounter with accumulated loss.

Assisted Death and Family Conflict

When Elfrieda begs Yolandi to take her to Switzerland, Yolandi refuses. Elvira’s position is not presented as identical to her daughter’s: later, when the Swiss clinic in Zurich comes up in conversation, she says she does not think Elfrieda should go and understands the option as intended for people who are already dying. Yolandi responds that Swiss law also allows assistance for people with mental illness and argues that Elfrieda’s weariness of life should be taken seriously. The exchange leaves their disagreement unresolved, grounded in different understandings of illness, legal access, and what care requires.

Yolandi privately researches assisted-death possibilities, including Switzerland and Mexico, and weighs what would be involved in each. She worries both about whether Elvira and Nic could agree and about whether telling Elfrieda might make her desire to die more fixed. The secrecy around this research shows the pressure surrounding Elvira’s role: she is part of the family whose consent Yolandi hopes to obtain, but she is not shown sharing in every stage of Yolandi’s deliberation. Elvira’s later objection makes clear that the legal possibility alone does not settle the moral question for her.

Burial, Memory, and Resilience

After Elfrieda dies, Elvira suggests that her daughter be buried with Jake in East Village. The cemetery caretaker says there is space for three urns, implicitly including Elvira in the family plot. Nic refuses because Elfrieda had expressly said she did not want to be buried in East Village. The disagreement exposes the limits of parental wishes after death: Elvira can propose a place that joins the family, but Elfrieda’s stated preference and Nic’s knowledge of it shape the final decision. Elfrieda’s ashes are buried beneath a large tree in Elmwood Cemetery in Winnipeg, rather than divided or returned to the family’s old community.

In Toronto, Elvira’s resilience appears in ordinary encounters as much as in bereavement. She buys black leather slip-on shoes at a Queen Street West boutique and approaches shops and cafés with interest in their products and the people who work there. Some of the younger, fashionable staff treat her less warmly than their other customers; she remains jovial and largely unaware of the slight. Yolandi and Nora, more alert to the dismissiveness, respond by boycotting the businesses. Elvira’s openness is not naïveté presented as a failing: it is part of her determination to become acquainted with a new home without surrendering her ease with people.

She also approaches her own death with practical candour. After visiting a funeral home, she tells Yolandi that cremation would cost fourteen hundred dollars, with pickup and return included. The matter-of-fact calculation sits beside the family’s painful disputes about where the dead belong, showing Elvira trying to make mortality legible through arrangements even when grief itself resists order.

Narrative Role

Elvira links generations of family loss. At Tina’s funeral, Yolandi reflects on the family cemetery in East Village, where her grandparents Helena and Cornelius are buried behind the graves of six babies; of Helena’s sixteen children, only ten reached adulthood. Tina’s death leaves Elvira as the last surviving sibling, while Elvira herself is still fighting her own battles. This history gives her grief a depth beyond a single bereavement, without reducing her to it.

The novel’s attention to her practical gestures—the hand squeezed in church, the funeral arrangements, the new shoes, the questions asked in unfamiliar shops—makes resilience a lived practice rather than a declaration. Elvira keeps entering rooms, making plans, and meeting strangers with curiosity even as death repeatedly rearranges the family around her.