Garbage Hill, a grassy rise in Winnipeg, where Elf and Nic live, is both an ordinary gathering place and a vantage point for an urgent conversation about grief and whether the narrator should help her sister seek death in Switzerland. Its history as a dump, its unimpressive height, and the meanings the narrator gives it all meet on the hilltop where she and Julie sit together.

Setting and Reclaimed Ground

Garbage Hill was once a garbage dump; grass was planted over it, and it became somewhere to spend summer afternoons or toboggan in winter. The winter use persists despite large signs forbidding tobogganing. The hill’s official, attractive name has been forgotten, and its sign has been covered in graffiti, leaving Garbage Hill as the name everyone uses, including the mayor. The narrator depicts that mayor not as much of a civic leader as an auctioneer selling off parts of the city to the highest bidder. The hill’s everyday name and improvised uses give this altered ground a local identity that its forgotten designation could not sustain.

Height, Grief, and Gratitude

The hill is not very high, but it is the highest point in Winnipeg, where Elf and Nic live. When the narrator asks Julie to go there, she is seeking proximity to God without knowing whether she wants to pray for mercy, condemn God, or offer thanks. The impulse recalls advice from her aunt Tina after her father died: even without wholehearted belief in God, it can feel good to close one’s eyes and mentally list what remains to be appreciated. The hill thus holds several possibilities at once—not a settled answer to grief, but a place from which the narrator can approach it.

Julie and the Sister’s Plea

The narrator and Julie sit cross-legged in the prickly brown grass, recalling a photo shoot Julie had done there when they were triumphant high-schoolers. Their conversation moves from shared youthful history to the narrator’s fear for her sister. Julie does not want her to pursue assisted death, regarding it as an option for people already dying; the narrator argues that Swiss law also recognizes the right of mentally ill people experiencing weariness of life to choose death. She says she does not want her sister to die, but that her sister is literally begging her, and asks Julie what she should do. Julie has no answer, but advises waiting to see whether treatment or pills work this time. The narrator agrees to wait, afraid that her sister might be discharged from hospital and then be gone. Against the hill’s broad view of the city and sky, the exchange remains unresolved: the height offers space for the question, not a way out of it.