Grief and family trauma

Grief and family trauma are an accumulating force in the Von Riesen family, shaped by repeated deaths and by the difficult work of caring for those still living. The novel presents sorrow not as a single response that can be completed, but as something inherited, revisited, and carried through family relationships, memory, and acts of telling. Its recurring losses make the past feel less like a closed chapter than a pattern that returns in altered circumstances.

Inherited Loss and Repetition

The family’s history gives that pattern its weight. Yolandi recalls that her aunt Tina had lost her daughter Leni to suicide seven years earlier, three years after Yolandi and Elfrieda’s father died by suicide. When Elfrieda’s crisis brings the family back to the hospital, Yolandi, her mother Lottie, and Tina travel together. Lottie drives, Yolandi holds one hand on her mother’s shoulder and reaches back to hold Tina’s hand, making their physical connection a quiet answer to the fear that they are living through another version of an old catastrophe. Yolandi’s question about whether Mennonites are a depressed people or whether the pain belongs only to her family arises from this history of recurrence, not from an abstract judgment about the community.

That history also appears in the scale of the family’s earlier losses. During the crisis, Yolandi helps Lottie and Tina to bed and reflects that the sisters had buried fourteen brothers and sisters. Their family had once been large enough to field two baseball teams; now only Lottie and Tina remained of sixteen siblings. They had also buried daughters, husbands, and parents. The accumulation shapes the family’s outlook, but the novel does not reduce its members to grief: they still read, speak to one another, and perform the ordinary work of care while living among memories of those who are gone.

Crisis, Care, and the Limits of Speech

The family’s inherited sorrow meets the present most sharply in Elfrieda’s suicidal despair and psychiatric hospitalization. Janice, a nurse, tells Elfrieda that she has done nothing wrong by wanting to end her suffering and that the staff want to help her find other, constructive ways through it. Her response contrasts with the shame Elfrieda feels and with the more punitive treatment she fears from other psychiatric staff. The scene makes a distinction between recognizing suffering and condemning the person who experiences it: care begins by treating Elfrieda’s distress as real without treating her as blameworthy.

Yolandi’s own care is more intimate but also more uncertain. She tries to understand what the prescribed medication might do, wondering whether it could change Elfrieda’s sense of meaning or merely dull her response to life. Janice admits that she does not know, and explains that the question has limited practical effect while Elfrieda refuses the medication. Yolandi describes the pattern as taking many pills at once or taking none. The exchange leaves the family without a simple remedy and exposes the limits of what a relative can know or control.

Communication itself becomes part of the struggle. Elfrieda sometimes will not speak, but she is willing to write. Yolandi urges the psychiatrist to accept written communication as a way of reaching her; he rejects the idea of exchanging notes, saying he lacks time and expects Elfrieda to communicate normally if she wants to get better. His refusal turns a practical accommodation into a test of conformity. Elsewhere, Janice brings paint and paper from art therapy, explaining that some patients find it easier to express themselves through those materials than through language. Across these scenes, the novel contrasts forms of care that make room for a patient’s available means of expression with care constrained by institutional convenience.

Metaphors for Vulnerability and Time

The novel also gives distress an imaginative vocabulary. Elfrieda tells Yolandi that she carries an imagined glass piano inside her, a fragile instrument she fears might break. It is an old upright Heintzman, once a player piano, now wholly glass, including its keys. Sounds such as bottles in a garbage truck, wind chimes, or a bird can make Elfrieda fear that the piano is breaking; even a child’s laughter is misheard as a threatening sound. The image conveys the intensity of her vulnerability without resolving it into a diagnosis. It also connects her inner life to music, an art central to her identity, while recasting that source of expression as something she fears losing.

Yolandi’s reflections on time extend the family’s grief beyond the immediate crisis. Writing in Toronto, she thinks about the ancient shoreline of Lake Ontario and the slow movement of the continents, which she remembers as occurring at the pace fingernails grow, though she cannot recall whether the continents move toward or away from one another. What holds her attention is the speed itself, and its uneasy relation to grief: sorrow may pass quickly or seem to last forever. In a later hospital silence between the sisters, nurses come and go and attach and detach equipment while births and geological change continue beyond their conversation. The contrast makes personal time feel both suspended and embedded in a world that carries on.

Family Rituals and the Material Work of Mourning

When Tina dies after surgery, the family’s grief takes practical form. Although the operation initially appears to have gone well, Tina’s organs begin to fail, and the family loses her despite the medical team’s efforts. In the waiting room, Lottie leans her forehead against a concrete wall; Tina’s husband Frank is unable to speak, and the family even forgets his insulin shot, a task Tina had recently reminded him about while away in Winnipeg. The loss is emotional, but it also removes a familiar source of everyday care.

The family immediately divides the work that follows. Sheila takes her father home and handles calls and arrangements for bringing Tina’s body to Vancouver. Yolandi plans to tell Elfrieda and buy groceries, especially coffee. Lottie goes to speak with a funeral-home contact about an urn and cremation. Later, at Tina’s funeral, relatives take turns telling stories in the Mennonite tradition of freiwilligis. The event’s remembrance is at once formal and unruly: a young child gets into the wooden urn and scatters and eats some of Tina’s ashes. The disruption does not end the memorial. The child’s father restores order, and Tina’s daughter Sheila returns to the microphone to finish the story. The episode places bodily remains, family ceremony, and storytelling in the same scene, making remembrance a communal practice that continues even when it cannot be made solemn or controlled.

After Elfrieda dies, the decisions around her remains become another expression of family attachment and difference. Yolandi had wanted to keep some ashes in Toronto, but Nic does not want them divided, so Elfrieda’s ashes are buried beneath a large tree in Elmwood Cemetery in Winnipeg. Lottie had suggested burial with her father in East Village, but Nic refuses because Elfrieda had expressly said she did not want to be buried there. Yolandi considers the alternative she had once hoped to pursue in Zurich and feels that she failed because Elfrieda did not die peacefully or with the outcome she wanted. Nic tells her that she did everything she could and that no one is to blame; Yolandi remains unsure. The burial settles where Elfrieda’s ashes will rest, but it does not settle the family’s grief or Yolandi’s sense of responsibility.

Storytelling as Witness

The novel’s fragmented movement between present crisis, earlier family memories, and later mourning reproduces the way loss returns rather than staying in a single chronological place. A remembered childhood dinner, for instance, brings Elfrieda’s teasing of their father into Yolandi’s later memory of her sister. The recollection links family humor and intimacy to a death that has since altered how every family member is seen. Memory does not erase the original scene; it gives it new resonance after another loss.

Storytelling is therefore both a record of grief and a form of continued relation. At Tina’s memorial, relatives tell stories while her ashes sit nearby; after Elfrieda’s death, Yolandi’s questions about what might have been remain unresolved. The novel does not offer mourning as a cure or convert repeated deaths into a moral lesson. Instead, it shows family members sharing tasks, memories, silence, and imperfect acts of care. Grief persists, but so does the work of telling the dead person’s story and keeping the living connected.