Leni’s suicide

Leni’s suicide is a formative loss in the Von Riesen family: Tina’s daughter and Yolandi’s cousin died in the Fraser River, seven years before the crisis surrounding Elfrieda. The family remembers the death not as an isolated tragedy but as part of a painful sequence of losses, one that returns when Yolandi is asked to consider how her sister might die.

Circumstances and Family Context

Leni’s body was found in the Fraser River after she had taken her own life. Her death came three years after the suicide of Yolandi and Elfrieda’s father, making it an early recurrence in a family history that later includes Elfrieda’s suicidal despair. Yolandi recalls that she was reporting on assisted suicide in Portland, Oregon, when news came that Leni had died. The professional subject and the family loss thus became inseparable in memory.

Leni was Tina’s daughter and Yolandi’s cousin. When Elfrieda’s crisis brings the family back to the hospital, Yolandi rides with her mother and Tina, holding both women’s hands as they form a physical chain. She understands the moment as a repetition: the family has faced this terror before, after her father’s death and then Leni’s. The recognition makes the current crisis feel less like a new emergency than another return of an old one.

Grief and Recollection

The loss persists in intimate family rituals as well as in crisis. Years later, while helping her mother and Tina to bed, Yolandi remembers Tina’s Plautdietsch goodnight blessing, which Tina had once said to Leni and Yolandi when they were children. The remembered words connect the cousins’ childhood to the family’s later bereavement, preserving an ordinary gesture of care within a history increasingly shaped by death.

Yolandi also places Leni’s death among the losses endured by Tina and her mother. The two sisters had buried many siblings, as well as daughters, husbands, and parents; by the time Yolandi reflects on the family’s grief, they are the only two remaining of sixteen children. Leni’s death therefore deepens an already accumulated bereavement rather than beginning it. The family’s repeated exposure to loss informs Yolandi’s sense that its history is marked by deaths across generations.

Later Echoes and Significance

While driving to dinner with Tina, her mother, and Nic, Yolandi finds herself thinking about death and recalling her reporting on assisted suicide and Leni’s death. Later, as she researches whether assisted death might be legally available to Elfrieda in Switzerland, Leni’s suicide remains part of the context through which Yolandi understands the request. The novel does not present Leni’s death as an explanation for Elfrieda’s wishes; instead, it shows how a previous suicide makes the present decision emotionally charged and familiar.

When Tina suffers a coronary event, Yolandi wonders whether painful memories and the helplessness surrounding Leni’s suicide might contribute to such a crisis, but she also considers physical explanations and leaves the connection unresolved. That uncertainty matters: grief is shown as a force that shapes how the family interprets illness, without being offered as a medical cause. Leni’s death consequently persists as both a specific bereavement and a recurring point of reference through which the family faces new fear.