The Swiss option

The Swiss option is Yolandi Von Riesen’s contemplated journey to Zurich with her sister, Elfrieda Von Riesen, so that Elfrieda could seek assisted death. It begins as an answer to Elfrieda’s plea, becomes an increasingly concrete plan involving law, money, and family consent, and ends as a source of enduring regret when Yolandi does not take her there. The possibility gives Yolandi a way to imagine accompanying her sister through a chosen death, but it also forces her to ask what her own participation would mean.

Origins and Legal Possibility

Elfrieda asks Yolandi to take her to Switzerland, presenting the request as something she is begging her sister to do. Yolandi refuses at first, rejecting the finality implied by the appeal. Her refusal does not end the question. Later, after learning that Elfrieda’s husband, Nic, is leaving for Spain, Yolandi searches for information about obtaining Nembutal there and about assisted death for people with mental illness. Her research leads her to understand that Swiss law permits assistance in suicide where the helper has no selfish motive, and that a person need not be a Swiss citizen to fall under that protection. She recognizes this as the reason Elfrieda had asked about Switzerland.

Yolandi’s subsequent account of the law is part of her own urgent research rather than an independent legal explanation. She sees a Swiss clinic in Zurich as a route that might make the plan lawful, but understands that legality would not guarantee access: doctors might decide Elfrieda’s suffering did not meet the required threshold. When Yolandi discusses the option with her friend Julie, Julie questions whether the clinic is intended only for people who are already dying. Yolandi counters that mentally ill people may also qualify under the concept she has encountered as weariness of life, and argues that Elfrieda can be understood as dying in that sense. Their exchange leaves the question open rather than resolving the tension between a claimed legal right and the uncertainty of an actual assessment.

Competing Plans and Practical Obstacles

Yolandi weighs two routes. One would take Elfrieda to Mexico, where Yolandi imagines obtaining Nembutal from a pet shop in a small, non-tourist town. She recognizes that this course would leave her uncertain about what counted as encouragement, and thinks it would require Nic and her mother, Lottie, to agree. The other route would take Elfrieda to Zurich and proceed through the clinic, subject to the possibility that doctors would refuse. That plan, too, would require Nic and Lottie’s agreement. Yolandi is briefly hopeful at having alternatives, but fears that telling Elfrieda about a way to die could extinguish any small remaining wish to live. She also considers that Elfrieda might travel alone after leaving hospital, defeating the purpose of ensuring she would not face her last moments by herself.

The alternatives carry different meanings in Yolandi’s imagination. Mexico seems cheaper and more closely associated with death, while Switzerland appears more orderly, associated with precision and neutrality. These impressions do not settle her choice; they reveal how she tries to make an overwhelming decision legible by attaching distinct imagined qualities to each destination. Meanwhile, she asks whether Elfrieda has considered moving to Toronto. Nic says he would accept that if she wanted it, but no move takes place. The prospect of living together remains another possible future beside the journey to Zurich, not a solution that displaces Elfrieda’s request.

The Zurich plan also requires money Yolandi does not have. While Nic and Lottie spend much of their time at the hospital with Elfrieda, Yolandi researches the Swiss option in Toronto and asks a bank for a twenty-thousand-dollar loan. She hopes the sum could cover travel, the clinic’s treatment, a hotel, and cremation and an urn. She offers her Rodeo Rhonda books as evidence of her work, but has neither collateral nor a book contract showing future income; the bank refuses the loan without such proof. Elfrieda’s money is held in a joint account with Nic, and Yolandi knows he would notice a large withdrawal. She later tells Elfrieda that she expects to have money soon and may use credit cards, but the financial means remain uncertain.

From Consideration to Unfulfilled Plan

Yolandi’s efforts unfold while Elfrieda is in hospital. She repeatedly calls to ask whether her sister is still there and whether the hospital will keep her, and spends hours researching Zurich. In this suspended period, the plan acquires the shape of an objective, even as its legal, financial, and familial conditions remain unsettled. Yolandi’s attention to keeping Elfrieda in hospital is so consuming that she forgets her birthday. When Lottie says Elfrieda has been given a day pass and describes plans for a cake, champagne, and flowers at home, Yolandi understands that the opportunity she has been organizing herself around may be slipping away. She had told Elfrieda she would try to secure the money; now the hospital is allowing her sister to leave temporarily, and Yolandi thinks of her as gone.

After Elfrieda dies, the imagined trip becomes inseparable from the question of what Yolandi failed to do. Nic rejects dividing the ashes; Elfrieda is buried beneath a large tree at Elmwood Cemetery in Winnipeg. Lottie had suggested burial with their father in East Village, but Nic says Elfrieda had expressly refused that place. In a later conversation about the music to engrave on the gravestone, Yolandi recognizes that her thoughts keep returning to Zurich. She does not tell Nic that Elfrieda had asked her to take her there. She fears that the disclosure might make him feel that Elfrieda did not trust him or that he had not understood her, and sees him as already alone in his loss. The silence protects Nic from a painful interpretation, but leaves Yolandi to examine her own responsibility without his knowledge of the request.

Regret and Meaning

Yolandi’s later account does not present the Swiss option as a decision she completed or as a death she caused. It remains a contemplated journey that she could not bring herself to undertake. When Nic tells her that she did everything she could and that nobody was to blame, Yolandi remains unsure. She imagines that Zurich might have allowed Elfrieda to die peacefully and not alone, and concludes that she failed to provide what her sister wanted. This regret coexists with the practical obstacles that had prevented the plan from becoming secure: uncertain medical approval, money she could not obtain, and her hesitation about how to involve Nic and Lottie.

In a letter to Elfrieda dated May 3, 2011, Yolandi recalls Tina’s prediction that forgiveness would arrive as a sudden lightness, then admits that she wishes she had taken Elfrieda to Zurich. She later tells her sister that Elfrieda knew she lacked the courage to do it and knew she would not come to Toronto. The two unrealized destinations frame Yolandi’s grief: Zurich represents the action she could not take, while Toronto represents the shared life she could not persuade her sister to enter. The Swiss option therefore remains more than a proposed medical route. It is the point at which love, accompaniment, legal possibility, and personal responsibility meet, without yielding a choice Yolandi can later regard as sufficient.