The father’s suicide is a defining loss in the family’s history, but the novel does not present it as a single, self-contained scene. Yolandi recalls her father’s final warning, later sees the family’s repeated encounters with suicide through the shadow of his death, and struggles with how that history shapes her response to Elfrieda’s wish to die. His memory is at once intimate and inherited: attached to an ordinary moment between father and daughter, yet entangled with the family’s wider history of grief.

Warning and death

The clearest glimpse of the father before his death comes from Yolandi’s memory of the day before he died. At noon, they sat by a fountain in a park, and he held her hand while telling her that it felt as though the lights were going out. The understated setting and his directness give the recollection the force of a warning, though the passage does not explain what he meant or show the suicide itself.

Elsewhere, the narrative establishes that he killed himself on railway tracks. It offers this fact in the course of Yolandi’s memories of another family death, making her father’s suicide part of a history that returns through later crises rather than a closed episode. The account withholds methodical detail about the death; its emphasis is on the way the fact persists in the minds and decisions of those left behind.

A loss that returns

The family’s experience of suicide is explicitly marked as repetition. Yolandi recalls riding with her mother and Aunt Tina during a later crisis, holding each woman’s hand so that the three formed a human chain. Aunt Tina had lost her daughter Leni to suicide seven years earlier, three years after Yolandi’s father died. Yolandi understands that they have been through this kind of fear before; the later emergency feels like another turn in a familiar pattern of bereavement and helplessness.

Her father’s death also resurfaces as an image she has to manage. While waiting on Julie’s porch, Yolandi banishes thoughts of his body on the tracks by concentrating on the porch’s particular objects and worn details. In the same unsettled interval, she tries to read a passerby as a sign about whether to take Elfrieda to Switzerland. A cat crosses the sidewalk, leaving the supposed sign ambiguous. The memory of her father is therefore not just background to her sister’s crisis: it intrudes on the very moment when Yolandi is weighing what to do.

The father in family memory

A remembered supper gives the father a presence beyond the circumstances of his death. In Yolandi’s childhood memory, he has set the dining-room table at his wife’s request. Elfrieda mocks the arrangement, and their father, who rarely directed anger at anyone but himself, protests that his attempt to act as a modern man has been met with derision. The scene preserves a domestic friction between his effort, Elfrieda’s wit, and the family’s discussion of women’s rights. Years later, this memory comes back to Yolandi in the context of seeing Elfrieda after her own death, showing how a small family exchange can remain bound to a later catastrophe without being reducible to it.

Yolandi also places her family’s suffering against a longer history of persecution. In a later reflection, she thinks of herself, Elfrieda, her father, and her cousin as innocent children, while recalling the family’s history of violence in Russia and flight from danger. She condemns the way religious authority and accusation can make people feel small and culpable, then connect that burden to their destruction. The passage presents this as Yolandi’s understanding of inherited trauma, not as a complete explanation of her father’s suicide.

Aftermath and narrative significance

The father’s burial place emerges indirectly when the family later decides where Elfrieda’s ashes should rest. Yolandi’s mother proposes that Elfrieda be buried with her father in East Village, where there is room for urns. Nic refuses because Elfrieda had expressly said she did not want burial there; her ashes are instead buried beneath a large tree in Elmwood Cemetery in Winnipeg. The exchange makes the father’s grave a point of reference in a new family decision, while also showing that the living must negotiate a dead person’s stated wishes and their own ideas of belonging.

By assembling the father’s death from a final conversation, a remembered image, later family losses, and disputes about burial, the novel keeps its consequences present without claiming to settle their cause. His suicide becomes one of the histories through which Yolandi confronts Elfrieda’s despair: a source of fear and painful recognition, but not a simple answer to what her sister needs or what Yolandi should do.