Tina Loewen

Tina Loewen is Yolandi’s aunt, Lottie’s sister, and Leni’s mother. She appears within a family whose care for one another is tested by repeated bereavements: Tina has lost a daughter to suicide, stands alongside Lottie and Yolandi during Elfrieda’s crisis, and later dies after surgery. The narrative gives her life through these relationships and specific acts of closeness, making her both a source of practical care and one of the family members whose absence deepens its accumulated grief.

Identity and Family

Tina is the sister of Lottie and the mother of Leni. She belongs to the family’s maternal line, whose women are closely bound through shared hardship and mutual support. The family’s account of its wider kinship structure also places Lottie’s family among the Poor Cousin contingent. In Yolandi’s description, wealth from the family business passed through male heirs to their sons, while the daughters received little or nothing. That inheritance pattern gives Tina’s place in the family an economic as well as emotional context: she and her sister belong to a line that understands itself as excluded from inherited wealth, but remains closely connected through kinship and shared struggle.

A childhood memory gives a glimpse of Tina and Lottie before adult losses came to define so many family gatherings. As children, the sisters raced their bicycles and encountered a large semi truck blocking their way. Rather than stop or take another route, they skidded beneath it and emerged unharmed, laughing. The remembered episode is brief, but it belongs to a family history in which danger and resilience are often recalled together. It also records the sisters as companions from early life, not merely as adults later brought together by grief.

Kinship and Care

Tina’s relationship with Lottie is presented through both affection and shared responsibility. When Yolandi returns to the family, Tina waits with Lottie at the airport. The two sisters stand arm in arm, and they greet Yolandi with a silent embrace before the three leave together. Later, during the hospital crisis surrounding Elfrieda, Lottie drives while Tina sits in the back seat. Yolandi holds one of Lottie’s shoulders and reaches back to hold Tina’s hand, making the three women a human chain. The gesture gives physical form to their family bond at a moment when they are confronting another emergency together.

Tina’s care also extends to Frank. While she is in Winnipeg, she has recently been calling him to remind him about his insulin shot. After her death, Sheila recalls this routine as the family sits in the hospital waiting room. The detail is modest but consequential: Tina’s attention had become part of Frank’s daily care, and the family recognizes its absence immediately. Frank is unable to speak when Tina dies, and his grief is expressed in the loss of the familiar support she had provided as well as in the loss of his wife.

Repeated Loss and Hospital Crisis

Tina’s family history includes the death of her daughter Leni by suicide. Yolandi places that loss seven years before the present crisis, and three years after Jake’s suicide. As the family gathers around Elfrieda in hospital, Yolandi thinks of the sequence as a return to a situation they have faced before. This history does not make the new crisis easier; it gives the family’s fear a longer reach. Tina is present within that repetition as a bereaved mother and as one of the relatives who must again accompany the family through uncertainty.

On the way to see Elfrieda, Tina faints in the van near Deacon’s Corner. The family goes directly to Emergency, where she is admitted; she has broken her arm in the fall and is given a cast. She is also experiencing chest pain and is placed in acute cardiology at Ste. Odile Hospital. The episode brings Tina’s own medical emergency into a family visit already organized around Elfrieda’s hospitalization. Rather than remaining only in the role of supporter, Tina becomes another patient whose condition requires the family’s attention.

Death and Aftermath

Tina undergoes surgery, and at first the family is told that it has gone well. The doctor comes out, removes his mask, and gives them an encouraging account of the operation. Then Tina’s organs begin to fail one by one. The medical team tries to save her, but cannot, and she dies. The change from apparent success to loss is sudden: the family had believed the operation was a straightforward success, only to find themselves sitting together in the waiting room, grieving an outcome they had not expected.

The aftermath reveals how widely Tina’s death touches the family. Lottie has lost her last sibling and her closest sister; she leaves the waiting room and leans her forehead against a concrete wall. Frank cannot speak. Sheila remembers both Tina’s reminders about his insulin and the ordinary belongings returned to the family in a hospital property bag: slippers, a sudoku book, a novel, glasses, toiletries, clothing, and shoes. The items mark the transition from Tina as a living relative receiving care to the person whose possessions must be gathered and taken away. Later, Frank cries for his wife while Yolandi sits beside him and places a hand on his leg.

Tina’s death also alters the family’s immediate plans. Yolandi and Lottie travel to Vancouver for Tina’s funeral, leaving Elfrieda in Winnipeg with Nic nearby. Before departing, Yolandi tells Elfrieda that she will return and that she wants her to come live with her in Toronto for a while. The promise is made amid the family’s competing needs: Tina’s death demands a farewell, while Elfrieda’s ongoing despair makes separation feel precarious. Tina’s final role in the narrative is therefore not simply that of another relative lost. Her death exposes how care must continue across several simultaneous forms of grief, even when the family cannot keep everyone together.