Winnipeg is the central place of return in the family’s story of Elfrieda’s final crisis. There, a concert that has been cancelled and revived gives way to hospitalization, anxious visits, and the gathering of relatives; later, the city becomes the place where her ashes are buried. For Yolandi, Winnipeg is at once her sister’s home and the setting in which earlier family losses seem to recur. Its significance lies less in a description of the city itself than in the repeated journeys back to it, each carrying a new version of the family’s grief.

A city of returns

Nearly two weeks after saying goodbye to Elfrieda in the doorway of her Winnipeg home, Yolandi is preparing to write the letters she had promised. By May, the opening concert of Elfrieda’s engagement with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra is back on. Nic reports that the rehearsal has gone well and that Elfrieda seems excited, though drained. The return of the concert makes Winnipeg the setting for a fragile possibility: ordinary public performance may resume even as her health remains uncertain.

The city soon becomes a destination for a different kind of return. When Yolandi arrives by plane, her mother and Tina are waiting at the foot of the escalator, arms linked. They greet her with affectionate words in Plautdietsch and a strong embrace. There is no suitcase to collect and no delay before they leave together. The quick passage from arrival to car gives the reunion an urgent, practical quality: the family has come together because another crisis is underway.

Family history repeating

During the drive, Yolandi keeps one hand on her mother’s shoulder and reaches back with the other to hold Tina’s hand, making a human chain across the seats. The gesture joins three generations of women in a moment shaped by losses that preceded Elfrieda’s crisis. Tina had lost her daughter Leni to suicide seven years earlier, three years after Yolandi and Elfrieda’s father died by suicide. Yolandi understands the present as another recurrence of a grief the family has already endured, not as an isolated emergency.

Winnipeg’s hospital scenes intensify that sense of repetition. At Ste. Odile Hospital, Nic is there, and Julie has also arrived. Yolandi speaks with Will by phone; after struggling to say what he wants her to tell Elfrieda, he manages to tell her that he loves her. The family’s presence is organized around limited visits, calls, and messages, each carrying something that cannot easily be said face to face. When her mother comes out, she does not cry. Nic puts an arm around her and guides her to a chair, where she sits staring into the distance and murmuring to herself or praying.

The hospital and the outside world

The strain follows Yolandi even into the underground car park at Ste. Odile Hospital. After leaving her mother and Tina at the intensive care entrance, she tries to park in a tight space. A man warns her that there will be trouble if her car touches his. Yolandi confronts him, explaining that she is about to go upstairs to find out whether her sister is dead or alive and insisting that her car is between the lines. The encounter sets the immediate peril of the hospital against the man’s concern for his vehicle. Winnipeg’s crisis does not remain contained within the ward: it alters the meaning of an ordinary parking dispute and exposes how little room Yolandi has left for anything outside her sister’s condition.

From Toronto, Yolandi continues to rely on Winnipeg updates. Nic usually visits the hospital twice a day, but reports little change; her mother goes less often because she cannot bear it. Yolandi hears that staff criticize Elfrieda for not following the programme, lecture her mother about tough love, and threaten shock therapy. She repeatedly calls the nurses’ desk for reassurance that Elfrieda will not be allowed to leave, and arranges for Nic to put a phone to Elfrieda’s ear during visits. Their calls make the distance between Toronto and Winnipeg tangible: Yolandi talks about their plan and her return while Elfrieda breathes but does not answer, until one day her voice comes through clear and strong.

Gathering, funeral, and burial

After Elfrieda dies, Yolandi contacts Will’s father in Manhattan and asks him to find Will and get him a ticket to Winnipeg immediately. Though the two adults have not spoken much in years, he agrees to help and speaks through tears about Elfrieda’s kindness and force of personality. Yolandi also calls Julie and friends of her mother, asking them to go to her mother’s apartment and wait. These calls turn Winnipeg into the point toward which the separated family and its supporters are directed, even as Yolandi struggles to reach Nic.

The city remains the setting for mourning after the funeral. In the church dining room, relatives eat ham and cheese sandwiches and remember Tina. Frank listens intently, hunched close to whoever is speaking, as if holding on to each sentence might preserve something of his wife. At the service, the family sings hymns in four-part harmony. The recollection presents Winnipeg’s funeral gathering as both communal and uneasy: family affection persists amid the disapproval of members of the Mennonite community, whose watchful presence Yolandi and her mother try not to engage.

Elfrieda’s burial fixes the family’s relationship to the city. Yolandi had wanted to take some of her sister’s ashes to Toronto, but Nic opposed dividing them; all of the ashes are buried beneath an enormous tree in Elmwood Cemetery in Winnipeg. Her mother had suggested burial with their father in East Village, where a cemetery representative said there was room if they were buried in urns. Nic refused because Elfrieda had expressly said she did not want to be buried there. The choice of Elmwood Cemetery therefore preserves Elfrieda’s stated wish while also keeping her remains together. For Yolandi, however, the burial cannot settle the question of what might have happened elsewhere: she continues to imagine that Elfrieda could have died peacefully in Zurich and to believe she failed her. Winnipeg holds both the family’s final act of care and the unresolved grief that survives it.