Yoli attempts to take Elf to Zurich for assisted death

Yoli attempts to take Elf to Zurich for assisted death, a plan that turns her sister’s plea into a practical and moral crisis. She first refuses, then investigates Swiss law, weighs alternatives, seeks money, and tries to remain connected to Elf during her hospitalization. The plan never becomes a journey: Elf dies, and Yoli is left to reckon with the possibility that she could have gone with her.

The request and the reversal

When Elf asks her to take her to Switzerland, Yoli initially says no. She refuses to accept Elf’s description of the request as one last thing, calling that phrasing morbid. The refusal is direct, but it does not settle the matter. Later, after learning that Nic is going to Spain, Yoli searches for information about obtaining Nembutal there and about assisted death for people with mental illness. She reads that Swiss law permits assistance for a person who wants to die if the helper has no selfish motive, and that a person need not be a Swiss citizen. That research makes Elf’s earlier plea newly comprehensible to her and changes refusal into deliberation.

Yoli considers two routes. One is Mexico, where she imagines obtaining Nembutal; she worries about the boundary between helping and encouraging Elf, and about whether she could keep that distinction clear. The other is Zurich, where she understands the process to be legal but fears that doctors might decide Elf’s suffering did not qualify. Either route would require Nic and Lottie to agree. Yoli also wonders whether telling Elf she is considering Switzerland or Mexico would extinguish any small hope Elf might still have of living. The plan is therefore not simply a question of where to go: Yoli is trying to balance her sister’s wish, the possibility of continued life, and her own responsibility for what assistance would mean.

Research, money, and practical barriers

The idea becomes concrete enough for Yoli to investigate the cost of a clinic in Zurich, though she does not yet know the amount. Julie questions whether such a clinic is meant only for people who are already dying. Yoli counters that Swiss law also allows assistance for mentally ill people and uses the phrase weariness of life to describe the grounds she has found. Her confidence is not certainty about the outcome: she knows the clinic or doctors might not accept Elf’s case.

While Elf is in hospital, Yoli spends hours researching what she thinks of as the Swiss option. She goes to a bank seeking a loan of twenty thousand dollars, estimating that it could cover travel, a hotel, treatment, her return, and cremation and an urn. She has no collateral. Her Rodeo Rhonda books, a possible advance on the next one, and an unfinished harbourmaster book do not persuade the bank to lend without a contract showing income. The scene makes the plan’s material limits as plain as its ethical ones: willingness alone cannot pay for a journey, and Yoli cannot draw freely on Elf’s money, which is held in a joint account with Nic.

Yoli tries to create funds by promising her publisher that Rodeo Rhonda number ten will be ready in less than a month, then writing intensely. She also has a small amount remaining from an arts grant for the harbourmaster book and a very small sum from the sale of the family’s Winnipeg house. These resources are uncertain and limited, but she treats writing as a possible means of making the plan possible. The effort is kept largely private; she does not discuss it with anyone in Toronto.

Keeping contact with Elf

Nic and Lottie spend much of their time at the hospital, while Yoli’s conversations with them are brief and dominated by updates. She calls the nurses’ desk seeking reassurance that Elf will not be allowed to leave. The staff tell her that Elf is still there and urge her to calm down; Yoli also asks to speak with her, but is told Elf must come out of her room and answer the phone herself in the recreation area. These calls show how little control Yoli has over contact or care from a distance, even as she tries to keep the plan alive.

Yoli arranges for Nic to call her from his phone when he visits Elf and to hold the phone to Elf’s ear. At first, Yoli tells Elf that she is still working out what to do, that she will see her soon, and that she has more work to finish before returning to Winnipeg. Elf does not speak during those calls. Then, on one call, her voice is clear and strong, and she asks when Yoli is coming to get her. The question gives the distant plan an immediate human stake: Elf is waiting for a sister who has not yet managed to arrive, while Yoli is still trying to make the means and decision align.

Death, burial, and the unfinished choice

After Elf dies, Yoli looks back on Zurich as the alternative she failed to realize. Elf’s ashes are buried beneath an enormous tree in Elmwood Cemetery in Winnipeg. Lottie had suggested burial beside the girls’ father in East Village, but Nic refuses because Elf had expressly said she did not want to be buried there. Yoli asks whether Elf could be buried in Nic’s backyard; he explains that there are legal issues, and the suggestion ends there. These conversations about where Elf belongs make clear that her stated wishes continue to guide the family even after her death.

Nic tells Yoli that she did everything she could and that no one is to blame. Yoli cannot accept that conclusion without reservation. She thinks Elf could have died peacefully and not alone in Zurich, and calls the failure hers, though she and Nic do not discuss the Swiss plan directly. When Nic proposes engraving a line of music on Elf’s headstone without words, Yoli recognizes that the thought she cannot bring herself to voice is still about Zurich. She avoids telling Nic that Elf had asked her to take her, partly because she fears he might hear the request as evidence that Elf did not trust him or that he did not understand her.

The plan’s lasting meaning

In a letter to Elf dated May 3, 2011, Yoli says that she wishes she had taken her to Zurich and apologizes. Later in the letter, she confronts what she believes Elf already knew: that Yoli did not have the courage to take her and that Elf was not coming to Toronto. The admission does not resolve the question of what Yoli could or should have done. It records the distance between imagining a legally possible route and actually carrying it out, amid uncertainty about eligibility, money, family agreement, and the effect of the choice on Elf.

The attempted journey thus remains incomplete but consequential. It links Elf’s request to Yoli’s research and practical efforts, then to the burial and the self-accusation that follows. The novel does not present the plan as a completed act or an easy answer. Its force lies in the gap between Yoli’s wish to accompany her sister and her inability to turn that wish into a journey before Elf dies.