Zurich

Zurich is the proposed destination for an assisted death that Yolandi Von Riesen considers for her sister, Elfrieda Von Riesen. It exists in the story as a legal possibility researched and debated by the family, not as a place they reach: Elfrieda dies in Winnipeg, and Yolandi later measures her own sense of failure against the peaceful death she believes Zurich might have offered.

A destination made possible by legal research

Yolandi’s interest in Zurich develops as she searches for ways to respond to Elfrieda’s request for help in dying. After learning that Nic is going to Spain, she looks online for information about obtaining Nembutal there, then researches assisted death for people with mental illness. She understands Swiss law to allow assistance when there is no selfish motivation, and believes that non-Swiss citizens are also protected. This research changes Zurich from a distant place-name into a possible course of action, although the legal information in the episode is presented through Yolandi’s understanding of what she reads.

Yolandi considers two routes: taking Elfrieda to Mexico to obtain Nembutal, or taking her to Zurich to pursue an assisted death within a legal framework. The Swiss option seems more hopeful to her, but she recognizes that it could fail if doctors judged Elfrieda’s suffering insufficient. Either plan would also require Nic and their mother to agree. Yolandi worries that telling Elfrieda about the alternatives could extinguish any remaining hope of living, while withholding the information could leave her to travel alone after leaving hospital. Zurich is therefore bound up not only with legal access, but with difficult choices about disclosure, companionship, and responsibility.

A request kept from the family

Elfrieda asks Yolandi to take her to Zurich and insists that Nic and their mother must not know, because she expects them to oppose the plan. She sees Yolandi as the one person who understands her wish. Yolandi initially refuses, telling Elfrieda that she will not take her to Switzerland, and resists the language of this being a final favor. Later, Elfrieda renews her appeal, and the possibility becomes harder for Yolandi to dismiss. The two sisters’ discussion makes Zurich a private plan whose practical realization would depend on concealing it from the people closest to Elfrieda.

Yolandi also discusses the Swiss option with Julie. She has searched for a clinic in Zurich and reports a quoted treatment cost of $5,263.16, with another $9,210.53 for related costs, including medical expenses, official fees, and a funeral. Julie questions whether the option is meant only for people who are already dying. Yolandi counters with her reading of Swiss law: she understands it to recognize a category described as weariness of life and to grant the same rights to people who are mentally ill. The figures make the proposed journey strikingly concrete, while the conversation leaves its moral and personal uncertainty unresolved.

The journey that never happens

The evidence does not show Yolandi taking Elfrieda to Zurich or completing arrangements with a clinic. The proposal remains a contemplated route, repeatedly caught between Elfrieda’s insistence, Yolandi’s doubts, the need for family agreement, and the uncertainty of whether doctors would approve. Its practical details do not resolve the central conflict: whether helping Elfrieda die would answer her suffering, and whether Yolandi can accept responsibility for carrying out that request.

After Elfrieda dies in Winnipeg, her ashes are buried beneath a large tree at Elmwood Cemetery. Nic opposes dividing the ashes, and he also rejects their mother’s suggestion that Elfrieda be buried in East Village, which Elfrieda had expressly not wanted. In the aftermath, Yolandi returns mentally to Zurich as the alternative she could not secure. She believes Elfrieda might have died peacefully and with someone beside her, and interprets the failure to make that possible as her own failure, even as Nic tells her that no one is to blame.

Narrative significance

Zurich carries the tension between a right imagined through law and the intimate obligations of family care. Yolandi’s research supplies a framework—eligibility, doctors’ judgments, costs, and procedure—but cannot settle whether the plan is possible or what taking Elfrieda there would mean. The city becomes a measure of an unrealized promise: for Elfrieda, the prospect of not facing death alone; for Yolandi, a course of action that might have honored her sister’s wish but that she did not manage to bring about.