Zurich for the planned assisted-death trip is not a setting Elfrieda Von Riesen reaches in the evidence presented, but a destination that comes to organize her sister Yolandi Von Riesen’s decisions and grief. First refusing Elfrieda’s request to take her to Switzerland, Yolandi later investigates whether such a journey could be legally possible, tries to find the money, and tells Elfrieda she intends to go. The plan never becomes a journey; after Elfrieda’s death, Zurich remains inseparable from Yolandi’s question of what she should have done.

A destination formed by a request

Elfrieda’s wish to go to Switzerland emerges from the crisis surrounding her suicidal despair and psychiatric hospitalization. When she asks Yolandi to take her, Yolandi refuses, insisting that she will not help her sister die. Her immediate response is protective but also definitive: she rejects the request rather than treating it as a practical question to be researched. At that point, Zurich is a possibility Elfrieda has raised, not a destination Yolandi accepts.

That refusal later becomes harder for Yolandi to maintain. She considers what it means to deny Elfrieda’s account of her own suffering, while also fearing that presenting assisted death as an available choice might extinguish any remaining wish to live. Zurich therefore represents more than a place on a map: it is the focus of a conflict between Elfrieda’s expressed wishes and Yolandi’s fear of helping make death seem inevitable. The location acquires its force through that unresolved responsibility, not through any account of the city itself.

Research, law, and imagined alternatives

Yolandi’s thinking changes when she searches for information about euthanasia for people with mental illness in Switzerland. Her research leads her to understand that Swiss law can permit assistance for a person who is not a Swiss citizen, provided the assistance is not motivated by selfish interests. She also learns that this provision has not often been used for people whose suffering is psychiatric. These are discoveries made through Yolandi’s search, and they give her a reason to reconsider her earlier refusal without assuring her that Elfrieda would qualify or that a clinic would accept the case.

Yolandi weighs Zurich against Mexico, imagining the two destinations in sharply different terms. In her mind, Mexico seems cheaper and more chaotic, while Switzerland suggests precision, timekeeping, and neutrality. The contrast shows how she tries to turn an emotional crisis into a choice between possible courses of action. Yet the imagined alternatives do not resolve the essential uncertainties: whether the plan could proceed, whether the people closest to Elfrieda would agree, and whether helping her would honor her wishes or place Yolandi in a role she could not bear.

The plan meets practical and moral resistance

Yolandi does not keep her investigation entirely private. In a conversation with Julie, she explains that Swiss law, as she understands it, also recognizes the claims of people who are weary of life. Julie doubts that assisted death is meant for someone who is not already dying. Their disagreement makes visible the gap between legal possibility and moral conviction: even if a route exists, it does not follow that those who love Elfrieda will agree about its meaning or whether it should be taken.

The logistics are formidable. Yolandi estimates that she needs twenty thousand dollars to cover the journey, her return, the clinic, accommodation, and arrangements after death. At a bank, she asks for a loan and offers her Rodeo Rhonda books as the basis for future income, but she has no collateral or book contract to demonstrate that the money is coming. Elfrieda’s funds are held in a joint account with Nic, so Yolandi fears that a large withdrawal would alert him. She also recognizes that Nic and Lottie would need to agree to her plan, and that Elfrieda might go alone if released from hospital. The practical barriers are thus inseparable from questions of trust, consent, and how much to disclose.

Yolandi eventually tells Elfrieda by telephone that she will soon have enough money to go to Zurich for the planned assisted-death trip, and that she will use credit cards if necessary. But the next morning, Lottie tells her the hospital is giving Elfrieda a day pass so she can celebrate her birthday at home. Yolandi realizes that she has become so absorbed in keeping her sister in hospital until she can assemble the money that she has forgotten the birthday itself. Nic is coming to collect Elfrieda, and Lottie plans a cake, champagne, and flowers. The intended journey to Zurich is overtaken by events at home; Yolandi’s sense that Elfrieda is now gone marks the collapse of the plan, not its completion.

An unrealized journey and its aftermath

Zurich continues to inhabit Yolandi’s thoughts after Elfrieda’s death. When Nic discusses putting a line of music on the gravestone, Yolandi understands that her own unexplained preoccupation is about Zurich. She wants to tell Nic that Elfrieda had asked her to take her there, but fears that this disclosure would suggest Elfrieda did not trust him or that he had failed to understand her. The conversation about the memorial therefore becomes another occasion on which the plan remains unspoken, as Yolandi tries to work out her own responsibility without transferring its burden to Nic.

The location’s final significance is clearest in Yolandi’s letter to Elfrieda, dated May 3, 2011. Recalling a promise from Aunt Tina that forgiveness might arrive as a sudden feeling of lightness, Yolandi says she wishes she had taken Elfrieda to Zurich and apologizes. The imagined trip cannot now be tested against what might have happened there; instead, it persists as a counterfactual around which Yolandi’s grief gathers. Zurich is at once a researched legal possibility, an attempted practical plan, and the place Yolandi believes she failed to take her sister.