Michiel's sister's suicide

Michiel’s sister’s suicide is disclosed not as an isolated tragedy but as the loss around which his guilt, family loyalties, and guarded account of himself have formed. Diagnosed as manic-depressive, she died by jumping a year later. In telling Emma what followed, Michiel reveals that he took over his sister’s criminal business to shield their parents, then allowed them to believe a version of her death that spared them a different kind of pain. The event makes his reserve legible without reducing it to a single cause: his sister’s death left him carrying both love and a burden of responsibility he could not straightforwardly share.

Family Background and the Diagnosis

Michiel begins with the story of his adoption. His parents could not have children, so they adopted him; afterward, his mother became pregnant. He describes himself as both the late-arriving adopted child and the firstborn, a position that left him feeling he could never quite match his sister in his parents’ eyes. He is careful to say that they did not mistreat him. He trained for a profession and joined his father’s hairdressing business, and by his account that ordinary path was going well. The family difference he describes is not a simple account of parental neglect, but a lasting sense of not being fully one of their children.

His sister, by contrast, is remembered as exceptional and difficult to contain. Michiel calls her charming and says she could do no wrong in the eyes of those around her, including him. She was eventually diagnosed as manic-depressive. A year later, she died by jumping. Michiel’s description of her as intensely manic and high makes clear how powerfully he remembers her in that state, but the account does not establish that illness alone explains her suicide. His conflicted thought that perhaps it was for the best comes with hesitation and pain: it is not a settled judgment on her life, but a thought he struggles to admit while mourning someone he loved and wanted to keep alive.

The Death and Its Uncovered Aftermath

The suicide is followed in Michiel’s account by revelations about the life his family had not known. His sister had access to drugs and was, he says, one of the largest dealers in the area. After her death, Michiel discovered that she had carried a loaded gun. The account does not say that the gun was used in her suicide; it belongs to the startling picture of a hidden world that emerged after the family had already lost her.

The autopsy showed that his sister had used drugs. His parents could not understand how she had obtained them, and Michiel says he had supplied them because he was a dealer. He turns that discovery into a stark accusation against himself: he had killed her. That is his interpretation of his role, not proof that he caused her suicide. The distinction matters. His narrative binds his sister’s drug use to his own involvement and guilt, while leaving the precise causes of her death unresolved.

Michiel’s Silence and Responsibility

After his sister died, people involved in the drug trade came after Michiel. He believed that his father’s business would be next and that his parents would also be in danger. He therefore took over everything connected with his sister’s operation, intending to protect them. He did not go to the police or tell his parents the full story. In his view, they had just lost their only daughter; revealing the criminal life she had led would impose another injury on them.

Instead, the parents understood their daughter as the victim rather than the dealer. Michiel let that account stand, even as the eventual discovery of his own role gave them reason to believe he had introduced her to drugs. He says he never corrected their understanding. Their version functioned as what he calls their happy ending, a protective explanation he could not bring himself to destroy. Yet his silence did not keep the family intact: in Emma’s response, his parents had lost both their daughter and, in a different way, Michiel. His attempt to protect them preserved one account of the loss while deepening his own isolation.

The Memory’s Return in the Ward

Michiel tells Emma this history after she asks about something Iefke said. The disclosure changes the meaning of his earlier silence: he is not simply withholding a painful anecdote, but describing a family history in which love, shame, danger, and protection have become difficult to separate. Emma recognizes an echo of her own thinking in his account, while still insisting that he, too, is his parents’ child. Their lives are not the same, but the exchange allows her to hear a familiar logic of taking blame and carrying pain for others.

Michiel also links his sister’s memory to his arrival at the PAAZ and to Emma’s talk of flying. He says that hearing her describe the feeling brought his sister back to him, as though he could hear her again. That connection does not equate Emma’s experience with his sister’s or explain the suicide; it shows how a shared image can reopen a bereavement that Michiel has kept largely unspoken. The story’s significance lies partly in this delayed return: the death is recalled through a conversation in which Michiel finally gives Emma the facts he has withheld, while the guilt and uncertainty surrounding them remain unresolved.