Michiel’s sister dies by suicide

Michiel’s sister’s suicide is the loss at the center of a story he has kept from his family and, until he tells Emma, from the reader. Diagnosed as manic-depressive, she died by jumping a year later. Michiel loved her and wanted to keep her alive; after her death, he concealed the extent of her criminal life and accepted the blame that followed. His account makes grief inseparable from loyalty, secrecy, and the costs of protecting the people left behind.

Diagnosis and death

Michiel describes a family history already marked by questions of belonging. He had been adopted because his parents could not have children, and his mother later became pregnant. He recalls himself as the child who could never quite compete with his sister, though he insists his parents did not neglect him. He completed his education and joined his father’s hairdressing business; against that comparatively settled path, his sister’s life came to seem increasingly dangerous and difficult to understand.

His description of her combines affection with the hindsight of a devastating illness. She could charm him and their parents, and, in his recollection, seemed unable to do wrong in their eyes. She was eventually diagnosed as manic-depressive. A year later, she jumped. Michiel remembers her as manic and intensely high, but his account does not reduce her to the diagnosis: she was his sister, someone he loved and would have done anything to keep. At the same time, he admits to a thought that troubles him—that perhaps her death was better than the life her illness might otherwise have brought. The thought expresses exhaustion and helplessness, not an absence of love; he presents it as a painful possibility he can barely say aloud.

What the family did not know

The first revelation after the funeral was that his sister had carried a loaded pistol. Michiel also says she had been one of the largest drug dealers in the area. These facts alter the family’s understanding of the woman they had believed they knew, but they do not arrive as a clean explanation of her death. The account says an autopsy found drugs in her system; it does not specify the circumstances or establish that drugs alone explain her suicide.

Michiel knew she had kept a supply of pills, but the discovery of her criminal activity exposed a danger extending beyond her own life. After she died, those involved in the dealing came after him. He believed the next targets would be his father’s business and then his parents. In his view, going to the police or telling his parents what their daughter had really been involved in would have compounded their loss. They had just lost a child; he could not bear to strip away the account that made her the victim rather than the person dealing drugs.

The burden Michiel takes on

Michiel says he took over everything connected with his sister in order to protect their parents. His decision was an act of concealment as much as protection: he carried her role and its danger rather than expose the family to it. Yet the sacrifice could not preserve the version of events he hoped to maintain. The autopsy established that his sister had used drugs, and his parents could not understand how she had obtained them. Two years later, a customer let the truth slip to Michiel’s father. His father then learned that Michiel was a dealer and concluded that Michiel had supplied his sister and killed her.

Michiel does not say that he gave her the drugs; he describes the accusation his father drew from the disclosure. That distinction matters. The family’s eventual knowledge did not produce a full confession or a shared account of responsibility. Michiel continued to withhold the truth, reasoning that his parents’ belief that their daughter had been a victim was their version of a happy ending. He had tried to spare them, but the silence left them with a false explanation and left him carrying both the secret and the blame.

The story’s return to the present

Michiel tells Emma about his sister while they are in the PAAZ. The revelation shifts their conversation from his guarded reference to what Iefke had said into a detailed account of adoption, bereavement, drug dealing, and family silence. Emma answers by insisting that he is also his parents’ child, challenging the sense that his adopted status made him less entitled to speak or be protected. She also tells him that good intentions do not always lead to a happy ending. Michiel is affected by her response, looks again at the photograph of his sister, and carefully puts it away in his cigarette case.

The memory also connects the sister’s death to Emma’s earlier experiences. Michiel says that when Emma arrived and spoke about the feeling of flying, it was as if he could hear his sister again. Her story therefore returns not only as an old secret but through a resemblance he recognizes in another patient’s account. The disclosure does not undo the death or resolve what the family knows. Instead, it gives Michiel a listener outside the family and makes visible the long aftermath of his protective silence: love preserved as a secret, a dead sister remembered through a photograph, and a brother still living with what he took over.