Marlene’s suicide enters the narrative not as a witnessed act but as news delivered by Joachim’s father, years after Marlene had spent eight weeks living with the family. The disclosure turns her earlier, unexplained attempt into part of a longer struggle: she had tried to kill herself four times, and even after six years of treatment neither she nor her psychiatrist had found an answer that could keep her alive.

The Earlier Attempt

During her stay with Joachim’s family, Marlene explained that she was there after trying to kill herself by swallowing every tablet she could find in a cupboard. She had fallen asleep, woken in hospital, and had her stomach pumped. Asked why she had done it, she said she did not know; she had come to find out. She suggested the question might have an answer a week later, but the account does not provide one. Her matter-of-fact uncertainty anticipates the explanation her father will give years afterward: the reason remained unknown even to Marlene herself.

Marlene stayed for eight weeks before returning to her parents. Her eventual death is therefore separated from the childhood household by years, but the earlier attempt gives the later news a history. What had seemed like a brief and baffling episode was part of a recurring wish to die, not a danger that disappeared when she left the family home.

The News at the Swimming Pool

Years later, while Joachim and his father are changing at an outdoor swimming pool, his father asks whether he remembers Marlene, who once lived with them. He then tells Joachim that she killed herself the day before. The ordinary, exposed setting makes the announcement starkly immediate: the conversation unfolds during the small business of changing, before father and son walk together to the showers.

As he speaks, the father performs an incongruous bit of physical comedy, lifting his underwear from the grass with his toes, tossing it into the air, and catching it. The gesture does not soften the news; instead, its casual awkwardness sits beside the gravity of what he says. When Joachim asks why, his father answers that he does not know. It was Marlene’s fourth attempt, he says, and she had wanted to die without knowing why.

Her Father’s Account

The disclosure also reveals the extent of the father’s involvement. He had treated Marlene for six years, and says they got along well: he liked her and thought she was a wonderful girl. He rejects her parents as the cause, describing them as kind people. The account does not offer a diagnosis or a final explanation; it preserves the painful gap between treatment, affection, and understanding.

The father’s voice breaks as he says he had hoped until the end that they might succeed. His admission makes the death more than a report of a fourth attempt ending fatally: it exposes the limits of a sustained therapeutic relationship, while refusing to suggest that care was absent. For Joachim, it is also an unusual moment of candor. His father had never before spoken so openly with him about one of his patients.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

A few days later, Marlene’s parents send the family a handblown glass sphere. Inside it, four diamond-shaped pieces turn around a pin under the force of sunlight. The object remains on the living-room windowsill for years, carrying the aftermath of Marlene’s death into the family’s everyday surroundings. On one of the hottest days the north has ever experienced, it bursts into a thousand pieces with a crack like a gunshot. The narrative does not explain the explosion as a symbol, but its sudden shattering gives the surviving object an abrupt, material ending of its own.

The sequence moves from Marlene’s first unexplained attempt, to the father’s belated announcement, to the glass sphere that outlasts her. Its central contradiction remains unresolved: Marlene was treated and liked, her parents were not blamed, and yet the wish to die persisted without a reason she could name. The narrative lets that unanswered question stand rather than turning her death into a solvable lesson.