2008-01-22 - 6:19 p.m.

When I started this I said I would swear, I would take criticism, and I wouldn't write anything I couldn't bear a family member to read, or wouldn't want them to read. Breaking my own groundrule for blogging, I'm going to talk about family.

The other day I took a five-minute ride with my grandfather, and we sat in semi-companionable silence (other half: he's deaf) while he drove. I wouldn't have told him what I was thinking about anyway, because I was thinking about his dead sister. Don't know why, minds are funny, sometimes you get a random thought and you can't trace its origins.
My grandfather was the oldest or second-oldest of seven kids, three dying in infancy and three living past 70. The other child is the Dead Sister, her death being one of those family deaths that has an effect on every person in the family for years to come - whether they know it or not. Seeing as I don't want to refer to her as Dead Sister and I use pseudonyms, she will be "Jenny".
Jenny was a favourite child and a darling kid and about seven when her horse spooked on the way home, bucked her off, and then by route ran to the house. Hers was a big death in the family so she feels kind of like everyone's baby cousin, so I'm not just saying this about a random person: I hope she died instantly or at least quickly. But I don't think she did. You can sort of figure out what a horrible scene it was for those present when the horse was finally home. My grandfather would have been about fourteen.
My grandparents were next-door neighbours as children (but not later. I'll explain why) and my grandmother's mother a nurse, so she was called over. She was, to be polite about it, a 'cantankerous old biddy', but that's me being polite, not admiring. She cried about it. I can't remember if my grandmother came with her when she went or not. My grandmother's youngest sister (born years after the incident) is named 'Jenny'.
After it happened my grandfather's mother was left with three living kids, and once you get past two you think they're safe. I think it ruined her, and it ruined the place for them, and they moved from that farm.

There's a third Jenny. My grandfather, his brother and his sister are the ones who survived childhood, and the sister named one of her three daughters 'Jenny' as well.
There's a huge frame hanging in my grandparent's hall of Jenny. She's young and plain and holding a doll. It's actually one of the largest pictures I have seen in a house, apart from very rich people's houses. I always feel a little weird to look at it because there's this proprietary connection there, like we all own her, and here's the little one who died so she's all our dead sister.

She won't be discussed outside my parents' dining room and certainly not in my grandparents' house, or mentioned. But that event, her death, and the things people have done since to ignore it or to fix it, have been such a huge part of the shaping of this family.

There are details I can't mention here because I don't know them, and I have never thought to ask.

I was thinking about this while I was sitting shotgun with my grandfather, thinking about how he would never talk about it, thinking about how I could never share with him what I was thinking or even that I was thinking it, and I just wanted to give that fourteen-year-old boy-ghost a hug. It sucks.