missing persons
Oct. 15th, 2009 07:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraSometime last spring I was talking to my mom about genealogy and family history - probably started by a discussion of who had come to my grandmother's funeral - and she said something about how doting great-aunt x had always wished for children of her own, and somehow it had never occurred to me before that those distant great-greats, those ancestors without descendants, hadn't just been childfree by choice. I had been 9 or 11 or something when I got particularly interested in drawing big family trees and at that age I simply took it for granted that people had kids if they wanted them or not if they didn't and so Grandma's (Catholic in the 1920s?) parents must just have wanted an only child, her aunts must have been happy to have none at all, and I never looked back and wondered about that. Until my mom mentioned otherwise and suddenly whole branches of my family were missing.
I have no idea whether there were babies lost or just never conceived at all; the people who grieved them are long since dead and the babies likely would be too, by now. I can't tell you which actual real second and third cousins were actually at my grandmother's funeral so it's not like another branch of them would affect my life in any way. (I am, of course, descended from the line of people who did all manage to have at least one child...) I'm sure Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day is meant to remember the babies someone actually, you know, still remembers. I guess I just wonder if those great-greats would have wished they had such a thing.
I went through a bunch of my grandmother's jewelry this summer with my mom and my aunt - looking for things I might want, and just looking at it, the variety of her collection. She had a "grandchildren" necklace, four little silver bead-people with birthstone bodies. My cousin wasn't on there. "Oh, no," my aunt - not my cousin's mother - said, "You don't do that."
My cousin died before I was born; my cousin was born with major abnormalities and didn't live very long. I don't think she ever left the hospital. There's no picture she drew immortalized as a plastic plate, she didn't make any of the many cards, crusted with glitter, that my grandmother had saved in a box, that I picked through to find the ones from me. But she had a sex, and a birthday; she met the minimum requirements to be a little sparkly bead-person on a silver chain. Of course a number of different people might have had relevant opinions about that - my grandmother, the aunt who is my cousin's mother, whatever consortium of her children bought her the necklace - and none of those people are me. Because I'm a coward, I didn't even ask my own mother what she thought about that (my mother who must have quietly tried to steer me towards describing myself as the oldest grandchild, rather than the first...). But my mom says my grandfather once corrected her sharply when she said he had four grandchildren. "Five," he said. "I have five grandchildren."
And so when my baby is old enough, when she wants to start drawing big family trees, I want to make sure she includes, with my cousins, my aunt's third child, the one who could so easily vanish out of the genealogy. And should I ever face the tragedy of losing a grandchild, I think I'd want her on my necklace, a birthstone and a name and a place in the family history.
I have no idea whether there were babies lost or just never conceived at all; the people who grieved them are long since dead and the babies likely would be too, by now. I can't tell you which actual real second and third cousins were actually at my grandmother's funeral so it's not like another branch of them would affect my life in any way. (I am, of course, descended from the line of people who did all manage to have at least one child...) I'm sure Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day is meant to remember the babies someone actually, you know, still remembers. I guess I just wonder if those great-greats would have wished they had such a thing.
I went through a bunch of my grandmother's jewelry this summer with my mom and my aunt - looking for things I might want, and just looking at it, the variety of her collection. She had a "grandchildren" necklace, four little silver bead-people with birthstone bodies. My cousin wasn't on there. "Oh, no," my aunt - not my cousin's mother - said, "You don't do that."
My cousin died before I was born; my cousin was born with major abnormalities and didn't live very long. I don't think she ever left the hospital. There's no picture she drew immortalized as a plastic plate, she didn't make any of the many cards, crusted with glitter, that my grandmother had saved in a box, that I picked through to find the ones from me. But she had a sex, and a birthday; she met the minimum requirements to be a little sparkly bead-person on a silver chain. Of course a number of different people might have had relevant opinions about that - my grandmother, the aunt who is my cousin's mother, whatever consortium of her children bought her the necklace - and none of those people are me. Because I'm a coward, I didn't even ask my own mother what she thought about that (my mother who must have quietly tried to steer me towards describing myself as the oldest grandchild, rather than the first...). But my mom says my grandfather once corrected her sharply when she said he had four grandchildren. "Five," he said. "I have five grandchildren."
And so when my baby is old enough, when she wants to start drawing big family trees, I want to make sure she includes, with my cousins, my aunt's third child, the one who could so easily vanish out of the genealogy. And should I ever face the tragedy of losing a grandchild, I think I'd want her on my necklace, a birthstone and a name and a place in the family history.
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no subject
Date: 2009-10-16 01:09 am (UTC)I'm always incredibly moved by the headstones with the single date; those babies seemed so cherished. As someone who lost my brother as an adult, I am so very conscious of the break that this has made in my family line always.
But I do also understand the idea of a pain so raw that the only way to close it off is actually to deny it ever happened. To convince yourself that that baby was little more than cells because to lose that baby is too awful. The gem would be a reminder that the brightness of that child did not get to become a brilliant sparkle. It sounds like your grandfather embraced that child despite that pain but it might not be completely fair (NOT THAT I KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT YOUR FAMILY) to say that your grandmother did what she did because she didn't acknowledge that baby. And for me--knowing that your chain has four beads but should have five--would be a way of thinking about that lost child every time you saw it.
But the family we tell ourselves isn't always the family we live, is it? And isn't it also that the family we live in isn't always exactly the same one the rest of the family is living in...
no subject
Date: 2009-10-16 02:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-16 04:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-16 05:09 am (UTC)