Every word is nonsense, but I understand it

Jenny is my cousin, and she was born five days before me. When we were born our mothers were always trying to outdo each other with the astounding cuteness that was their baby girls. Dresses and frills and bows and ribbons, me and Jenny, moms and babies.

When we were six months old Jenny developed cancer. She had all this surgery and her hair fell out and she was no longer a cute baby. She was sick. My mother put me in coveralls and hats until Jenny got better. And she did get better. She had problems, sure, but she got better. She had mutated breast tissue which they said they could take care of but that she should wait until she was finished having babies. She's four years old, they're talking about her having babies. Her mother went grey, and more than a little crazy.

Jenny was a beautiful girl. Her limb of our tree was troubled and always rife with domestic violence, drug use, prison sentences. Her mother had a string of abusive husbands and Jenny grew up, always just five days older but somehow living a different life, right down the street. She was beautiful, beautiful. Dark and quiet and sadly optimistic. Once our uncle took us to see E.T. in the theater. We had never been to a movie theater before. Gary told me, when E.T. was dying, to tell Jenny that it was all right, that he wasn't going to stay dead. Jenny said I'm not afraid of dying, and I'm not afraid of staying dead. When he took us back to her house we snuck into the bathroom to chew grape gum because we knew our mothers would kill us for chewing gum.

Our cousins were very protective of Jenny. My brother and Donnie and Greg were only two years older than us, and we were all close, but Jenny was always everyone's focus. She had a life that we did not understand, and knew things that little girls shouldn't, and still she was only beautiful. She had massive scars on her stomach from the surgeries as a baby, and as we grew she would lift her shirt and ask me if they were getting better, and I always told her yes, and then I would show her my stomach and ask her if I was getting as fat as our other cousins and she would always say no.

When we were in junior high, Jenny was the prettiest girl I had ever seen. Things were turning around for her, too. Her mother had married a good man, a friend of my father's, a barber named Roger who loved Jenny and her mother equally. There was a new baby, Emily, that Jenny worshipped and swore to protect. Jenny was happy, and in her happiness everyone was happy. Jenny had an adoring fan club, led by Jeremy Poe. Jeremy Poe. And he loved Jenny and swore to protect her also. But Jenny never loved Jeremy Poe, she loved Kevin Ault, who was everything that I hoped to find in heaven and who I had promised myself to when I was seven years old. Kevin, and Cori, and Jenny the beautiful gypsy who never, never got a fair shot. When we were sophomores in high school Kevin declared himself to be for Jenny and Jenny and Jenny and I was heartbroken, but happy for Jenny. In that order.

Jenny and Kevin did not stay Jenny and Kevin for very long. A year later and Kevin had moved away, and after eleven years of hope I accepted that Kevin would never look at me the way he looked at Jenny. And that I may never see him again, and again I was heartbroken. I moved away, also. Jenny married a different boy, one who knew she was beautiful but had not sworn to protect her, and he didn't. They had two babies, and I had two babies, and we sent pictures and told each other that our babies were equally perfect, me and Jenny, moms and babies.

When the younger pair were six months old, Madison, Jenny's baby, died.



I thought that my heart had stopped, but it hadn't. I thought that the sun would go dark, but it didn't. I thought that in time, things would be okay, but they weren't. Jenny's mother lost her mind, again, and in her grief she selfishly left it to Jenny to take care of everything, including her mother. Roger was out of the country on missions, where he would cut the hair of orphans in Mexico. Jenny's mother could not function, and could not take care of Emily. Jenny took Emily, and made the funeral arrangements, and raised the money for a memorial by herself. Jenny, beautiful in her grief, and the girls would later comment that she had always looked good in black.

Roger returned to find his granddaughter dead and his daughter gone and his wife locked in her house, not the woman he had left. For years he tried to keep them together, but she eventually left him. By then things had fallen apart, Emily was a mess and did not wear it as well as Jenny had at her age, and her mother fought Roger for her and Roger was by then a police officer in our small town and it tore everyone apart. Jenny's husband did not stay either, but then he had never loved her the way everyone else did. He had thought that she was beautiful, and beautiful women do not have dead babies.

Two years later a girl we had lived with in high school, Becky, died of cancer, leaving three young children behind. Jenny commented that she, Jenny, was lucky to have only lost one child, and that it must be far more difficult to know, to know that you are going to leave your children motherless and not be able to do anything to stop it.

After some time Jenny remarried, and this time it was Jeremy Poe. Jeremy Poe, and now it was his turn to be happy. And they had a little boy and Jenny said that's enough, that's it, I cannot have any more babies, and Madison was still not there. But with the decision to end her reproduction came the opportunity to undo the damage wrought by the cancer of our infancy. So it began, with the doctors and the surgeries and the medicine again. Twelve months ago, and when she's done, she will look like everyone else because while everyone else knew that she was beautiful, Jenny never did. But it isn't easy, with the doctors and the surgeries and the medicine. And she was sick.

And her back hurt. She couldn't pick up her little boy, because her back hurt. And she said to the doctor, my back hurts. And he said that was to be expected. And she said she was weak, and he said that's to be expected. And she was worried about her test results and he said That's all to be expected, we know what we're doing and what we're doing is going to make you sick before it makes you not sick. You just wait, you're going to be better than you've ever been.

She had an X-ray of her back, which showed that one of her ribs had detached due to a swelling somewhere. Thus, her back hurt. Last week she went to a different doctor. And today my aunt called me and said that the cancer in Jenny's spine is so advanced that she will be dead in three weeks.



I cannot conceive of a world in which someone thought that this was a good plan. I have cousins, terrible people, that die of hepatitis in prison because the choices they make render them unfit for society and all of nature, even their own bodies, rises up in protest. I work on people that, after reading their charts and histories, I ask myself why their death was not more painful. And I stand at the graves of my friends, beautiful women that want nothing more than to live a happy life and give their children a happy life and take pictures and die, old and happy in their beds, surrounded by their children and grandchildren, and I watch their husbands and children and wonder how they're going to make it. Mike, and Jeremy, dads and babies, and wonder how you can explain this to them. Because every word is nonsense.