From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

I guess in a big family, something is always happening to someone, because there are so many people for things to be happening to. Elinor, one of Tante Berta’s daughters, killed herself last night. Of course, I am not supposed to know anything about it. Grandmother tried to make me believe that she had an accident and fell down the stairs, but I heard everyone talking about it in the kitchen. Elinor was in New York because she wanted to be an opera singer, only it turned out that she couldn’t sing as well as she thought she could, and she couldn’t get a job, so Uncle Herman had to go and bring her home. When she got home, she was so sad that she couldn’t eat or sleep or even talk to anyone. Then last night, while everyone was eating dinner, she went to bed and took her brother’s gun and shot herself. Tante Esther was here all day long and she and Grandmother had such a good time talking about it. I knew it was not nice to listen behind doors, but I couldn’t hear the story any other way. Tomorrow is Elinor’s funeral. The whole family will go, but I know they won’t take me. Tante Esther says that people who kill themselves should not have funerals, and they shouldn’t even be in the same cemetery with good people who don’t kill themselves. She said about a million times how terrible it must have been for Dora to go upstairs and see her sister lying in all that blood. I think that Elinor should have waited until after dinner.