I have a three syllable name. It is not uncommon for people to immediately want to truncate it. The other day a man I’ve met a handful of times called me Kim in greeting, it was warm and friendly and harbored no ill will. I don’t remember what automatic acknowledgement I gave, a smile, a nod, or a wave but my nephew who witnessed it all laughed. “You did not like that at all.” It’s true. Kim hasn’t been my name for a very long time. But that’s another story.
Over the Memorial Day weekend the New York Times published a thousand names. They were one tenth of the American lives lost to Covid-19 thus far.
One hundred thousand.
Some numbers are unfathomable. I’m not alone in my inability to fully digest them, my brain does quick Mother Goose translations; big, small or… unfathomable, too tiny to conceive or too massive to carry. After holding it a moment and feeling the weight, I set it down. No doubt if it had just been another headline with graphics, colors and numbers I might not have picked it back up. But the story was bigger than the numbers. There were names with ages and a single anecdotal detail of the person: put himself through college, played the saxophone at Denver’s oldest jazz club for 40 years, sanitation worker living his fullest days. The statistics were no longer sterile facts, they were people with families and friends, histories and dreams. And they were gone in less than a fiscal quarter.
Every name tells a story.
My parents could not agree on a name, the stalemate ended with Kimberly. It was the name of the daughter of a movie star my mom was smitten with and a racehorse whose odds my dad favored. When I was a young girl trying to fit into a new world and a new culture I insisted on the diminutive Kim. By the end of high school and all its traumas, I finally came into a sense of self, one not so much defined by the opinions of the Allisons and Susies and I wanted my name back.
There is power in a name. The names of some of our grandest institutions are not coincidentally the names of some of our most powerful families. Sometimes those names are stripped when the family’s shame overshadows the once good name. I pray there will be more reckonings and more licensed names laid low. To take away a name is to assert power. Remove a name and redact history. A slave is stripped of his name and lineage. A free man’s status is diminished when he is addressed as boy. A family history is erased in the ink ledgers of Ellis Island.
In every name lives a world of events and emotions. When human loss is reported with anonymity instead of humanity we avoid the messy emotions of outrage and rancor. We can keep calm and carry on. Imagine if every time a factory or plant was closed the names of those suddenly jobless were printed out with a little fleeting detail: third generation union gal; proud parent of the family’s first college sophomore; baked cookies for everyone every last Friday. Imagine these names as national news because they worked for a national brand? Would it give shareholders a new perspective on the costs of their returns? Imagine printing the names of every person displaced or killed by tornados, hurricanes and forest fires. Would we have more environmental reform? Maybe insurance reform? Imagine reporting the name of every single shooting victim not just a selection? Could that force a shift in the conversation? I don’t know the answers but I know asking questions is the only way to find them.
I know that our names are important. They are the sum of the stories we carry and our stories connect us. This virus connects us all, it has gone beyond borders and economic strata. The list of names is a sobering reminder. Closeness is the scourge of this virus but connection is our salvation. We need to keep taking care of, and for each other.
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