A Name Worth Carrying

What do we unconsciously carry with us when we are named for someone else? An annual holiday inconvenience over a name most people associate with Christmas unfolds into a meditation on family, grief, resilience, and the women whose lives echo through the generations.

Every year. Every single year. It never fails. It is as much a harbinger of the holiday season as Mariah Carey singing “All I Want for Christmas.” And speaking of, anyone who has ever worked in retail during that time of year will tell you that is absolutely 100% the very last song you would ever consciously choose to listen to. It loses its luster after hearing it for the 500^th time during a shift, and then every shift after that for over a month. A festive form of psychological warfare.

But I digress, this is not about Mariah Carey, and as we are in August, we are decidedly outside of a holiday season. To get to where I’m going to, I must connect a few dots first.

My name is Holly, which means that every holiday season some cashier, salesperson, or other individual to whom I hand over my credit card will look at it, read my name and then exclaim some version of, “Well you must just love Christmas!” Wash, rinse, and repeat at the next store and the next weekend and the next season, over and over. There is no real response to give in that situation; I mean as a newborn I did not choose my name for a holiday I had not yet experienced, grab the pen from the labor and delivery nurse, and fill out my own birth certificate.

In response, I usually fake a half smile that does not reach my eyes and remind myself that doing more online shopping would save me from more of the same.

To be clear, I am not named such because anyone in my family was just so in love with the holidays. I am southern, and in typical southern fashion, we are named for our family members. I am no exception and carry the name of my great-great grandmother, but even she was named for her grandmother. Quite the lineage.

People can be named for any number of reasons, all of them meaningful in their own way. And perhaps therein lies why this seasonal inconvenience bugs me a bit more; it waters down the intentionality behind my name and associates it with something altogether less than. On a recent long commute home, my mind started to wander even as music filled the interior, competing for attention with the surrounding sounds of traffic.  

What’s in a name? What do we unconsciously carry with us when we are named for someone else?

To be honest, I know blessedly little about my great-great grandmother. But what I do know fills in enough. She spent the entirety of her existence in a land so rural it remains so even now. She did not live a life of leisure, with the comfort of wealth to warm her. She lived a life dependent on the fickle nature of weather and the resulting harvest that followed. Every rise of the sun brought forth another tussle with the elements, etching grit and determination into the very fiber of her soul. She buried one child. Later on, she buried three more in the span of two years. A season of grief and seeds buried deep.

We delude ourselves into thinking that was just how it was then. That mothers were accustomed to the unwelcome knock of death upon the door.  That the procession to the children’s portion of the graveyard was part and parcel of the social fabric, unfortunate but expected.

The grief of a mother never leaves, even as other children are born and introduce giggles into rooms who have keenly felt its absence for far too long. Somehow, my namesake found the shreds of stamina that were barely identifiable and carried on, later giving birth to my great grandmother.

My great grandmother only lived for the first six months of my life, but when she held me for the first time and was told my name—she began weeping, so utterly touched I was named for her mother.

There can be no better judge of character than in that single moment and in the end is all I need to know about whose name I carry.

You see, my great grandmother also buried a child who did not see her second birthday. I can only surmise that in that moment and in the years to follow, she turned to the one person who so innately understood the depths of a mother’s sorrow. Even as time marched forward and marked its passage onto her face and hair, in old age she would say that the pain never goes away.

What’s in a name? Struggle and resilience. Fatigue and stamina. Grief and compassion. Weariness and grit. And above all, love.

So no, unnamed salespersons—I do not by virtue of my name alone love the holiday season. My name is not born of consumerism and over-consumption. It is built on the very foundation of what it means to be human.

To rise above circumstances.

To be a mother.

To live and lose.

To find a way forward.

To carry love when all else falls.

To be remembered.

And to carry that remembrance forward.

When I hear my name, I hear more than the two syllables it takes to say it properly. I hear the women who made it worth carrying.