It was one of those first days of fall, where the light suddenly feels more distant. Golden hour and Greenwood Cemetery had an ephemeral glow, a stark contrast to the detritus of our lives collecting along the cemetery’s fence. Walking through the maze of gravestones, I found the architectures of death truly captivating. Some of them were bold and allegorical—an angel’s weeping body thrust over a tomb, monuments of stone depicting motifs, embodying the human struggle of mortality. Other graves were modest stones with simple designs that stated the names of the deceased, who they were to people (devoted mother, loving husband, loyal friend), and the dates of birth and death. One adorned a transcription of “MY FIRST. MY LAST. MY EVERYTHING / I LOVE YOU, BELLA.”
Graves there date back to the mid-1800s when the cemetery was founded. Within the sea of monuments to the deceased of generations, a handful made my gut ache, some made me laugh, and others landed me at the intersection of rapture and anguish that is life. Around a curve on one of the many winding paths, I stood looking at a grassy area with weathered stones whose identifying information of the people buried beneath had been washed away by time. I felt a pang of sadness for the nameless dead who had been long gone. Without a name, they are just bones in the ground.
Names are a way of understanding ourselves as individuals, separate from the world and the rest of its population. The narrative of self is wrapped in that name, an understanding of one’s history and how one came to be at this present moment. In the clusters of tombstones of the same names, I found an understanding of the way a name ties you to your familial lineage, one in a clan. All of the pain and glory of being wrapped up in a history much larger than yourself is distilled within a name.
My middle name is my mother’s last name, which she got from her father. He had received the name when he immigrated to the United States, a child fleeing Nazi-occupied Germany. The U.S. government crafted the very German name of Gradenwitz into Graydon, the name my grandfather passed to his two daughters and subsequently three of his four grandchildren as middle names. The name keeps threatening to die, as it would have with my mother, for her sister had changed her name when she married. It survived another generation by being passed to some of their children as middle names. Three generations of assimilation and the “American Dream.” Three generations of joy and grief. If none of us pass the name on to our children and it dies, will all of that die with the name, too?
I have decided to go by the name Graydon. I keep getting taken out of myself when I am referred to by it, suddenly aware of how I am seen and exist in the world. But not in the way I am taken out of myself when I am misgendered or in the way I am when the guy at the corner store calls me “sweetheart” or “honey.” Instead, there is a deep satisfaction. I turn the new name over in my mouth, feeling the shape of the vowels and consonants. It feels good, more androgynous, more fitting to who I am.
As I make the transition from one identifier to another, both my first and middle name feel foreign; both feel familiar. I exist in a liminal space somewhere between them, a space between two selves. As I take control of my identity and my understanding of self, I am met with a completely unexpected hiccup. There is a nagging feeling that with the rejection of my given name, I am abandoning the kid that went by that name. The tender place in my chest aches for that child, what they experienced and went through, and a fear begins to bubble that I am giving up on them, leaving them to be forgotten to time and history—leaving them to the same fate as the nameless tombstones in Greenwood Cemetery.
My therapist assures me this is not the case. She insists that everything that made that child who they were lives inside me now. Deciding to go by a different name is a formidable action that places history in the past. Dead names are tender. They can be a deeply painful reminder of a past self and the way that self existed in the world.
I danced a few weeks ago. I hadn’t danced in years but said I wanted to one night. And the next morning, after my sweetie left for work, I put in my headphones and played a playlist that I made eight years ago during my freshman year of college. I was in my sweats and a dirty t-shirt, and I danced in the living room.