Chaya, my new name
Content warning death and sexual violence
Last week, I walked into the AT&T store to activate my new phone. The man behind the desk looked up, smiling like Buddha. His nametag said he was a Veteran. I said his name out loud and then, “Thank you for serving this country.” I paused and added, “this country that doesn’t treat you as it should.”
“Even when you’re serving,” he said quietly, “it’s a lot.”
He activated my phone, walking me through each step, so I could do it myself next time. “I know, I’m sure I can,” I sighed, “but I prefer another person by my side.”
About to leave, I said, “This was a really great experience. Thank you,” and I said his name out loud again.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“My name is Carol…” I lowered my voice a bit as if I was telling him a secret, ”but I’m thinking of changing it. Carol was the most popular name the year I was born; it doesn’t really fit me.”
“What will be your new name?” he played along.
“Maybe Sunshine,” I said, “that’s the name I use to make reservations. Or maybe my Hebrew name, Chaya. It means ‘living thing.’”
I felt a shiver at the edge of my skin.
“Did you feel that?” he asked, rubbing his arms, “that’s your name calling, Chaya, living thing.”
The woman who was waiting to go next said, “Yes, that’s it Chaya. That’s it.”
I called my mother and asked her about my Great Aunt Clara, the “Chaya” I was named for.
“I don’t remember much. I really didn’t like her,” she said, “she was very religious, always dressed in black. As a little girl she scared me.” That was all she could remember.
“Why did you name me after someone you didn’t like?” I asked her as she drifted back to sleep.
My Grandma Tillie and her sister Clara had five brothers, four older and one younger. The outside world knew their father as a charming door-to-door salesman, with a pushcart of notions and stories from the old country. At home he was stern and overbearing. He expected his daughters to dutifully clean the houses of their parents and older brothers. My grandmother never forgave him for preventing her from studying to be a nurse.
During World War 2, Tillie and Clara joined the circle of Jewish women mourners, who sat and cried with mothers who had lost their husbands and sons. When there was a tragedy — like a flood or an earthquake or a massacre — my grandmother would say, “The mothers are weeping.” We are certainly weeping now, with the survivors of loss at such unthinkable scale in Israel-Palestine now. I imagine my grandmother and her sister in their long black dresses, their heads down, moving in lock step to tend to the house of grief.
At some point, perhaps after my grandmother lost her own son in the War, the sisters became members of the Jewish chevra kadisha, the women who tended to the dead, ritually washing the bodies, wrapping them in white linen shrouds, and sitting protecting the bodies until it was time for burial. I was told this story by one of my grandmother’s cousins, when they were about to move my grandmother’s body from the hospital where she died to the Jewish funeral home.
This year I’ve often felt my body dressed in black and weighed down with grief. I wonder how far back my connection to these ritual mourners goes? When my father died, it took me much longer to finish grieving than my mother and sister. That whole chapter of my life is shrouded in shame around my unrelenting sadness.
The undertow started on the anniversary of my father’s death this past year. I attended an Education for Racial Equity webinar where Jennifer Lee-Koble described the erasure of indigenous history and the rape of millions of indigenous women on this continent.
I’ve known this history intellectually for some time, but this was the first time I heard the story aloud from someone whose own life descended from the survivors of those massacres, through the lens of events that are happening in the present. The way the human brain works, spoken stories allow us to experience these connections between other people’s lives and our own. This is how story mysteriously and reliably connects us with people whose experience is different from our own.
While my mother napped, I imagined myself with my grandmother’s relatives in Hungary, a teenage girl walking in a starchy black dress and uncomfortable shoes, tending to the dead and the grieving lovers they left behind.
I called back and asked again, “Mom, if you didn’t like Aunt Clara, why in the world did you name me after her?”
“I have no idea,” she said, this time annoyed, “it must have been my mother’s idea.”
During my first trip to Israel-Palestine, after my freshman year of college in the summer of 1977, I tried on the name Chaya. Speakers of both Hebrew and Arabic understood the name, which means first of all living thing, but also colloquially animal and beast.
Those three meanings of my Hebrew name Chaya – living thing, animal, beast – are in play right now in how I choose to relate to myself and other people in the face of this horrific grief, the waves of loss and sadness in Israel-Palestine right now – both from Hamas’ murder and kidnapping of Israelis, and from Israel’s bombing all of Gaza. including schools, mosques and UN relief centers, where people were sheltering after their homes had been destroyed, and refusing basic relief to the besieged Palestinians. Hamas is not all Palestinians; and the Israeli government is not all Israelis. The majority of both Palestinians and Israelis yearn for peace.
I am choosing to call myself Chaya to embrace my own and my ancestors’ complexity: living thing, animal, beast – and perhaps the force of life itself, something that connects us across our differences. My survival instinct is extremely strong; may my sometimes overpowering grief help me, through these horrific times, to temper this fevered longing for life with soothing and enduring love for all humans, all living things.