Colloquy with this post.
Isabella Foster, d. 1876
Dunedin in those days
was a town of omitters:
people whose life stories
were as webs, as ephemera.
The kind of town
where a mother and father
could drift in for a wedding
then wash out again.
Their son, hopeful young man
not long in the city
was the first time a widower
in less than a year.
Isabella
buried there
Catholic father,
Melbourne-born.
We found your name
at the Mormons
and when we cheered
they shushed us down.
Little girl, little wife
how long before no-one said your name?
By the time of my grandfather, at least,
his father — your husband — didn’t speak of you,
but then
he was an old man then,
by then.
Traces find their way through though, don’t they?
It was there in the marriage certificate — his, not yours —
it was there in photocopied script;
“Widower”. It was you. You were there despite the silence.
Little girl, little wife,
we talk about you all the time;
we’ve got your death certificate.
We say your name. You and your dad
there in South Dunedin cemetery.
Kin of our kin, little girl.
You’re in our story. We’ve got you. We’ve got you.
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Posterous
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Cried. Lovely.
The first Mrs. Foster is a permanent tear-jerker between my mother and me. One or other of us only has to quote her epitaph and it’s looking out the window and changing the subject for both of us.
Awe.
…“Widower”. It was you. You were there despite the silence…
There is a silent Widower world. A strange inner land, both comforting and cold, present and absent.
I find myself thinking more and more that the Victorian tradition of all family and friends wearing mourning, even with all the constraints that brought, provided a social scaffolding around people that allowed for consideration and care in a way we don’t have today. I rail against the notion that people need to get over things, to move on. Life is a constant state of change and will move us on whether we like it or not. Why push any further than that?
You’ve got me thinking about something else that will most likely seem obvious, the ways in which names are inherited in families. My mother’s very unusual name, Melide, is a tribute to a cousin who died young (yet not young enough for her death to be more or less discounted, as was often the case with babies), and when we had our first child and he turned out to be a boy the name Giuseppe – which we anglicised in order for it to be horribly mangled by the locals – was the first that came to mind. We simply had to do it, and perhaps the connection he feels to the granfather he never met is due partly to that.
My cousin is married to a Scandinavian man whose brother died at 16 of cancer. Both one of their sons and another son in the family have his name, with a further middle name (my cousin’s son is also named for his New Zealand grandfather) following.
My father and his brothers and sisters were all named by their grandmother (and called quite different names, in some cases, growing up). I think naming is one of the most powerful ways we can remember people. It gives the named person an ancestral overlay which they then come to inhabit, and depart from, themselves.
My father’s father died when he was just 24 and my brother was named for him just over ten years later. My grandfather, however, was never known by his given name, so there is some of that distance there to which I refer.
For it *not* to be horribly mangled by the locals, obviously. And not that we would have blamed them for it either.
Dad takes pleasure, especially at high-toned events, in referring to Giuseppe Verdi as “Joe Green”.
Beautiful. It all is very familiar to me having lost my dad (Don) when I was fifteen. A beautiful poem – and such a lovely name.
Thank you. We had often wondered why my great-grandfather’s first daughter (my grandfather’s much older half-sister) was called Isabella Maria (the latter her mother), and when we found the record of Isabella Elizabeth, it then made sense.
Isn’t Isabella the Spanish version of Elizabeth? If so, I like the name even more: like being called Mary Maria or Megan Margaret.
Thanks for this Megan. It is beautifully resonate – and I too am crying.
Thank you, my friend! I was inspired to delve more deeply than I usually do for my contribution to Giovanni’s entries by the fact that Keri Hulme–Keri Hulme!–had the previous week contributed a poem about Matariki that followed my much smaller offering. If ever that were to happen again, I would want nothing but the best I can do on display.
Poetry began when Adam started naming things. (disclaimer, it may have been Eve). Think this is from Graves.
In my family I was known as The Namer. You are right, names track linear time. And then there is the ancient tradition of The Other Name…
Where is the other name
I came here with
I don’t know
it’s in another.