Names

Every year, between eight and nine hundred people die on the Victoria Hospice program. In 1985, we gathered once a week in the garden to ring a bell and say the names of those who had died that week. A friend, who started working as a counselor shortly before I left, says the names are no longer recited and she can’t remember when the practice stopped.

What do we do when the names keep piling up? Each year, sixty million people die. The year my mother died we decided to have Christmas away from home. On Sunday, December 26, 2004, we were skiing down Mt. Washington through drifts of new snow when the Boxing Day Tsunami killed 230,000 people in Southeast Asia.

In Washington, DC, 58,286 names are written on black-polished granite on the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial: the Wall, as it is otherwise known. At Sunset Beach in Vancouver, a short walk from Stanley Park on English Bay, the names of those who have died of AIDS in the city are cut through twenty steel panels on a wooded slope. The same wooded slope where I wove daisy chains to wear on my wrists and ankles in the mid sixties. In the spring, when you stand with your back to the ocean reading the names, you can look through each one to the purple crocuses growing on the bank. In the winter, when it snows, each letter is a perfect white stencil. When you go to the website for Vancouver AIDS Memorial Society you will see that a lack of funding and volunteers leaves them unable to operate any longer.

“What,” asks Annie Dillard, “what will move us to pity?”

My husband, Patrick, grew up on the prairies. His grandmother, Maria, who lived in a small Mennonite community just north of Steinbach, Manitoba, was one of fifty million people who died of Spanish flu in 1918. When she was ill, people brought food and left it on her doorstep, not wanting to catch the disease themselves. The day Maria died, the family carried her body past her house; her mother raised herself on one elbow to see her daughter pass by on the way to the grave before she, too, died the next day. The word influenza, first used in Italian, has its origins in the belief that epidemics were due to the influence of the stars. An ethereal fluid, flowing from the heavens, was believed to directly affect the “character and destiny” of men.

In the late 1800s, smallpox bloomed up the West Coast, killing half the native population from Victoria to Alaska. At Fort Victoria, a Hudson’s Bay trading post, to which native hunters and trappers came from all over the province, whites were immunized against smallpox; natives weren’t. When we fall sick, we head for home. One of the legends of the Kwantlen people tells of a fearful dragon with eyes of fire and breath of steam who lived not far from the village. When this dragon awoke and breathed upon the children, sores broke out where his breath touched them and they burned with heat and they died to feed this monster. During the smallpox epidemic, the Kwantlen people along the Fraser River paddled softly so as not to wake the sleeping dragon. Is it any surprise we stop writing down the names and ringing bells?

An infinite number of things die every minute, writes Borges: “Events, far-reaching enough to people all space, whose end is nonetheless tolled when one man dies, may cause us to wonder.” We feel for one what we cannot feel for many. Every so often my mother would stop in the middle of whatever it was she was doing and imagine what Ian might have looked like as a middle-aged man; other times she’d say, “I would have grandchildren by now,” and she’d calculate their ages. She used to tell the story of how she sailed from London to New York to join her husband, John, on the maiden voyage of the Queen Elizabeth with two young children in tow and how, on the train across Canada, the prairie was covered in a sea of yellow rapeseed. They arrived in Vancouver on October 31, 1946. My sister was two, but Ian was old enough to go out trick-or-treating. In his British schoolboy’s outfit, people thought he had the greatest costume they’d ever seen.

Rough estimates indicate that over one hundred eight billion people have died in human history. The living will never outnumber the dead. The World Population Clock, which operates continuously, currently estimates that each second 4.3 people are born and 1.8 people die. Of the fifty-two million people who die every year, falling coconuts kill one hundred fifty of them, which, if true, makes the tropical fruits about ten times more dangerous than sharks.

I remember the names of the patients I met early more readily than I do the later ones. When the names became too many, I remembered faces. When the faces overwhelmed, I remembered people by the diseases they died of: the man on the farm who died of Lou Gehrig’s, the baby with the glioblastoma, the sailor with throat cancer, the cyclist with bone cancer. The actress in a green velvet dressing gown with a tumor growing in the shadow of her heart.

This morning I wake up wondering what the name Ian means. In an online reference, I find it is the Gaelic form of John. I didn’t know he was named after his father. In Scottish, the name means “Gift from God.”

Only now does it occur to me that he made two train trips across the country: one when he arrived, as a boy, through fields of yellow; the other in a box the color of the prairie sky.

The world’s seventh billion person, Danica May Camacho, was born in the Philippines on October 31, 2011—sixty-six years to the day after my mother arrived with her two children from England and my brother headed straight out into the goblin and ghost-filled streets of his new home.