As a pastoral care student, I visited a mortuary where bodies were sent for forensic autopsies. That meant that the people who ended up there often were a victim of crime or died a violent death. I did not see any bodies, but we did see the room where people went to view the body through a glass window. Our student group also spoke to a counsellor who was there to assist grieving families. What impacted me the most was the realisation that the staff who conducted the autopsies usually did not know the names of the cadaver. Instead, they used a number for identification. This helped them to become emotionally detached from the person and the story of the dead on the autopsy table.
In the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz in the 1940s, the living was numbered by a tattoo forcibly placed on their body. This was one of several intentional dehumanisation methods used on the Jewish (and non-Jewish) prisoners of war.
Whilst these two situations are not the same; they do raise the same issue. That is the importance of a name. When someone takes the time to call me by my name and to remember my name, I feel valued. And likewise, when I take the time to call someone by their name and I remember their name, I am valuing them as a person.
My husband travels overseas with a group to provide medical treatment to the poorest of the poor in several nations. The queue is long and the faces at the end of each day start to all look the same. These are people the medical staff will never see again. One thing he insists on doing is taking the time to find out each person’s name and to call them by it. They are more than a statistic or a queue to reduce; each person has a story and each person has a name.
I recall as a child having a favourite teacher in a little country primary school. He left our school one year and returned sometime later to visit. I was one of a number of students that crowded around him and greeted him by his name. He said hello to my friends and hello to my sister and he called her by her name. He did not remember mine nor even say hello. Whilst this was not dehumanising or intentional, it did make me feel invisible, insignificant and maybe a little immemorable.
Sometimes I am overwhelmed by my insignificance looking into the vastness of the heavens on a moonless night. I am amazed and reassured, that the same God that made the stars, is the same Creator God that formed me in my mother’s womb. He knows the number of hairs on my head; he knows my name and he knows my story.
Each of us has a name and a story. Some parents, more than others have invested a lot of thought into the name given to their child. My mother was going to call me Donna. Except on the day I was born in a little county hospital, Mrs Donna was buried in the cemetery across the road. My mum told me she looked down at her cherubic first born daughter and called me Angela.
Whilst I have answered to Ange, Angie, Angela and even Amanda; all of these are preferable to being overlooked or treated as just a number. I have become more sensitive to this as I have become older. Maybe it’s a result of living among strangers in a busy world? Whatever the reason, I have come to realise the importance of a name.
I confess that remembering names does not come easily to me. I usually remember faces before the name. And when I meet people out of the context I first met them, my brain scrambles to make the connection of the face to a name. I have picked up a few tips on the way and I think I am doing better. I certainly am not suggesting I get it right. One thing I do know though is that my name, your name, everybody’s name is important.
“A person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language,” (Dale Carnegie)
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