HOME | DD

Description
I’ve never know what my name means or has meant to others and I don't think that I ever will.  To many, Robert isn’t a name that hits you suddenly with an overcoming sense of hope, doesn’t strike you with some divine meaning dragging behind the very word itself.  Robert.  And yet to me, this name holds with it utmost value.  What once was dark, has turned to light; what once was lost, now is found; what once was gone, shall now be held in remembrance forevermore.

To me, my name does mean hope; it does carry with it its own divine meaning in its very purpose.  And yet there is discord -- a schism in this purpose, hope, and meaning -- a disharmony, a new revelation breaking down that which once I felt was so subtle, so simplified, so concentrated, but is a hollow that now has grown throughout.  The resurrection of a name, I have, but I cannot ever be the resurrection of the man whose name I have inherited, the man whose name I have come to see as my own, the man whose name I have been given as a reminder, as a remembrance, of the past and a man who once lived.

Despair.  Emptiness.  Nonfulfillment.  Call me these and no other.  I feel obligated to be like him, my would-be uncle, suddenly taken from his life at the age of 19.  I feel that I have failed; I know nothing I can say or do will ever make up for that hole in my father's heart in springtime.  He says it’s the rain, that's what gets to him.  Those April showers you see out your window on a cool spring night remind him of that day -- the day.  The day when he had to say goodbye; the day when everyone in that small town seemed to cry.  They all knew him; I wish I had.  My father tells me stories of when they were young: It's a small town and so you could get away with a lot, he says. The silence that follows is deafening; I can see the nostalgia in his eyes.  I wonder what he's thinking, but I already know:I wonder . . . I wonder just if he wouldn’t have gotten in that car, what would things be like now?

I don't think that anyone will ever know what it would be like.  But me being the remembrance, a reminder, possessing a name of hope and the strength through changing times, I do know one thing now: I am here not to feel obligated to replace one who is fallen, or to resurrect what he was -- I carry this name with me as a remembrance, as a reminder to others, as well as to myself, that from true despair and loss, can come the reassurance of a new tomorrow, even though in a different light.  Now I see my name no longer as a burden -- Robert -- but as a remembrance and a source of hope.  Robert Grafsgaard.