Wanting to Be Seen





Our lives are empty because of this.






A Name So Odd It Could’ve Been Made Up

My oldest sister was named Cecilie.

That is not a typo. It is not Cecile, or Cecilia. It is Cecilie (pronounced similar to Cicely Tyson‘s name, but with a short “e” on the first syllable).

My other sister, Jennifer, and my brother, Peter, and I have extremely common names. But Cecilie’s name was as uncommon as ours was common. It was in the polar opposite direction from our names. It was as if my parents began naming their children with a heavy dose of uniqueness, and then changed strategies when number two arrived. With child three and four, they went the straight Biblical route.


Cecilie and me, about nine months before she died.

I feel that Cecilie didn’t like her name much. As the years went by, she seemed more and more tired of the spelling corrections and the pronunciation corrections. My mother once mentioned that she had offered my sister the opportunity to change her name, but she declined. Perhaps my sister was too invested in it by then. I don’t know what name she would have preferred. She never told me.

In fact, no one in my family ever talks about why Cecilie had such a painfully unique name. It is like a taboo subject. We talk more about why my uncle is gay than we do my own sister’s given name.

Maybe I’m the only one who finds it odd that we have two classic Biblical names, one name that was the single most popular name for newborn American girls every single year from 1970 to 1984, and then we have Cecilie, a name so odd that it could have been made up, like Dweezil.


Names carry a lot of weight. People name children after themselves, sometimes to the third or fourth generation. They name children after their parents or grandparents. Some people make sure everyone in the family has the same initials. Family (last) names can influence who you are and how people perceive you. Kennedy, Bush, or Schwarzenegger, for instance.

So to question one’s own parents about why a name was chosen over another seems to flirt with one’s own existence. For instance, my father was the third in his family to bear his name, and many thought that his first-born son–that’s me–would also carry the name. Instead, I was given a completely new name.

I have some issues with my name, but to ask why I wasn’t named after my father would make me appear ungrateful. After all, I am healthy and independent. It’s what’s inside that counts, right?

In addition, I find it hard to imagine myself not being Matthew at this point. Would my life have been different if I had another name? Would Cecilie’s have been?

My sister’s life was not an easy one. She had an undiagnosed mash-up of Tourette syndrome, possibly some minor brain damage, and something from the Autism spectrum. She had scoliosis beginning when she was a pre-teen. And she died in 2009 from ovarian cancer a few months before her 48th birthday.

So maybe her name was the least of her problems. But I still wonder.