Remembering her name
Aug. 3rd, 2011 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustToday is my sister Gabrielle's birthday; she would have been 55.
She was the youngest of three, and she was born at home: I have some memories from before she was born, but her birth is my earliest datable memory. My brother and I were eating boiled eggs, and we were told that we had a little sister. Who told us? My father, my grandmother? I remember going out into the garden to make a list of names for the new baby, which is more my father's kind of idea than my grandmother's.
My list included all the names I could think of, and more - I was five. 'Rose' is a girl's name, but it's also a flower name, so I listed all the flower names I could think of. I seem to remember that Tulip was on the list. Also Cinderella. Inexplicably, the name my parents chose from my list was Ann, which they gave to Gabrielle as a middle name, and which she didn't like and never used.
I was going to say that I didn't know where the name Gabrielle came from, but perhaps I do: my mother's best friend had given her eldest son the name Gabriel as a middle name (had her sister been a Gabrielle?). Certainly we pronounced it Gabriel, as if it had been the boy's name.
I don't think the angelic connotations were at the front of anyone's mind. A couple of years later we holidayed in Italy, by which time Gabrielle was a white-blonde toddler with a forceful personality. Italians cooed over this very fair bambino, and when a group of nuns went into rhapsodies that so angelic a child should have so angelic a name, the story entered at once and forever into family folklore: how could they have got it so wrong?
Gabrielle died just as the internet was entering our lives; I have a single e-mail from her, sent from work, about nothing in particular. From time to time I google her, and I'm always slightly affronted not to find her. Part of the problem is our (fairly common) surname: search for either of us, and you find pages of namesakes. So even if I put aside my reluctance to name names in this journal, and tell you that my sister Gabrielle Rogers was a forceful and memorable person, a founder member of Beit Klal Yisrael, a social worker and gay Jewish activist, even so when I google her next year, she may still be invisible. But it won't be my fault.
She was the youngest of three, and she was born at home: I have some memories from before she was born, but her birth is my earliest datable memory. My brother and I were eating boiled eggs, and we were told that we had a little sister. Who told us? My father, my grandmother? I remember going out into the garden to make a list of names for the new baby, which is more my father's kind of idea than my grandmother's.
My list included all the names I could think of, and more - I was five. 'Rose' is a girl's name, but it's also a flower name, so I listed all the flower names I could think of. I seem to remember that Tulip was on the list. Also Cinderella. Inexplicably, the name my parents chose from my list was Ann, which they gave to Gabrielle as a middle name, and which she didn't like and never used.
I was going to say that I didn't know where the name Gabrielle came from, but perhaps I do: my mother's best friend had given her eldest son the name Gabriel as a middle name (had her sister been a Gabrielle?). Certainly we pronounced it Gabriel, as if it had been the boy's name.
I don't think the angelic connotations were at the front of anyone's mind. A couple of years later we holidayed in Italy, by which time Gabrielle was a white-blonde toddler with a forceful personality. Italians cooed over this very fair bambino, and when a group of nuns went into rhapsodies that so angelic a child should have so angelic a name, the story entered at once and forever into family folklore: how could they have got it so wrong?
Gabrielle died just as the internet was entering our lives; I have a single e-mail from her, sent from work, about nothing in particular. From time to time I google her, and I'm always slightly affronted not to find her. Part of the problem is our (fairly common) surname: search for either of us, and you find pages of namesakes. So even if I put aside my reluctance to name names in this journal, and tell you that my sister Gabrielle Rogers was a forceful and memorable person, a founder member of Beit Klal Yisrael, a social worker and gay Jewish activist, even so when I google her next year, she may still be invisible. But it won't be my fault.
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