Self-Portrait of a Woman Losing Her Name

There are five people who call/ed me Bria:

• My grandfather
• My grandmother
• My Aunt 
• My husband’s grandmother, Bubba
• My father 

Four of them are dead.

My name, or at least one of them, is endangered. 

Is in danger?

The result is the same: it is vanishing and perhaps in that vanishing it means a part of me is vanishing as well.

2.

When my husband’s grandmother was still alive, she lived on the third floor of her big house in Dormont. She shared this house with her youngest daughter, son- in law and three grandchildren. During the holidays, we’d all go over and sit around the dining room table full of manicotti and pizzelles and every kind of cookie you could dream up and talk.

It was during one of these gatherings when my husband’s grandmother, whose name was Joan but everyone called Bubba, asked:

“What do people call you?”

I thought this was an odd question. RJ and I had been dating for years at this point and of course, Bubba knew my name, Brianna, and she knew what everyone called me: Bri. 

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“What do your parents call you?” she seemed to be driving at something and I was unsure of what that was, but her insistence made me pause. 

“Bri, but…” I pause to take a drink, “my father calls me Bria.” 

“Is he the only one?”

“My grandmother does and my aunt did,” I look down at the crushed ice melting in my cup. My Aunt Judi had been dead for years at this point but she’d always called me “Bria” and when someone else uttered it, it felt like conjuring a ghost.

“I like that,” Bubba grins. “May I call you Bria?”

“Sure,” I smile but there’s still that haunt hovering around my name as it hangs in the air.

3.

My husband told me, after we moved in together but before we were married, that he couldn’t call me Bria even though I assured him he could.

We were still young in our relationship and that newness felt fresh green when he said:

“It feels too sacred. Like I’m treading on hallowed ground.”

4.

Bubba sent me birthday cards for years addressed to “Bria Proie.”

I’d kept my maiden name, Pike, when I got married, so every time I got a card from her in the mail, I’d think:  Who is this woman? I’d like to meet her. 

5.

Each time I called my grandparents, my grandma would answer the phone: 

“Hello, Bria!” and when she asked my grandfather if he wanted to talk to me she’d carry the cordless phone out to the front door and holler out to the garage or the front yard:

“Roger! You want to talk to Bria?” 

6.

My father turns seventy. His hair is completely white and not as luxurious as it was during the quarantine but still thick and healthy.

He has prostate cancer which is responding well to treatment but now when we’re around each other, I find myself watching him closely and whenever he calls me Bria, whether on the phone or face-face, I have the urge to snap up his voice and put it in jar to keep forever.

I wish I could capture my father in the same jar, but I can’t and the truth of his eventual vanishing scares the shit out of me. 

7.

Who is Bria anyway?

She is a baby sitting in a pile of leaves in the backyard of her first house. She is wearing a white knit hat and laughing as she throws leaves into the air. She sits next to a stoic black lab, who even in photographs never takes his eyes off her.

She is a child of four or five perching high in the gnarled branches of her grandparent’s apple tree, holding her grandmother so tightly around the neck that she lifts her to the balls of her feet.

She is a child of six who sits next to her baby sister under the Christmas tree and delights in making her laugh. This will continue for the rest of their lives. 

She is a child of seven riding around the yard on a sturdy brown and white pony. Her grandfather carefully leads that pony around and around and around.

She is eight years old and saying goodbye to her best friend, Jo-Anne, to move to a state that she has trouble saying let alone spelling: Pennsylvania.

She is eleven years old and obsessed with Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation.

She is thirteen and loves her horses. Kinda like that Tom Petty song but she doesn’t have a boyfriend and doesn’t really want one.

She’s sixteen and wishes that school came as easily to her as it does for her friends.

She’s eighteen and ready to be gone.

She’s twenty and studying abroad in England. It’s terrifying but she loves it. It’s while she’s there that she learns her aunt, the one whose been sending her letters for months, is dying of ovarian cancer.

She’s twenty-one and grieving. She’s also falling in love for the first time.

She’s twenty-two and off to Texas for graduate school. She doesn’t know anyone. Texas is good and hard and lonely and formative in ways she’s still learning to appreciate.

She’s twenty-four and driving to Indianapolis in her Nissan Sentra. She’s going to be an adjunct instructor at a community college teaching composition. She will move in with her boyfriend, the same one she was falling in love with when she was twenty-one. These are the things she can’t know:

• She will live with her boyfriend and his three male roommates for one year. It will be one of the hardest years of her young life.
• She will befriend all three roommates. These three boys will have three girlfriends who will eventually become their wives. She will befriend all three women. She will attend all three weddings. 
• Thirteen years later two of those three couples will be divorced and she and her boyfriend, now husband, will sit in their living room, on the couch not speaking, but twining their fingers together tightly. 

She is thirty years old and married but keeps her name.

She is thirty-four years old and a mother. She is apparently of advanced maternal age, which she thinks is bullshit. Her son will come into this world as the result of a car accident that results in a breech birth that results in a cesarean. She is a disaster but she is trying.

She is thirty-eight and giving her grandmother’s eulogy and saying goodbye to her grandfather. He will be dead within the month. 

She is thirty-nine and celebrating her birthday in quarantine from Covid-19. She is as depressed as she has ever been.

She is forty-one sitting in St. Bernards in Pittsburgh saying goodbye to Bubba. 

She is forty-two and writing. Still writing. Always writing. Still trying. Always trying.