He feels like a doppelgänger. Another man, you think when you think of him, this human being who lived the first half of your life, a name you no longer connect with when people speak it. He died years ago — a figurative, emotional death, a melodramatic conceit, you might say, but no less painful for being a metaphor. Letting go of him means you can acknowledge what you hated about him. His flaws. The way he needed constant validation. How he wanted people to see his brilliance but didn’t want to have to work hard to make something of it. His fear. His codependency. His weak response to bullies in all walks of life. How he cared what others thought. How he refused to see hatred and spite in his loved ones, beginning with his own rage-filled grandfather, a Presbyterian minister so cruel that he bullied the boy’s father into hanging himself at just four years old. That his own dad survived — doing his best to shatter for his children the wheel of trauma many of us are bound to — does nothing to lessen that pain, either. You don’t want that old man’s name. Not anymore.
You want your mom’s father’s surname, making you Benjamin Day, divorced from that other legacy of cruelty, itself stretching back, or so you imagine, to the infamous child-murderer, der Rattenfänger von Hameln, the Pied Piper of Lower Saxony, a dark legend from your paternal grandfather’s Germany. Even if that human being never existed — he probably didn’t — you don’t want anything to do with his crimes. Yet you can’t escape a reckoning. A woman you loved once told you all people inherit wounds and strengths from their ancestors. You can’t feel it because you’re white, she told you, and you think it’s true what she said. People who think they’re white don’t feel or acknowledge their ancestors and I swear to God it’s fucking up the world. But it’s never too late to listen. You can change. You have changed. Look inside. Find strength from those who came before. You can be like another one of your ancestors, Robert de Brus, Fifth Lord of Annandale, known by historians as Robert the Competitor, who declared for the Scottish throne late in his seventies. He died in 1295 on your birthday: 31 March.
You’ve thought a lot about ancestors. A lot about names. You’ve read the work of supernominalists like Thomas Hobbes. All of that, though, the Pied Piper and the Competitor, all the philosophy, all the literary allusion, it means something but not everything — it obscures how much it hurt to lose your job, your friends, your family. That glowing pain. How you wept every night. Thinking your life had ended; wanting to die but not wanting to die. Staying for your daughter. Making sure she never felt alone or afraid. Building a home for her in an empty house. Sending her to your co-parent. Smoking weed, reading books. Emptying your feelings into strangers, their bodies acting as a tender and loving reprieve from self-hatred, as your body was to theirs on the nights they shared with you. Something happens in that time. You begin to come alive again, and you realize as you step out of the dark flames, testing your new identity against the world, that the old, broken pieces of your psyche feel burned away, and you’re a different person. You carry things over, your kindness and intellect, features you’re proud to share with your ancestors. As you rediscover your purpose, identity, and sexuality, you understand that this person you’ve uncovered lay dormant for years. You were him, waiting to be born. A man who chooses kindness and love and joy. A man who never hesitates to defend the weak. A man who advocates for justice. A man who treasures art and the people who make it. You’re him. He’s you.
A man like your grandfather who loved you. Who laughed with you. Who carried a rifle during the Second World War when he served in China as part of the O.S.S.; who returned to live and work in a small-town fire department. Who once in his seventies confronted two junkyard Rottweilers with a table-leg club when they threatened you and your sister. A man who wasn’t cruel but who wasn’t afraid. A man you remember standing tall and indomitable with his table-leg club the way his ancestor Robert the Competitor stood with a sword. You still have his fireman’s helmet. It’s yours, now.
Your doppelgänger remains as a shade. People call you his name, but they don’t know you’re not him. You have rebuilt your life. You’ve found love. You’ve found adventure. You’ve found hope. You haven’t been him for a long time. You’ll never be him again.