‘We are the sum of our mistakes, aren’t we?’ exclaimed my Uncle Jerry bitterly as he shuffled through yellowing folios and disintegrating documents written in a language I did not recognise.
These documents would later form the ‘evidence’ of an agreement between a certain ‘Christianne Diderot’ and my grandmother for the transfer of a burial plot in what was now a highly sought after cemetery. The legal drama surrounding the cemetery’s initial refusal to acknowledge this agreement would form a central part of my early childhood.
At the time, however, I thought my uncle’s rhetorical statement was clever, although I didn’t really understand what it meant, but it’s stayed with me through the years.
He then turned around and stared at that mouldering pile of documents and muttered balefully ‘it’s the wog tax. In life you change your name to fit in, and then in death they use it against you.’
That had also stayed with me, and now all those years later Uncle Jerry’s words came back to me as I reviewed the officious response informing me that a request to place his cremated remains in his mother’s tomb was denied as the name on the death certificate did not match the name on the naturalisation certificate.
The advice on how to rectify this was expensive and impracticable. The signature block, I noted, included proforma condolences, and sat just above another set of proforma condolences, the acknowledgement of country.
A simple search turned up an old copy of the Government Gazette Notices which indicated that my uncle had changed his original name at naturalisation from ‘Geoffroy’ to ‘Jerry’. It was done, as I imagined him fondly saying because: ‘you didn’t want to scare the horses’, but in the intervening years Uncle Jerry had reverted to his original name, and his passport and water bills had all faithfully reflected that fact.
In our minds Uncle Jerry and Geoffroy had always lived as two separate but parallel individuals:
Uncle Jerry was the man who had worked hard to eliminate his accent and spoke the ‘Queens English’ with a stiff formality that he reserved for strangers and officialdom. Geoffroy, on the other hand, was the man who in moments of anger and excitement flitted between his native tongue and an English that was so heavily accented as to be virtually incomprehensible.
Who would have guessed that a decision taken sixty years earlier in good faith had such negative consequences? His ashes were now marooned in a bureaucratic no man’s land. It was a sort of purgatory conceivable only by the modern state where burial plots were a ‘valuable property right,’ and not the final resting place until (in his case) the second coming of Jesus Christ.
I imagined the conversation in that gloomy in between place:
‘What are you here for, mate?’
‘Some kind of mistake. My nephew’s just sorting out some paperwork, and then I’ll be off,’ comes the confident response.
A little digging and his newfound acquaintance regretfully advises:
‘Better make yourself comfortable, you might be here awhile … maybe forever.’
I was brooding this unwelcome historical irony in that part of the afternoon where boredom contends with sleepiness, and the tedium of your work makes you question your life choices. It was also at this time when the following message landed in the office group chat:
Hi Jeff, I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that my name is not spelt ‘Jamie’ but ‘Jayhmie’. Grateful if all your future communication can reflect this.
It was concluded with a passive/aggressive smiley faced emoji.
I was puzzled at the novel spelling. Afterall, what is the point of ‘Jamie’ if its spelling is not universally understood. Rather irrelevantly I also wondered whether certain names were appropriate after a certain age but concluded that the ancestors’ wishes must be respected.
My fingers hovered above the keyboard, unsure whether to respond when my uncle’s frustrated words echoed across the decades and again now from that place where I imagined he was marooned. Unbidden, I typed out the following response:
Hi Jayhmie, I well understand your frustration. Truly, I do. A review of your previous emails indicates that my name has been variously written as Jeffery or Jeffry or shortened in the casual way to Jeff. It is none of those things, but in fact follows the traditional French spelling of Geoffroy. I would, however, take Geoff at a pinch, as that seems the path of least resistance.
I did not conclude my response with a smiley face emoji before sending.
In all fairness I fleetingly considered, but quickly dismissed, HR’s advice to pass my response through AI to correct any ‘tonal issues’.
The silence as they say was deafening.
© Tropical Writers Inc 2026