A Light Death?

Strange though it might seem, I hadn’t considered the relevance of my, um,‘grave’ surname to the ghost project until Roger Robinson pointed it out to me at a workshop in Norwich this afternoon. According to that source of great wit and wisdom ‘ancestry.com’, the name Mort is associated with the following:

“English (Lancashire): of uncertain origin. The most plausible suggestion is that it is a Norman nickname from Old French mort ‘dead’ (Latin mortuus), presumably referring to a person of deathly pallor or unnaturally still countenance, or possibly to someone who played the part of death in a pageant.”

Coupled with my first name, Helen, which has Greek origins and means ‘light’, that gives you ‘A Light Death’. How charming.

I’ll ignore the other possible definition of Mort: “it could also be the result of survival into the Middle English period of an Old English personal name, Morta, or an Old English vocabulary word mort ‘young salmon or trout’”.

I’d rather be dead than a young trout, on balance.

Here’s a poem about my deadly name, which first appeared in 'Acumen'.

The French for Death

I trampled ants for kicks on the quay at Dieppe, dawdling
by the desk where they wouldn’t take yes for an answer;
yes, it was our name and spelled just so –
we shook our heads at Moor and Maud and Morden,
dad repeated it in Oldham’s finest guttural.

Rope swung from the captain’s fist
and flayed the water. I saw him shudder, troubled
by a shift of air or a vision of our crossing: glower of thunder,
the lurch and buckle of the ferry, a thick Alsatian
with a face like Cerberus ushering us in to port

and I looked him in the eye, popped my bubblegum,
a child from the underworld in red sandals
and a t-shirt made by Disney, not yet ashamed
by that curt syllable, locked, cold to the tongue,
its hush of the morgue, not yet the girl

who takes the worst route home
pauses at the splayed mouths of alleyways
and looks straight past you as we kiss, as if to pick out
small behind your left shoulder, the spindle of a shipwreck,
prow to a far country.