How I Made Peace With my Last Name

“They are a generous and warm-hearted people and these traits must have belonged to their ancestors from the earliest times.”

-A few words by Richard Foley on the O’Heffernan family, from the biography of 18^th-century poet Liam Dall O’Heffernan*

It’s the second day of lessons and the professoressa at the front of the room is calling roll.  The last names of the other students roll gracefully off of her tongue, beautiful, melodic Italian names with vowels to spare.  It’s all a, e, i, o, u—sounds that gently leave her lips and flit around for a second like butterflies before gracefully disappearing.

But it happens when she starts to call the “F” names, suddenly I am conscious of my heart beat in my chest.  By the time she reaches “G,” my heart is racing and I realize that I have a death grip on my pen.  Is the room suddenly really warm or is that just me?  And when I see a brief look of puzzlement on her face, there is a pause.  I know that she has arrived at my name.  There is no vowel at the end, no easy place for your tongue to gently leave the word.  That could probably be forgiven if it weren’t for the horribly breathy H+e combination at the very beginning.  It’s a cursed pairing of letters, something terrible, an arrangement so frightening in the Italian language that it can only be read with a down-turned, uncertain scowl and inevitably followed by a markedly pronounced question mark.

“Eeeef-fer-NAWN?  erEEN Eeeef-fer-NAWN?”

Timidly, I lower my eyes and raise my hand and in the littlest voice I can find…

“si.”

Yes.  I’m here.

Likely, the reality of the situation is that everyone is staring at their phones, not paying any attention at all to me—but I can’t help but feel as if all eyes are on me and all ears on that name.  I feel exposed, my foreignness laid bare.  I’m not from around here, my name announces proudly to anyone that is even a little bit listening.  Once again, my last name has betrayed me.  I just want to hide.

Having an unpronounceable last name makes even simple tasks difficult.  Signing for a package from the FedEx guy?  Forget about it.  When you pronounce the name you just signed, he gives you a look of profound confusion.  Making reservations for something?  Don’t bother—better to use someone else’s name or better yet make up a fake one.  And God forbid you should have to spell out your email address.  Excuse me, but do you have an hour and a half to discuss this?

And for months (maybe even years at this point), I have been secretly trying on other people’s last names in the way that other people try on sweaters.  How much easier would it be a Rossi? Bianchi? Innocenti?  I picture myself walking around, randomly introducing myself to strangers on the street, for the pure ease of it all!  How lovely it could be! Si, tanto piacere!  But something feels un-genuine about appropriating other people’s names.  After all, a last name with no past is like a tree without roots.  Not to mention, it’s creepy.

So I decided that if I must be branded with this name, if it is bound to follow me, stamped on passport no matter how far I travel—maybe I should learn to embrace it.  And so I started to learn.

As it turns out, “Heffernan” or an alternative spelling “Hiffernan” both derive from an old Irish Gaelic family name, “Ua h-Ifearnain,” a name which I had to copy letter for letter out of the pages of a book* because it looks so dreadfully and delightfully foreign.  It possibly comes from the Gaelic word meaning “horse-lords” or more interestingly, “spawns of Hell.”  It’s an ancient name too, which appears in the written records for the first time in 1047* (!!!!!).

And trying to sift through names of people and places I can scarcely understand or recall, grappling to pin down long-gone, forgotten societies of which I know nothing, I realize that history is multi-leveled and multi-layered.  And it makes me feel fragile to settle with the fact that my blood and my genes, the fabric of me, my eventual existence all hang in the balance of these other lives and loves and kings and wars, twists and turns that are so far beyond my grasp.  1047 is a long time before my great-great-great grandfather, John Heffernan arrived in America in the 1850s and an even longer time before I am sweating in a classroom in Italy, embarrassed by the inevitable unpronouncibility of my name, returned to the Old World, but not quite back to the country that John Heffernan fled all those years ago, a place he would hardly recognize now.

But out of lists and names and counties and anecdotes, there emerges in my study the eternal constant of change hard at work.  There is movement of people facing war or political exile or famine, re-emerging and re-settling, loving and living and fighting and doing it all over again the next generation.  And in the New World, the blood of those “generous and warm-hearted” folks would meet blood from other reaches of the world and somehow the outcome (or more accurately another intermediary form) is me, me and this name, surviving long beyond all those poets or scholars or horse-lords or whatever.  And I take comfort knowing that it will surely out-live me too, that I am but a single chapter in a greater narrative. 

And looking at all this movement and change over the centuries, I can’t help but wonder how many Ua h-Iefearnains and O’Heffernans and Hiffernans have shared my experience of being a stranger with a strange name.  Certainly a whole generation did with the anglicizing loss of the “O,” signaling the eventual loss of the entire Gaelic language.  Certainly John Heffernan did when he arrived as an Irishman in a country that remained hostile towards the Irish immigrants, fleeing a desperate famine.  And I come to understand that this bastardized pronunciation is only the most recent development in an unfathomably complicated story. Names, like the humans they designate, are not fragile, static things.  They don’t sit on shelves or hang on walls or rest undisturbed for centuries—they are malleable, changeable and most of all transportable.  And in carrying this name with me, I am part of a noble tradition.

And after all, erEEN Eeeef-fer-NAWN, it has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

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*I’m drawing from a book called The Heffernans and their Times: A Study in Irish History written by Dr. Patrick Heffernan.  Thanks to my Dad for sharing it with me and for generally being a great source of Heffernan history.

**I'll also add that the professore eventually settled on calling me by my first name, a benevolent gesture sparing everyone involved a lot of frustration.