Katherine
What’s in a name? Something and everything. Many of us wonder what our parents were thinking when they named us but sometimes I think life has a way of showing us there’s rhyme and reason beyond even what they intended.
Medical Review Hearing
Katherine, as a name, came to be associated with καθαρός (katharos), meaning ‘pure’, which led to the alternative spelling Katharine. In March this year, 31 March 2011 to be precise, I’d left Waipukurau at the crack of dawn to drive to Porirua to attend the Medical Review hearing for Kate. I remember the day well because it was my daughter Mede’s birthday.
She’d turned twenty years old having arrived at 23.55 hours that day nineteen years earlier. Mede is our familial name for her given name Amiria. It’s Maori for Amelia. They say that a characteristic of the name-bearer is that they’re a person of action, not merely of words. Over the years I’ve observed these characteristics in my daughter, these and so many positive others.
The skies were ink black and the stars hung in glimmering unison as I drove across the Takapau Plains headed to Porirua. Bright southern stars hanging in the sky like spectrals of hope. Approaching the Manawatu Gorge or Te Apiti, Maori meaning ‘The Narrow Passage’ there was an eeriness about the monolithic shadows of windmills as they rose up out of the Saddle Rd, straddled the Tararua mountain range north of Palmerston North and loomed imposingly in the predawn light.
What’s in a Name?
The name Katherine has among its implied characteristics, those of being free from corrupt desire and being purified by fire. It would be fair to say the events of the past few months have enabled Kate to live into her name in ways that perhaps neither her parents nor Katherine herself ever imagined. What’s in a name? Something and everything.
I thought about these things as the miles ran out on the road beneath me, its monotone bitumen voice, light then deep in turns. It made me reflective on how housed in something as simple as what we are called are qualities others later discern in us or nurture, elicit and extract from us over the course of our lifetime.
My friend Katherine isn’t perfect, none of us are. But Katherine, more than anyone else I know has lived into her name with a genuineness that (from time to time) I wished she didn’t. I saw up close the personal cost that speaking out against corruption exacted from her. It’s ugly. I experienced a “service” that had the capacity to do more harm than good despite it’s dressed up policy writing.
Kate’s website delivery isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but oh well, horses for courses. Speaking out against corruption, it takes courage. It’s definitely not for the faint-hearted. In the weeks ahead, Kate and I will unravel some of that here.
UPDATE:
Yesterday, 17 May 2011 I was advised that Kate was “no longer at the Unit, at Rangipapa” and for privacy reasons I could not be told where she had gone. As the morning progressed she was eventually located.
She had been transferred to the ICU side of Te Whare Ahuru, an acute mental health inpatient unit that uses a variety of strategies, including the concept of a ‘wellness centre’ to minimise the use of seclusion and restraint and improve service delivery in Lower Hutt.”
An early release from this facility will effectively put a stop to Kate pushing through for a Judicial Inquiry. How convenient! When I spoke to her this morning she was no longer on the ICU side of the Unit. She’d had a cup of coffee yesterday and was looking forward to a second cup today. Simple things can be so exquisite. Like a name. What’s in a name? Something and everything.
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1. Ships in the Night 2. Alone Alone All All Alone 3. Systems that take the Kate 4. Model Citizen: A Piece of Kate 5. A Twist of Kate: The Castaway 6. Throwing Out the Lifelines 7. An Anchor in the Social World 8. Rights of Passage 9. Katherine
Here is another commentary about the name Katherine, this is written by Kathyrn Cassidy, “What of Catherine. Was she handpicked? Not knowingly, but spiritually they were pulled (gravitated) together just as we are all pulled towards our karmic destiny.
More on Catherine another time but suffice to say here that I have yet to meet a Catherine, Katherine, Kathryn or any derivative of the name who has not felt an air of persecution entering their lives at some point on their life path. Names have meaning.
This Catherine will certainly feel ‘persecuted’ by some, not for her beliefs but by the snobbery of those who consider her not high-born enough or worthy of such a position. In the eyes of that Higher Power which perfectly orders everything in this Universe however, you can be sure she is exactly where she is meant to be – for better or for worse!”