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# The names are said
- URL: https://www.rubyskitchentable.com/the-names-are-said/
- Published: 2026-10-31T10:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-31T10:00:00.000Z
- Author: Ruby Hayes
- Tags: devotional

*"He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." — Revelation 21:4*

Tomorrow is All Saints' Day and I am going to say their names.

I am going to say them here first, before I say them in the sanctuary, because the sanctuary is for the congregation and this kitchen table is for me, and there are names I carry that the congregation does not know I carry, and the carrying is the same whether anyone hears.

Earl Hayes. My husband. Forty years of mornings at this table. The man who checked the fence every Sunday because it was the fence, and who brought home ice cream when he was sorry, and who died on a Tuesday afternoon in July in the bedroom upstairs while I held his hand and the room got smaller with every breath that did not come. Seven years. I have said his name every morning since, on the list, first or last depending on the morning, and the saying of it has not changed and the man has not come back and the saying is not for the coming back. The saying is for the keeping.

Mama. Ruth Boyd. My mother, who shelled beans on the porch every summer evening and sang hymns while she canned and told me that August is not a month for starting things and who died eleven years ago next month in the hospital with her Bible on the table and her reading glasses on the cord around her neck. The nurse said she was reading when she went and I believe that because my mother was always reading when she went — reading when she fell asleep, reading when the children came, reading when my father came in from the store. She was a woman who kept her place.

Daddy. James Raymond Boyd. My father, who ran the hardware store on Main Street and who knew every porch in town and who died on a Saturday morning in the kitchen of the house on Franklin Street, and I was in this house four miles away and did not know until the phone rang. He carried a war underneath everything he did and he never told us what he saw and the bad nights were the nights we heard him walking and did not go downstairs.

Earl's mother, Virginia Hayes, who gave us the wind chime that hangs on the front porch and that I have never liked the sound of and will never take down. Robert Whitfield, Maggie's husband, who died a few years before Earl and who loved "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" and who I think of every time I hear it. My grandmother, Margaret Anne Boyd, who taught my mother to can and my mother taught me and I have taught no one because my daughters are not canners and the chain will end with me and that is all right.

The man whose name I learned three months ago. The woman at church's husband. I will say his name tomorrow in the sanctuary for the first time and I will not write it here because his wife is still learning how to carry it and the carrying is private until she says otherwise.

Revelation says death will be no more. I do not understand that verse the way I understand the Twenty-Third Psalm or the verse about the green pastures. I do not understand what no more means when the dead are still dead and the grief is still the grief and the kitchen table still has one chair that is empty. But I believe it the way I believe the green pasture — not because I can see it but because the verse has never been wrong yet, and the fact that I cannot see the no-more does not mean the no-more is not coming.

Tomorrow I will stand in the sanctuary and the names will be read and I will say amen.

Tonight I am at the kitchen table and the names are in my mouth and the house is full of my son and his family and the woodstove is going and the wind is outside and the dead are being held by someone whose hands are larger than mine.

*Earl. Mama. Daddy. Virginia. Robert. Margaret Anne. The names are said. The holding is yours.*