tonyandkirsten.org

Since Kai is currently a relatively unusual name, I thought it would be appropriate to blog about why we gave Kai his name.

The name Kai, as near as I can tell, has two primary origins. One seems to be roughly Indoeuropean, meaning either “Lord”, “Warrior”, “Keeper of Keys” or “Rejoice” as Caius / Gaius in Latin (Cai / Kai in Welsh and German and Kaj in Scandinavian) and Anglicized as Kay. The Arthurian legend depicts Cai (Sir Kay) as Arthur’s foster brother and one the first and most loyal of the Knights of the Round Table (also hot-headed). The other origin is Pacific, meaning “Ocean” in Japanese and Hawaiian.

All that said, we didn’t pick Kai because of any of the mentioned meanings of the name. Kai has an entirely different meaning to me.

Shortly after our first son was born, my dad unexpectedly passed away. Erik was about 3 1/2 months old. I had already been thinking about how my Dad raised me, the ways that we spent time together and what lessons he had taught me (both intentional and not) about what it was to be a man. After Dad passed my Mom, brother, sisters, in-laws, neices, nephews, aunts and friends spent copious time telling stories and remembering Dad. All this really brought his parenting (for which I am very grateful) into sharp focus for me. I decided that there was much of what and how Dad taught me that I wanted to repeat with my son.

I also began to think that if God were to give me another son, I wanted to preserve these thoughts by giving my son my Dad’s name. His name was Kay Russell Hill, a name that even in 1944 had quite a Boy-named-Sue feeling to it. Since Kai is a related name to Kay and only one letter off, I suggested the name to Kirsten after we found out she was having a boy. We tried it out for a while and quickly became settled on calling him Kai.

So while Kai is indeed nice masculine sounding male name, to me it is primarily a reminder of Dad, our relationship and the legacy that he left me to pass to my family.