My Name is Luca
On Names, Music, and the Thin Membranes Between Joy and Grief
When she told me she was pregnant in June 2012, we did the thing. The name game. What do we call the baby if it's a boy? If it's a girl? We were in the kitchen, and it was after breakfast. I don’t remember what we had—filmjölk and müsli, probably.
I’ve always had a kind of short-term amnesia when it comes to anything connected to Luca. I don’t recall the girl names we tossed around, although that was on the table too, we somehow started with boy names. Maybe because somewhere deep down we already knew.
We thought he'd live in Sweden. We thought he'd live. We were still thinking in futures back then—tentative, conditional, but futures. So, we started with “international” names, whatever that means. She’s been everywhere, and so had I in a way. Swedish-Swedish didn’t feel right. We wanted short. We wanted borderless. We landed on Luka, a twist on the Swedish name Lukas.
But then came the association. The Suzanne Vega song. Luka. 1987. Maybe you know it. Most people my age do. A beautiful song—spare, haunting, unforgettable. A boy. A real boy. Lived in Suzanne Vega’s building in New York. A victim of child abuse. The lyrics tell it calmly, almost too calmly, the way kids sometimes describe horror when they’ve normalized it.
We paused there. Luka was perfect, but... not that Luka. So we shifted a letter. Went full Italian. Luca. We said: let’s make this child the opposite of the one in the song. Let’s make him loved. From day one. And maybe that would be enough.
—
Flash forward to yesterday. April 21st. I didn’t know, but apparently it’s been nine years since Prince died. Another memory sinkhole. That purple-clad icon was / will always be one of my saints of sound. In 1987—after Vega released Luka—Prince wrote her a letter. Handwritten. Real ink. He had just heard the song and sat down to tell her:
Dearest Suzanne,
Luka is the most compelling piece of music I’ve heard in a long time.
There are no words 2 tell u all the things I feel when I hear it.
I thank God 4 u.
— Prince
Suzanne Vega never made the letter public until 2016. Prince had just died. Accidental overdose. No foul play, no note. Just a dumb, stupid death. She posted the letter on Twitter. The internet did what the internet does. It went viral.
I didn’t know any of this until yesterday, when the algorithm nudged it my way, like a ghost elbowing me in the ribs. It was her tweet, April 21, 2025. She followed it up with a recent live version of Luka. https://x.com/suzyv/status/1915416039333994521
We couldn’t stop Luca from suffering. We tried. We failed. But I think—maybe—I think he knew he was loved. I think he still knows. Maybe that counts for something. Does it?
Picture credits:
“Suzanna Vega’s ‘Flying With Angels’ | New Releases”, Albumism, May 3, 2025. https://albumism.com/storefront-new-releases/suzanne-vega-flying-with-angels
Suzanne Vega, Twitter, suzyv, April 21, 2025. https://x.com/suzyv/status/1914431083384377763
Beautiful, Umut.
So moving Umut.