Just as we did when I was pregnant with Lucy, to find out the gender of our second baby we bought a small, layered cake and asked the bakery to tint the filling between the layers either pink or blue based on the ultrasound photo the technician gave us in a sealed envelope.
It was Valentine’s Day and I had set the table with candles and fresh flowers for the occasion. After dinner, we cut into the cake revealing the blue icing inside. “A boy!” Jeff and I cheered. “ICING!” Lucy squealed.
We thought that we would probably name him James. That is, until after we’d eaten our cake and began to FaceTime family to tell them the good news. When my grandparents asked if we had a name chosen, Jeff said “I think we’ll name him James” and “probably” became “certainly.” James was grandfather’s name. Jim to most, Jimbo to some, Papa to me.
Papa had been diagnosed with lung cancer a few years earlier. He’d gone into remission twice, but now the cancer was back and we weren’t sure what was taking a bigger toll on his body, the cancer or the treatments that had been keeping him alive for so long.
We had been with them in Florida a month before and my mom had prepared me ahead of time. “It’s not good, kitten. He’s not eating. He’s sleeping a lot.” Until then, it had been easy to believe that we had plenty of time left, that he would surprise us a third time. It had been easy to pretend he wasn’t dying.
“Your grandfather is ecstatic.” She told me on the phone the day after we shared the news. “Even if you don’t name him James, just let your Papa think you are for as long as possible. He’s absolutely thrilled.”
On June 27th, 2021, James Marshall Steele was born and on July 2nd, 2021, James Edward Gibson passed away, one life passing over the other briefly, like an eclipse.
I stopped at their house the other day to check the mail and as I sorted through the stack I saw an ad with Papa’s name on it. “Lunch is on us, James Gibson”. I held it in my hands for a long time unsure of whether to keep it in the stack or throw it away. He would have thrown it away, but holding that piece of junk mail made it easy, for a moment, to forget that he wasn’t here to do that. Holding a piece of mail with his name made it easy to pretend that he might walk into the kitchen with a “whaddaya say, kiddo” and a pat on the back.
My Nana says James has Papa’s fingers, long and tapered. I think he has his disposition, laid back, quick to laugh. It’s only natural for us to want to link them somehow when the beginning of James’s life is so intimately connected to the end of Papa’s. And yet, James is entirely his own person, unrepeatable in a million ways we’ve yet to discover. Still, we find comfort in discovering the ways in which James and Papa overlap, like a ven diagram.
People ask me what we’ll call him. I shrug and tell them I don’t know. After all, James is the kind of name you grow into. What baby looks like a James? For now, we mostly call him baby or brother. I greet him in the morning with a “hello sweet boy.” Our pediatrician called him gingersnap at his last check up.
I don’t know what nicknames he’ll grow into or if he really does have Papa’s long fingers or quick wit. But someday I’ll tell him why we chose his name, about his one of a kind great grandfather, and we’ll watch as he grows into the person he was always meant to be, a new and wonderful James all his own.
