Only after we had
decided on Jasper as the name for our firstborn did we realize that
Jasper was one of the Three Wise Men. Later we also found out that
one of my husband's ancestors, Jasper Gunn, came to the Massachusetts
Bay Colony in the 1640's. When we chose his name we were thinking a
bit about Jasper Johns, and Jasper National Park in Canada, and the
deep red rock with green striations. Maybe the British designer
Jasper Conran crossed my mind, though I can guarantee that he never
crossed my husband's.
As a child I loved
the story of the Magi, the distinguished and holy men who followed a
star to the place where the young Jesus lived. I was artistic from a
very early age: a clotheshorse, a coloring book aficionado and a
maker of homemade paper dolls. The Wise Men spoke to these
predilections. No matter how crude the representation on the felt
banner hanging in the church sanctuary, no matter how cheesy the
illustration in the Sunday School materials, the Magi were the most
colorful part of the Christmas story, decked out in ermine and purple
and dripping with jewels. No matter how dispiriting it was to color
in the sand and the hay and the dun-colored animals, I knew that the
best was still to come, that eventually I would be handed the
coloring sheet with the Wise Men in it, standing there next to their
camels. I could at last use the best hues in my oil pastel box: the
ruby, violet and lapis.
And then there were
the gifts.
When I was five
years old I often visited my grandfather's cousin, a genteel
Nashville lady who kept a cut glass bowl of rose petals and balls of
sandalwood on her sideboard. That was how I thought of the Magi's
gifts: fragrant, rare, opulently displayed. The gold, frankincense
and myrrh were fantastic in and of themselves, and they were
transported in wooden boxes inlaid with ivory and in colored glass
bottles with domed tops and silver filigree.
Of course I
understood that Jesus was the king, that he was the one receiving the
gifts, but he was just a boy in bare feet wearing a tattered dress.
He was not fun to color at all. The gifts belonged to him, but not
really. The Magi were frozen in eternal presentation, the gifts never
leaving their hands. It didn't seem real that the next day the Magi
would leave and Jesus would put those gifts on a crude shelf in his
mud hut.
The Magi were not of
the kingdom of Judea. Jasper was traditionally believed to be an
Indian king, Melchior Persian, Balthazar Arabian. The fact that the
three were not Jews, saints, or apostles, but Zoroastrian priests and
astrologers, visitors in the Judeo-Christian story, like
Shakespearean actors appearing in cameo roles in a James Bond movie,
was fine with me when we chose Jasper's name. It seemed exactly the
right amount of distance to keep from my religious heritage.
Seven years later,
when we found out we were having another boy, we asked ourselves if
we dared to name him Balthazar. All too well I remembered the
horrified silence that had greeted me when I announced to my mother
that Jasper was named Jasper. I had prepared for disapproval; I had
not revealed the name to anyone until it was on the birth certificate
and would have required legal proceedings to change.
"Well, I
like the name Jasper," my cousin said to me sympathetically a
few months later, confirming the nature of the discussions that had
gone on behind closed doors.
Jasper was Stickley
next to the Baroque magnificence that was Balthazar. But in addition
to just thinking it was a tremendously cool name, we liked the idea
of linking the brothers together. Of course they would never have a
brother named Melchior, but that was OK. Two out of three Wise Men
was fine with me. Maybe Melchior would be a cat.
After Balthazar
died, when I was in the labor and delivery room, I hesitated at the
whiteboard where the nurses wrote their names when they came on duty.
There was a place to write the name of the baby, but I wasn't sure it
was appropriate. They had not written it in. Technically it no longer
mattered, since he would never use it. He would not have a birth
certificate or a death certificate, would exist only for us and in
the unsettling limbo that is the province of the almost-born. We
could have called him 'Pumpkin' or 'Baby Q' or 'Captain Zimbo'. After
an hour or two, though, I took the blue marker and I wrote
'Balthazar'. Because it was his name.
The nurses seemed
confused by it, not sure how to pronounce it, not sure what ethnicity
it signaled, all but one, whose mother was from Spain. She kept
calling him 'Baltasar', but I didn't mind. High on fentanyl and still
in shock, I babbled on about how much I love Spain. I told her about
the Spanish human rights lawyer Baltasar Garzon, who had tried to
extradite Pinochet for war crimes and was at the time of Balthazar's
birth being railroaded by right wing elements in Spain for daring to
investigate war crimes under Franco. I was proud that my son shared
his name. During that long night, when he lay in the bassinet next to
me, there but not there, she listened without comment, pressing on my
uterus and taking my temperature.
When the nurse asked
if I wanted her to call a clergy member I said sure. My thinking was
as follows: when someone dies, you call the minister. Someone has
died. What else is there to do? It was not a sophisticated analysis
of our situation, but it was the best I could do in my shell-shocked
condition. And it set a precedent for how I would go forward: I would
accept help from anyone, anywhere. I wouldn't try to be brave, or
stoic, or proud. I would do anything anyone suggested, no matter how
weird it sounded, whether I wanted to or not.
I gave the nurse the
name of the church where I am (still) a member. My membership for the
last four or five years has involved writing a check for $100 so I
don't get kicked off the rolls, and sometimes flipping through the
newsletter that comes in the mail. But whether I still believed in
God wasn't really the point at that moment.
David came to the
hospital on the morning of April 4. I remembered him from certain
church suppers at which, as a member of the Hospitality committee, I
had set the tables and washed dishes. Bespectacled, with thinning
hair and a calm, soothing voice, he seemed to me to be the very model
of a minister. Jasper had been a year or two old then, and he and his
wife were in the process of an open adoption. They got as far as the
delivery room with the birth mother before she changed her mind and
kept the baby. Devastated, they decided to end their quest to adopt
and to live child-free. I knew at the time that being around me and
my baby must have been excruciating, and yet I felt it would be
presumptuous, to say or do something to try to console the minister.
So I didn't say anything. I put it out of my mind. And then I stopped
going to church at all.
It was that history,
though, that made him acutely sensitive to how it felt to have your
baby, your heart, snatched away at the very last moment, a time that
should have been so joyful but was instantly its darkest opposite. I
have never in my life believed that things happen for a reason, but
it was fortuitous that it was he who was there, because he was
probably the only person I know who could have said the right thing
at that moment.
He prayed over
Balthazar, and he blessed him. As he did so, he said, "Like the
Wise Men, Balthazar brings gifts. We may not understand now what they
are, but in time we may come to know the gifts he brings."
A Presbyterian
minister who came to my hospital room the day after my son was
stillborn framed his life and my life as his mother in Biblical
terms, and I chose to accept his framework. I didn't have to. But I
also didn't have to name the boy Balthazar.
I'm not an optimist
by nature. I'm not a glass half-full type. I am the last person on
Earth to invoke angels, to tell anyone to find the silver lining in
their personal tragedy, to suggest they make their lemons into
lemonade. This is not a book of blessed assurance, of easy comfort.
But when I chose
Balthazar for my son's name I committed myself to discovering and
nurturing his gifts. That commitment was made before he was born. The
fact that he died doesn't change it.
These are not the
Magi's gifts of my childhood. They are rough gifts, necessarily. They
come in broken jars and battered boxes, brought by men with bare feet
and torn robes. They are what he brought.
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