William Wallace to be exact.
That’s right. Like THE William Wallace.
Well, Kind of.
More like the Mel Gibson from Braveheart version of William Wallace.
The real William Wallace is cool, but the Mel Gibson William Wallace is really cool.
Ryan loved that movie.
He always teased me by saying “if we have another son, we are going to name him William Wallace.”
Obviously, I was not on board with this idea but it was a funny conversation every now and then.
Throughout my pregnancy, we had a tough time agreeing on a boys name. We did have a girls name picked out but we were struggling with the boy names (we weren’t and didn’t find out the sex until birth).
While waiting to be transferred into L&D, brokenhearted and in disbelief, I turned and looked at Ryan.
“Look, if we have a boy, we can name him William Wallace.”
It was a very eerie moment. He smiled. An unspoken understanding passed between us. I knew it was ridiculous, but it was going to be meaningful. Without hesitation, he agreed.
After delivery the nurse asked us what we are going to name the baby. Ryan looked at me and then I looked at her, “William Wallace”.
It took everything in me to not laugh.
The nurse responds, in a dead serious voice, “That is a nice strong name!”.
I started laughing. Ryan glared at me with a smirk on his face. I couldn’t stop. She looked concerned.
The ROOTS program at SJMC gifted us bracelets before we left the hospital with Williams name beaded on it.
It was funny and it was sad.
How do you name a dead child? The names you have picked out are for that child to grow old with. How do you give them a name just to turn around and burry them?
Every time we had to tell someone his name, I would start cracking up. One, because of the hormones and two, because we named our son William Wallace. The Scottish Knight. Mel Gibson. Braveheart. The name I told Ryan that I would 100% never agree to. A name with no meaning and a name with significant meaning.
Fast forward six years and we mostly just call him Will. Will is a nice normal name. We can say Will without laughing or thinking that is sounds weird. We can say Will without having to explain why we named our son William Wallace.
We still laugh when people ask us about it or when we think back to those really hard days. We don’t mind telling the story but not everyone gets our sense of humor about it.
Naming our son William Wallace has given us a fun and funny memory to go along with a heartbreaking and dark time in our lives. Some may think that is weird, but we think it is perfect.
“All men die, but not all men truly live.” William Wallace
[ If you’re new here, you can read more about the loss of our son here. ]
On another note: Will died from Umbilical Hyper-coiling which ultimately caused his heart to stop. In a sense, BraveHEART is a perfectly poetic nickname for him.
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