NAMESAKE

         “So that’s my namesake,” he said, accepting the newborn into his rough, stained hands as though someone had suddenly handed him a snake or a porcupine. I was only a few days old the afternoon my grandfather held me that first time; too young to know that he would die during the night that followed, or that the choice of my middle name had been a gift to him in his final hours.
         My father said it was my grandmother’s nagging that finished him off, that he died just for a little peace and quiet. I have wondered from time to time what the gift of a name could have meant to him at that terminal moment in life. Was there relief in knowing his memory might persist? Did it help him push fear aside and accept mortality? Or was he simply ready to go as my father claimed?
         My grandfather’s full name was Webster Haze Griffith. It was the unfortunate “Haze” part that I inherited. It is the part that I choose to keep to myself because Haze never seemed like an actual name to me. Haze was something children did when they discovered I had a name like Haze. Haze was the fog that clouded my parents’ judgment the day they were choosing the name of their second born, and it was the misty veil that obscured the morning my grandfather did not awake to hold his grandson again. Haze is the pale curtain his memory now hides behind.
         And so, I am a namesake to a man I never knew, whose life barely overlapped mine. I bear his name not by choice, but at least with contentment in knowing it may have eased his passing. My memories of him are not my own, but I carry them anyway. I carry them for him.