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Carolyn Bessette and her husband John F. Kennedy Jr. are known for the tragic way their lives were cut far too short. In the summer of 1999, when the couple and Bessette’s sister were in their 30s, they all died when JFK Jr. crashed the single-engine plane he was flying. But now, Christopher Andersen — author of The Way John Died — is revealing what the iconic couple’s life might have looked like if not for that fateful day.
Andersen revealed to Us Weekly earlier this week that Bessette and Kennedy were discussing having kids. Despite Bessette’s initial uneasiness given the media attention surrounding the Kennedys, Andersen claims she and Kennedy were in the midst of family planning in the final weeks of their lives.
“[John] even had a name picked out,” Andersen told the publication. “[Whether] it was a boy or a girl, they were going to call the child Flynn.”
Flynn! Flynn Kennedy. What a beautiful gender-neutral name. It has Gaelic and Irish origins meaning son of the red-haired one and ruddy, respectively. You could possibly get away with saying JFK Jr. had red highlights. Regardless, he definitely had Irish ancestry.
Meaning aside, it seems they were ahead of their time by planning to use a gender-neutral name. And I love the idea that their theoretical baby would have had two N’s in both their first and last name and that perhaps the F was meant as a nod to “Fitzgerald” (the “F” in JFK).
Sadly, we’ll never know for certain. But it sounds like the Bessette-Kennedy family was also ahead of their time in the way they were approaching their marriage. Despite claims that their whirlwind romance was coming to an end, Andersen said the two were in couple’s therapy (how modern!) and working to strengthen their relationship before bringing kids into the mix.
“Toward the end of their lives, they had managed to reach this kind of rapprochement,” he said. “Whatever friction was there was being dealt with.”
We’d love to know what Bessette thought of the name Flynn. Even for the strongest of couples, picking out a baby name can be a major source of friction. So if she and her husband were on the same page about the moniker, that would have been an impressive and telling feat. Alternatively, perhaps the proposed baby name was a topic of conversation in their counseling sessions.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’ll say once again that we’ll sadly never know if little Flynn Kennedy would have been born and named as such. But what we do know, is that it would have been a beautiful name.
From Thea for Theodore and Zhenya for Eugene, here’s a list of feminine versions of traditional male names for your baby girl.
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