Hubby Had A Name
It will come as no surprise to you that Hubby had a name. We are all given a name at birth. Some wear it with pride. Others, not so much.
The decision to hide Hubby’s name from the readers of these chapters about my caregiving journey by his side was a conscious one. If my vignettes and lessons learned along the way were only to be associated with one name, then how would others be able to understand that enormity of the issues at hand? The challenges were those of fifty million people who have dementia at present and easily another 250 million who are family, friends, their professional caregivers, their doctors and hospitals.
When I began writing these chapters more than two years ago, my husband, Bernard, asked what I was writing about. I explained that I was writing about our journey together, and about the difficulties associated with memory loss. He actually asked that I not use his name in the articles that I was writing. I respected that wish. It was always my intention to share with others, but not to embarrass my husband. These chapters unexpectedly also became a way to celebrate much of his life and our marriage of 50 years. That was an unanticipated bonus for us both.
Hubby is no longer at my side, and I feel comfortable speaking about his name now that he has passed.
Now it is time to address the importance of his many names. Born Bernard Isidore Tobias Diamond, it is unlikely that another soul ever had exactly the same name. As is Jewish tradition, he had Hebrew names as well, which were used when he was given the honor of being called up to the Torah on Shabbat mornings. The names one is given are important. There is even a tradition that we change the Hebrew name of someone who is critically ill in order to fool the angel of death, should it descend to take the soul of our loved one.
Hubby used to say that his Hebrew name was “Beryl Yitzhak Tevya,” which are Yiddish names. A Jewish man’s Hebrew name is given at his brit milah, the religious circumcision ceremony welcoming a male child into the covenant of Abraham, when he is only eight days old. Little wonder he did not remember correctly with so much else happening at the time!
However, there is a reason why this mattered in our lives.
When our son Dov was born, the rabbi preparing for his brit milah asked what Bernard’s name was in Hebrew. A Jew often has two sets of names in the West, one in English and another in Hebrew. Our tradition holds that we do not name our children after those still alive. The name “Beryl” and the name “Dov,” although in different languages, both translate to “bear.” Hence, we were not allowed to give our son the Hebrew name “Dov” at his brit. We selected, instead, the name Yaakov Shlomo in honor of my grandfathers named “Jacob” and “Solomon” in our families who had passed away. This may seem insignificant in the whole of a family history, but these changes resulted in a meaningful coincidence. When Hubby asked his mother, years later, whether he was named “Beryl” at his brit, his mother laughed and said “Of course not. We called you that as a nickname. Your religious name was Yitzhak.” According to the Torah, the generations of the forefathers of the Jewish nation were “Abraham, Issac and Jacob.” Bernard’s father was Abraham. His son (Bernard) was Yitzhak (Issac) and our son was named “Yaakov” (Jacob) with no thought on our part as to the symbolic importance of that decision.
Perhaps the attention we give to the selection of a name is quite simply our need to be identified as unique. My own name is far less than that; there are Barbara Diamonds galore in every English-speaking country. Most of us were named after movie stars in the early 1940s: Barbara Stanwick and Barbara Bel Geddies being the most memorable. I suspect that the reason Barbra Streisand’s name is spelled with a missing “a” is to try to make a very ordinary name unique.
After having taken you, my reader, on this journey through our marriage and Bernard’s slowly increasing cognitive decline, I hope that I have paid him the respect that he deserved after having been a dedicated life-partner for as long as he was able. When life gives us a rough ride, as the last 15 years of our marriage became, it is satisfying to know that sharing those “bumps” may actually have helped another on the same rollercoaster. That is why I have written more than 140 chapters, and why I hope that Bernard, looking down on me from the heavens, will forgive me for revealing his name towards the end of these years of writing this Dementia Diaries.
