Baby Naming

Naming the baby ties generations together, creating an unbroken chain of life. Sometimes, this quaint tradition reveals how deep this connection really is.

I am a writer. My profession was created by the fireside of a prehistoric camp. After a successful hunt, the meat was divided among the heroes who had provided sustenance to the tribe. The choicest meat went to the hunter whose spear first struck the prey. The next piece of meat went to the tracker who led the tribe to the beast. The meat was divided but before the final morsels of meat were distributed, one man, not a great hunter or tracker, stood and began to chant, retelling the exploits of the tribe. The storyteller’s job is to tell our story, to help us see that we are larger than life.

That is the tradition I was raised in. That is my share of the spoils of the hunt.

I love my parents dearly, but even when communication was flowing emotionally, it was still technically challenging. I had inherited my parents’ tendency to overreach, so neither side was ever readily available to pick up the phone and chat. Phone calls were scheduled well in advance. The seven-hour time difference between New Jersey and Israel meant that on any phone call, one side was waking up very early or staying up late. We had never been the type of family that engaged in idle chit-chat, and the years of separation had just made that condition even worse. The men in my family are naturally reticent, holding emotions deep inside, hidden even from themselves. Silence was familiar territory, so when something serious happened, we did what we do best. We didn’t talk about it.

My dad found out about the cancer right about the time I met the woman who eventually became my wife. My folks decided that I was preoccupied, and the timing was not right for me to hear about his illness. Family crises had always been met with stoic silence, and this time would be no different. They decided to smile through the pain and suffering to celebrate my wedding. Part of their familial obligation, as they saw it, was to hide the truth. Six months after my wedding, I got the call from my folks and after hearing the news, I was telling my new wife, a woman I barely knew, what my parents had finally told me.

A husband is supposed to share such things with his wife, even though I was newly married and it felt strange to share my pain. I pushed through my fears and made a conscious decision not to pass on this hated gift of silence.

“My dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer,” I heard myself saying. “Surgery was not an option, so they are moving forward with chemo.“

It was a heavy message, a burden they had already been carrying for a year. But as a dutiful son, I had learned to read between the lines. It was clear that my parents had followed their usual tactic of padding the truth with hope and false optimism, so my repetition of their words rang false in my ears. I searched her face to see if she believed me or if she saw through my words, just as I had seen through my parents’ words.

I repeated what my parents had told me, and she listened with a concerned look on her face, the perfect image of a caring wife. After the heavy message came an even heavier silence, but this time it was a silence shared. Even that was a victory of sorts.

“When do you want to go?” she finally said, naming my fear that I refused to put words to, leading me across an emotional chasm.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “We’ll decide together.”

She nodded, accepting half of a burden I could not carry alone.

Now that the ice had been broken, more conversations with my parents followed. The disease was named in medically scientific terms that gave a false sense of security. If the doctors could name it, then they could certainly cure it. It also meant we could avoid linking it to my father personally. There was an illness in an organ that had to be dealt with. The connection to my father’s body and what the illness could do to him was never mentioned.

My father was an icon in my life, an immortal symbol of fatherhood, and the source from which my existence and identity flowed. He transcended physicality and was not an organ or a disease. Intellectually, I knew he had a prostate, though my indifference to that fact did not preclude that organ’s failure, taking my father away from me. Unfamiliar feelings were churning away deep within me, and I couldn’t begin to identify them. My world was falling apart, and I was lost without a map. Daily routine rolled over my emotions and confusion, pulling me away from any effort at coping before anything was resolved. I put the issue in a closet, pulling it out every month or two when my parents called. I would dutifully ask how things were, euphemistically asking about the cancer and treatment. I never once asked ‘How is dad?’. That would be breaking the rules. They answered in kind, in generic and barely understood technical terms. I would respond with concern, trying to sound like the loving son I really wanted to be, despite being painfully disconnected from my heart when it really mattered. When I finally asked how my dad was feeling, he said “Fine”, despite my mother’s tales of harsh treatments and increasingly gloomy lab results.

After two and a half years, even a crisis becomes a routine. I was able to pigeonhole my fear and concerns, storing them away in a dusty closet in the back of my mind. Since I live on the other side of the world, my father’s life-threatening illness became a topic for discussion whenever friends asked. I was sure that it was an entirely different experience for my siblings, who had to witness the effects of the disease and the ravages of the treatment. The geographic reality helped me to insulate myself from my feelings.

I was shocked when my boss came back to the kitchen in the middle of the Saturday night rush, his cell phone waving in the air, telling me I had a phone call from America. Phone calls are not allowed during business hours, especially on Saturday nights when the restaurant resembles a feeding frenzy at a zoo. Apparently, this was an exception. I left the heat and tension of the kitchen and picked up the phone at the bar.

“Hi, Adam. I waited until I knew Shabbat was over in Israel.”

The moment I heard my brother’s voice, I knew it was bad news.

“The doctors are going to run a series of tests tomorrow that will tell us more about dad’s condition, but they are saying a few months is the best-case scenario,” he said. “We want you to come and be with us.”

The decision had been made for me.

“Okay, I’ll book a flight tomorrow,” I said, thinking about how I would tell my wife. “But if we are going to be in the States for several months, it will take me at least two days to pack up the wife and baby.”

My wife called the travel agent in the morning. A direct flight was five hundred dollars more. My parents were buying the ticket, so despite what my heart screamed at me, we took the flight that connected in Turkey. For a visit that would last several months, it seemed absurd to pay that much money to save a few hours.

A hectic day and a half later, I called my brother before we left for Ben Gurion Airport.

“They did the tests,” he said. “They are saying that a few months might be overly optimistic.”

“What does that mean?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Ok,” I said. “I’ll call you when I land in JFK.”

“The car service will be waiting,” he said.

I got on one plane as the sun rose over Tel Aviv and got off another plane fourteen hours later as the sun set over a snow-dusted Manhattan. I scanned the waiting area, but the limo driver had already spotted me. My beard and peyos made it easy to pick me out in the crowd of clean-shaven travelers. He handed me his cell phone. My brother was already on the line. The reception was awful, and he had to tell me three times before I understood.

“Get here now, or you won’t see Dad in this world.”

I wanted to scream, to tell him he’s wrong. What he was saying made no sense.

“The doctors had said a couple of months.”

There was no response from my brother.

“Ok,” I said. “I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

Once again, modern medical science had claimed omniscience only to be exposed as jungle voodoo, a chimpanzee in a lab coat. I jumped back and forth between numb disbelief and barely suppressed rage as the black SUV wrestled through pre-holiday traffic. Everyone was on a frantic shopping spree, conspiring to make me late when being late was most definitely not an option. The driver fiddled with the radio but couldn’t find anything except for Christmas carols. My nightmare was playing out to the tune of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

“Could we turn it off?” I finally asked in desperation.

The silence was even worse, leaving me no place to hide. I barely managed to hold myself back from chewing at the upholstery. I got to the hospital, but they wouldn’t let the baby in, so my wife sat downstairs. My brother stopped me outside the room.

“Dad refused morphine,” he said. “He wanted to be awake and aware when you got here. But he is really uncomfortable.” He hesitated. “Don’t be shocked by dad’s appearance.”

I braced myself, but when I saw him, I was surprised. I wanted to say out loud, ‘Gee, Dad, you look great, ’ but I knew it would hurt and anger my family. They had watched him get sick and decline and I had been spared the worst.

Everyone in the room took a turn telling my dad that I had arrived, not so much happy to see me as they were relieved to say something positive. He smiled at me with a child-like joy I had never seen before. I kissed his cheek and had a few minutes, maybe ten, possibly twelve, to say a few meaningless words as the nurse attached a syringe of morphine to one of the tubes attached to my father’s body. His face changed as he drifted off into numb space, and my mother put her head in his lap. The siblings gathered in a corner of the room and mumbled to each other.

“How was the flight?”

Silly pleasantries are the final refuge for the emotionally overwhelmed. “Fine. Turkey was strange.”

“The baby got big.”

“Yeah. She just started walking last week, and yesterday we were chasing her all over the Turkish airport.”

My little sister clutched my hand. I usually push her away, and she usually teases me about it, but this time was different. This time it wasn’t teasing. She needed to hold my hand, and I needed it too.

“She is so cute,” she said. “I can’t wait to take her shopping for clothes.” Her voice shook as she teased me.

“Don’t spoil her. No presents.”

“I most certainly will spoil that little princess.”

We returned to my father’s bedside to wait in uncomfortable silence. I realized that somewhere along the way, a stranger had become a wife, and now I wanted her near me in order to cope with my own family. It was late, and everyone had children at home, and the past few weeks had wreaked havoc. By unspoken agreement, I stayed with my mother. She slept in a chair while I watched my father.

The night nurse came in to adjust the medication.

“This is the morphine drip,” she explained. “It’s entirely automatic, and we have the dosage dialed in. It should be enough to make your father comfortable.” She showed me a button. “This is for when he seems to be in pain. It gives him a little extra push of morphine. You don’t need to worry. It won’t let you give him too much.”

I nodded my head numbly. Couldn’t she see that I was a little child, afraid to be left alone? I didn’t want this responsibility, to be left with my finger on a button, forced to choose between watching my father suffer and putting more poison into his vein?

The next few days were a blur. Mom and I never went further than the nursing station. The lights were kept low, and the curtains were drawn tight, keeping everyone in a round-the-clock twilight that worked as well as the morphine. I began to recognize the shifts and could tell night from day by the changing faces. As my father became increasingly uncomfortable, I cursed myself, promising that each time I pushed the button, it would be the last. My brother and sister came for a couple of hours in the evening, but I felt distant from them. They were visiting and would return home to their children, their homes, their lives. My home was far away, and I was trapped in this strange and difficult reality. My wife came to be with me. I dozed off in mid-sentence, sitting up with my baby daughter in my lap. The next few days existed outside of time. My father slept as my mother, and I watched. He woke up parched, and I held a plastic cup of water to his lips. As I watched him drink, a voice echoed in my head, reminding me that this was a tremendous mitzvah. I was going to get an enormous reward from God for doing this.

‘Fascinating’, I thought. ‘Next time, just shoot me. I don’t want the mitzvah if it means watching my father struggle to stay alive.’

He woke up uncomfortable, moaning until two nurses came to help me rearrange the tubes and move him into a chair. He slept sitting up, his chin on his chest, until the pain came back, waking him. We did it all over again in reverse, maneuvering his bloated body back into the bed. It became a cycle, its rhythm speeding up as the end drew near. The transfers increased in difficulty and frequency. The nurse took me aside.

“There is another painkiller,” she explained. “It’s stronger. But after we use that, you won’t be able to talk to him.”

She gave me a look that was intended to explain something she didn’t want to say out loud. I stared at her, refusing to understand what I already knew.

I labored through the day, my mother and I taking turns sleeping in the chair by the bed, waking up to help move my father. I took a shower in a stall meant for washing patients in wheelchairs, then got dressed in the clothes I had been wearing for three days.

My father’s pain increased after the sun set. He was moaning more, so I hit the button without remorse, knowing the alternative was even worse than the morphine and too awful to discuss. Mom slipped out to sleep lying down in the visitors’ lounge. My brother had said they would stop by in the morning after they sent the kids to school. I was praying for my father to hold on long enough so that I wouldn’t have to ask for the other painkiller until after my brother and sister arrived.

Around two a.m., my father woke up.

“Adam,’ he said, lucid for the first time since they had started the morphine drip. He tried to get out of bed but got tangled up in the tubes and wires. I rushed over, trying to untangle him, but he kept trying to sit up. I finally managed to help him sit up, and he dangled his legs over the side of the bed, panting from the effort. He began to push off, but his legs wouldn’t hold him. I slid under him, trying to support him when I knew I couldn’t. His breath hit me, heavy with the strange smell of the drugs they had been pumping into him. I began to stagger.

“C’mon, Adam,” he said, using the same voice he had used when I was doing something stupid, running the lawnmower over rocks, or backing the car into the garbage cans.

“Come on. Get me out of here. I want to get out of here NOW! ”

I heard the words, and I knew exactly what he meant. Get me out of this bed, out of this hospital, out of this reality. Here and Now was the place where his body was sick and in pain. If we went somewhere else, anywhere else, he wouldn’t have to suffer. My mind raced as I desperately tried to figure out how to pull it off. I needed a wheelchair. That wasn’t a big problem. They were all over the place. Mom was asleep, so I could get her keys from her pocketbook and take her car. That probably wouldn’t be too much of a problem either. But she had gotten a new car, and I wasn’t sure what color or model it was. I didn’t know where it was parked. I didn’t even have a driver’s license in this country. I fought down panic. ‘This is crazy,’ I thought. But another voice answered from deep inside me. ‘Yeah, but it doesn’t get any more real than this. So if you’re gonna get crazy, now’s the time.’

Okay, I needed to get my dad dressed, and it was the middle of winter outside.

I felt myself slipping under my father’s weight. I reached out with the last of my strength and barely managed to push the button to call for a nurse. She came running, helping to steady him until another nurse arrived. The three of us put him back in bed. After fixing the tubes, she looked at me, asking with her eyes, knowing what the question meant to me. I nodded weakly. She left, coming back a few minutes later with a small bottle that fit in the slot where the morphine had been. I fell into the chair, not realizing I had slept until my mom woke me up. Through the half-closed blinds, I could see a gray, pre-dawn sky. My mom was holding back her tears. “I think it’s time”, she said.

Fifteen minutes later, I called my brother, waking him up.

After burying my father, we sat Shiva. My mother told me that when preparing for the end, my father made a strange request. No inheritances were to be given while my mother was alive, but he had specified one item. A gold pocket watch he had inherited from his grandfather was to be given to me. The gift confused me. I had no desire for such a luxury item. But I took it home when I returned to Israel.

Watching my father die changed me forever. They say that life is a cycle, but I don’t really know what that means. They say that time heals all wounds, but it’s a rare day that I don’t think about my dad and how he left the world. Mourning has a beginning but no end date. Some good came out of it. I remember watching my dad sleep, and I realized that if god had wanted it, at any moment, my dad could have gotten up out of bed and been healthy.

I also remember thinking that it was impossible and illogical to believe that my dad was leaving me forever. He was so much a part of me that his death could only be a temporary illusion. I carried a tiny physical piece of his body inside of me, and his physicality was the template for me. My soul, my self, was a flame that was lit from his. I knew that somewhere down the line, we were going to be reunited. Time has shown this to be true. In some ways I feel closer to my father than ever. I hear his voice clearer than I ever heard it before and I have felt his blessings influence my life.

A few months later, my wife became pregnant again. Between work and studying, I would steal a few moments to try to understand my life. I finished saying kaddish for my father. A few months later, on a Friday night at three a.m., my wife woke me up, and we went to the hospital. My wife, God bless her, likes to be prepared. We arrived with three backpacks full of clothes, food, home remedies, and several sealed plastic bags my wife told me not to open. The world of women remains a foreign land to most men. I began to settle in, my wife explaining what needed to be unpacked and ready. She was in the early stages, and the contractions, though strong, were still far apart. I was feeling relatively calm and relaxed. This would be our second child, and the first birth had gone smoothly. Secure in my spectator status, my biggest concern was finding a cup of coffee so that I would be awake for the birth. The midwife strapped a monitor around my wife’s belly and stepped out. My wife and I were alone in the birthing room, each of us preparing for the ordeal in our own way. My wife was meditating and saying tehillim in between contractions, and I was sipping my extra-strong brew. The pains were beginning to get worse, so my wife’s stress level was rising. I was thinking about what I might do to make the experience more meaningful, either read tehillim or get another cup of coffee. My wife groaned as another series of contractions began. I turned to her, trying to remember what our birthing coach had told me to say. I had read about using visualizations, waves washing over her body. I turned to her, pausing to choose the right words to calm her.

She looked up at me, her face wrinkled in pain that was beginning to become unbearable. “Get me out of here. Aii! I want to get out of here NOW!”

I stopped, unable to respond. It struck me hard that the last time I had been in a hospital room was a year and a half earlier, when I had also been tired, praying for morning to come so the ordeal would be over. I had heard the exact words then. Our eyes met, and my wife understood what she had said and how it was affecting me. I don’t know what hit me at that moment, but it was pure power, crushing me, throwing me out of myself and into a different reality. At that moment, I had a prophetic vision, unshakable knowledge. I was sure of two things. The first was that my wife would give birth to a boy. It was more than a certainty in my mind, and it proved to be true. The second was that, despite what I had felt two minutes before, despite this being my second child, the fact below the surface of everyday life is that I was in no way ready or capable of dealing with what was about to happen. The midwife entered the room with two other nurses and my wife’s birthing coach.

I stepped back, putting myself in the corner of the room, my face pressed into the tile wall, and began to argue with God. I became Jacob, wrestling with the angel before dawn. I fought God with everything I had, hating him for making life a series of sweet oases of joy and love surrounded by a desert of death and pain. My wife was trapped in Chava’s curse, distant from me, yet my life and any hope for a small bit of happiness were entirely dependent upon her physical existence and the fragile existence of a tiny baby I had yet to meet. I could only pray that this time, the end would be life and love, not death and an empty grave. Under similar circumstances, with blood and pain, God had taken my father from me. God is the boss and doesn’t check with us to see whether what he is doing is okay.

The most we can do is pray, hoping that our prayers actually mean something to him. So I prayed, my clenched fist pressing into the cold tiles. God made man in his image. If he wanted a fight, then I was up for it. When it’s important, when it really matters, when life is hanging in the balance and can go either way, fear makes me strong. But it’s not just any fear. I’m not afraid of hell. In my short stay in this world, I’ve seen worse than hell. If I fear God, if I pray, it’s not because I’m afraid of the fires in a world to come. I pray because of what I see in this world and God’s presence in it. I raged silently, busy nurses rushing around me. No one noticed my anger or my tears. They were concentrating on helping my wife. I heard someone say, “It’s a boy. You have a son.”

I turned around, and a nurse placed my baby in my arms, going back to help with the afterbirth. Unlike my last time in a hospital, I would be leaving with more lives intact than when I entered.

I took my wife and new son home. I knew that I should name him after my father, but the idea terrified me. Every time I called him by name, I would be hammering a new nail in my father’s coffin, reaffirming his death. Because you only name your children for those who have passed on.

I begged my rabbi for an answer. How could I name my son after my father?

“That is what we do,” he said. “We are Jews.”

I felt small and inadequate, but realized I had no choice. A few days later, I stood in the synagogue and watched as a man with a knife approached my son. I was Abraham offering up his son to God in the covenant of blood that has been the legacy of Jewish fathers to their sons for countless generations. But I did not feel holy. I felt small and inadequate to do what was expected of me. And when they asked, my voice shook as I called out his name for the first time.

“He shall be called in Israel, Aharon Leib.”

Not long after, I was trying to put my life in order. I opened my father’s gold pocket watch and discovered that it was inscribed with his name: Aharon Leib. But suddenly I realized that the original owner, his grandfather, had inscribed it. My father had gifted me the watch, knowing that I was only going to serve as a caretaker until my son, the third Aharon Leib, came of age.

Every time I held him, every time I called my son’s name, I was calling my father. And this son will, God willing, be living long after I have passed on, a testament of life’s fragility, and at the same time, its power to overcome death. Just as one flame lights another and then goes out, a father brings his son into the world. Death and life, one door closing as another opens.

Until a few weeks ago, this was the end of the story. But once again, I got a phone call. My brother had ben battling cancer for several years. The end was imminent and I had to fly to the US. I was not in time to be by his side when he left the world but he left this world surrounded by family. We sat shiva in his daughter’s house. I was shocked when the man leading thew prayer called out my brother’s name.

“Yisrael, the son of Shlomo.”

I took my nephew, my father’s son, aside. He had been born just a few weeks before I left for Israel so I barely knew him. “You should know that your father’s Hebrew name was Yisrael Shlomo, the son of Aharon Leib,” I said.

He nodded. “I know that.”

I hesitated. I dislike giving religious instruction. I prefer to allow people to find their own way to God.

“We have the custom of naming children after our deceased loved ones,” I said. “I was the only sibling who had a kid after our father died, so I named my son Aharon Leib, after your grandfather. I don’t think your sister is planning on having more children. It would mean a lot to me if you named a child for my brother.”

He nodded. “I discussed that with my father a few weeks before he passed. He told me to have more children.”

Of course, that is how my brother would ask his son to name his child after him.

“We’re not really sure what to do if we have a girl.”

I smiled. I didn’t want to tell him that I had a strong hunch that wouldn’t be a problem.

One small addendum. Before the final verdict from the doctors, when my brother was still anticipating a long course of chemotherapy, his daughter-in-law encountered medical complications in her pregnancy. The doctors decided to induce labor, and her daughter was born six weeks early. My brother flew out to California to hold his new granddaughter. Less than six weeks later, my brother left the world.

Life is often cruel, but occasionally, God shows tender mercies to the most precious souls.

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