A Few Parting Words
As you might have noticed I have signed my name Alan Herbert Rowan Baptiste Barysh. My name after I had it changed was Alan Herbert Barysh. It would have stayed Alan Herbert Barysh forever. However, two things happened in my life that caused me to add the extra middle names.
The first was the death of Rowan Rauche the daughter of Heather Rauche. Let me go into more detail. Heather Rauche and I are Facebook friends. I don’t know much about her. I do know that she was “with child” when we became cyberspace friends. I also knew that she was peacock proud to be pregnant. As a matter of fact, I would say she was delirious with her pregnancy. She was delirious with the joy of having a new baby. From what I saw in her Facebook posts, she was truly celebrating her pregnancy.
As others did, I followed her posts on Facebook. Then I learned the truth. Or rather the sad truth. It was just two hours after Heather Rauche gave birth that her baby died. When I heard the news I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. I thought how hard it must have been to lose a child that early in that child’s life. I knew I had to do something about it. The first thing I did was to send her daily posts of encouraging messages. I vowed to keep sending these posts until asked to stop. These posts were to counter the bogus words of “concern” like “She’s better off now” and “Well at least she won’t have to suffer now” ad nauseam. It’s good that these faux counselors were not near me. These would have been replies. “How on earth do you know this child is in a better place? Did you visit her? Did she call you?” Or yeah right that’s some kind of consolation. Then there was the callous remark “This too shall pass. You will get over it” To these bogus remarks of concern these are two of my better sarcastic remarks. Who are you? Are you the shift supervisor for Mourners Incorporated? What are you saying? Are you telling me that there’s only an allotted amount of time for mourning? Then there’s the “Oh well---that’s life” response. To that, I say that’s because you are letting life run you. No, we shouldn’t let life run us. We should run life. Right now we don’t have the medical resources or skills to make life run for us. That doesn’t mean that we can’t work to change things. That means that each and every person must work to create a world where no child dies a child and no one dies needlessly. In that spirit, I added Rowan to my name so that wherever I go I will keep her legacy alive.
I added Baptiste to my name in honor of a brother of a caregiver here at Beechwood Assisted Living. Once again something gut-punched me. I could not fathom losing a sibling. This death was doubly devastating. The tragedy of having this happen to a woman who devotes her whole working life to servicing the people who live here brought out the best in me. So, asked her if I could incorporate the name of her brother in my name and keep her brother’s name as his legacy wherever I went and work for the day when sisters and brothers don’t have to bury their kin before they die or go on living without knowing that there’s someone in their corner who can lift some of the burden of grief from their shoulders.
Now for the lighter news. For a while now I have noticed that the placing of initials after the name of someone denotes an appreciation of the things they have accomplished in their life. You know like PhD or MD etc. So I decided to throw some initials after my name. I chose M E O B for Most Extraordinary Old Buzzard/ And now even Paul Harvey knows the rest of the story. I think I am done here. May I show you to the door?
