My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (11 page)

After my mother’s first serious illness, there is a shift in this dynamic. Returning from the six-week hospital stay deeply depressed and withdrawn, my mother is now clearly unable to care for their apartment, to do the daily cooking and cleaning that has defined her life since retirement. In addition, my father’s severe spinal stenosis has affected his balance and he requires close, moment-to-moment monitoring. Our fiercest battles in those months are waged in the arena of domestic sovereignty since my mother refuses to acknowledge the extent of her own needs. Eventually she concedes that my father’s inability to walk unaided warrants more extensive help. For his part, my father begins to bond with the health aides as he recognizes that my mother cannot fulfill his personal needs. Unable to take on her traditional caregiving roles, my mother becomes something of a displaced person. Increasingly, my self-obsessed father treats her dismissively as a secondary character in the drama of his own survival.

And yet, slowly and painfully over a two-year period, my mother’s depression lifts. Making a connection with a particularly sympathetic m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 65

health aide, she is able to find a new role for herself—making doctors’

appointments and keeping the all-important weekly calendar, answering the phone, and maintaining contacts with the outside world.

As she begins to reposition herself in the domestic sphere, she comes back to life and into touch with her feelings. For the first time in decades, my mother is able to express genuine sadness, to enjoy a bit of humor, and to speak more realistically about her situation. She even learns to make some small claims for herself—telling my father, when I am present, that she does not like to be yelled at for unimportant reasons, that she wants to go out to a restaurant with a visiting relative, and that she will attend a family function that he refuses to go to.

My father continues to act out his patriarchal role with a vengeance. He is constantly critical, and my mother is always trying to please him. Now I understand their interactions as anything but atypical. It is as if all the illness and vulnerability has finally laid bare the gendered skeleton of their relationship. With my father’s emotions writ so large, what place can there have been for my mother’s desires? With her endless self-denial, how can he learn to curb his demanding ways? Finally, I am left to wonder what I gained and what I lost by not seeing the extent of his bullying and the depths of her self-abnegation. What do these changed perceptions tell me about myself, about the function of memory, and the childhood I thought I understood so well?

A year and a half after my father’s hospitalization for severe dehydration and the insertion of the gastronomy tube, much to everyone’s surprise, he comes back to life. Slowly I watch as he sheds the flat-tened and sanitized language with which he left the hospital. Increasingly his talk is punctuated by favorite Yiddish expressions, terms of childhood endearment, and the sounds of genuine laughter. And although both my parents have never lived in the past, as it is reported of some elderly, my father is now more willing to tell anecdotes about his family and to recall the impact on his life of historical events such 66 n jonathan g. silin

as the Great Depression. Feeling less vulnerable and more robust, he is able to look back, and this, ironically enough, allows me to stay anchored in the present.

Despite the definitive prognosis of his own doctors, my father continues to seek out the one medical expert who can explain with certainty the nature of his swallowing difficulty, know how to treat it, and assure him that he will eat again. Meanwhile, he sits at the dinner table while my mother and I have our food. He encourages us to eat more—my mother, because she has always been anemic and is now dangerously underweight, and me, because over the years that’s just become an immutable part of the family script. He is genuinely pleased to hear that the curried chicken is tasty and disappointed when I reject a second helping of mashed potatoes. We reminisce about the way that my mother used another orangey yellow ingre-dient, saffron, to flavor special dishes and even agree to disagree on whether he ever enjoyed spicy foods himself.

At times my father complains about the discomfort caused by his feeding tube. It irritates the skin, makes odd noises, and occasionally causes minor bleeding. As in so many other areas of his life, my father adjusts to discomforts that once would have been considered intolerable and sets his sights on increasingly modest accomplishments. He does not speak of missing my mother’s famous pot roast or of longing for the taste of her potato pancakes. More simply, he hopes one day to sip a glass of water or to drink a cup of tea without choking. I try to steer a middle course between the Scylla of supporting goals that can only lead to disappointment and the Charybdis of blocking the ambitious drive that has served him so well. Whatever the outcome, we are able to talk and share stories, summon old memories, and even create some new ones. If for no other reason than that, a year after his hospitalization for severe dehydration, both of us are enjoying an improved psychic reality, the best it has been in a long, long time.

5

Reading, Writing, and

the Wrath of My Father

I want to suggest that anthropologists, and other vulnerable observers, can and should write about loss. But we must do so with a different awareness, an awareness of how excruciating are the paradoxes of attachment and displacement. Above all, I think we need to be absolutely pitiless with ourselves.

ru t h b e h a r ,
The Vulnerable Observer
My personal and professional lives have a serendipitous way of running along parallel tracks. Ever since my father was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx, I have had to think about the possibility that he would lose the ability to speak. How would he communicate?

What would happen to his love of language? At the same time, as codirector of research for a large urban school-reform project, I am confronted with the overwhelming focus on reading and writing in contemporary classrooms. Observing teachers and students in a hard-pressed, low-performing district, I am painfully aware that a pernicious insistence on measurable standards, high-stakes tests, and accountability has filtered down to even the youngest children and 67

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their teachers. In these early childhood classrooms, every activity must contribute directly and visibly to teaching academic skills. The morning message, once written by teacher to students at the start of the day as a vehicle for encouraging discussion of past experiences or upcoming events, is now a formulaic exercise designed to teach letter and word recognition. When children are invited to bring in a favorite stuffed animal, the activity is rationalized with a measuring assignment during work time. The kindergartners must determine the tallest and shortest creatures brought from home. While reading sto-rybooks, teachers emphasize the names of authors and illustrators, ask children to draw inferences from pictures, and direct attention to techniques of character and plot development. Seldom is a text left unanalyzed and rarely are the author’s words allowed to wash over the children, the meaning and structure seeping into their pores without articulation. There is little time for cooking and block building, for trips into the neighborhood and visits from people who do interesting work. In these, as in so many classrooms around the country, literacy takes precedence over life.

Although phonics, spelling, and punctuation are drilled daily, in some classrooms the legacy of the whole language movement is evident in the labels affixed to cabinets, shelves, educational materials, even chairs and tables. I can’t help but wonder what the five- and six-year-olds make of the signs mandated by the district to appear over classroom work areas, such as “This is the dramatic play area. We are doctors and nurses. We have fun.” Or of the mobiles filled with poems that float too far above the children’s heads for them to read, or the

“word walls” crammed with too many words for a nonreader to sort through. Although children are required to write in journals and to share their efforts with the class, group discussions that reflect the world outside the classroom are few and far between. As long as they write it really doesn’t matter what they say. And for all the talk about multiple drafts, editing, and the writing process, there is an underlying emphasis on the product that will be read to the class, placed on the wall, and ultimately brought home to family.

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When in 1999 my father’s cancer returned and he lost the remaining part of his larynx that had been salvaged in the initial surgery, I was prompted to reflect on the power and limitations of language in an even more immediate way. Too debilitated or simply too stubborn to master the electrolarynx, an appliance that allows many to communicate despite the lack of vocal cords, my father remains wedded to the written word. Steadfastly refusing a simple instruction such as “milk” or “sweater,” he turns every request into a paragraph-long treatise on his current health status or the climate conditions in his room. He takes obvious satisfaction in his carefully crafted sentences, which range in mood from playful and humorous to angry and demanding. When he finally hands me the yellow legal pad on which he scrawls his communications, his expression is one of pride and watchfulness. Will I laugh at the right place, grasp his double enten-dre, or appreciate his concerns? Although I often wish for the more rapid, more “natural” dialogue possible with the electrolarynx, I can’t help but be awed by his command of pen and paper. Despite his numerous disabilities, he is still able to generate ideas, exercise control, and make his desires known in his own unique voice. My father teaches me about the compensatory pleasures of the text.

I only have to look back to my parents’ inaugural use of the telephone answering machine to find a precursor to the precise, carefully calculated style that my father would adopt in his written communications. It took my then eighty-something parents several years to master the art of leaving a message. Unlike my friends who have honed their telephonic skills on outgoing messages—adding and deleting musical serenades as well as chipper and Zen-like encourage-ments for the day ahead—my parents focused their attention on the messages they left on others’ answering machines. Over time they turned it into a distinct and nuanced vehicle of communication.

At first, there was only the clicking sound of their hanging up that announced the call. Our recorded message always seemed to catch them off guard. Was it simply that they couldn’t organize themselves quickly enough to say anything, or that they felt the machine to be a 70 n jonathan g. silin

personal affront, a mechanical barrier designed to prevent privileged parent-child communications? Eventually there were brief, cryptic fragments that ultimately gave way to more fully realized, if formulaic, communications.

My mother’s are the briefer. First, she calls out my name as if entering a house and trying to determine if anyone is home: “Johnny, are you there?” Hearing no reply, she identifies herself, “It’s your mother.”

Of course this is totally unnecessary, for who else but a mother would use a long-discarded childhood diminutive, Johnny. Finally, she asks that I call “when you have a chance.” While outwardly signaling respect for my full schedule, this last phrase implicitly underlines the need to make my return call a top priority.

For his part, my father is more playful and has developed the phone message into a literary genre. There are still moments when he stumbles, pregnant pauses from which I worry he won’t recover quickly enough to avoid a broken connection. But then the hesitant, sandpapery voice, the result of the first surgery and subsequent radiation therapy, returns with new assurance. Unlike the uniformity of my mother’s messages, my father’s vary wildly in length. His style is eclectic, dare I say postmodern. The structure is that of a business letter with opening address and closing salutation. The overall impact, however, is that of the carefully crafted camp letter, the kind I used to receive as a child in the 1950s. No faxes, e-mails, or telephone calls in those days. Growing up in New York City, I was packed off to the Adirondack Mountains for two months each summer—no wimpy, one-week specialty camps. Luckily, my parents were conscientious correspondents. My mother’s letters were chatty and upbeat while my father’s were more tightly controlled missives. Given his busy life, it was the fact of the letter that had to be appreciated.

Now, forty-five years later, with more time on his hands, he has clearly come to appreciate the communicative potential of the well-left phone message. The address is always direct, an emphatic call to attention, “Jonathan. This is your father speaking.” His commanding opening is then followed by a disclaimer made in a gentler, more re-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 71

laxed tone, “This is not a medical emergency. We are both fine. Well, actually, there is no change in our physical condition.” Here my father adjusts his initial assessment of “fine,” which implies an acceptance of their many new disabilities, to a “no change” status. He skillfully edits his words to achieve greater literal accuracy and emotional authenticity. He describes but prefers not to pass judgment on their condition.

My father’s request, the reason for the call, is couched in formal language appropriate to the world of business in which he spent most of his life. “Please call me at your earliest possible convenience.” Now there is one of those long, unnerving pauses followed by a second disclaimer. “Nor is it about fiscal matters,” the topic of many tense phone calls during the last years. “There is something that I want to talk with you about,” a shorter pause, “and it’s not a problem with the help, either,” another arena of ongoing difficulties for us. Finally, the closing salutation echoes those long-ago summers, “Love, Pop.”

My father signs his missive with the term he uses to refer to his own father, not the way that I refer to him. I have adopted the more formal “dad.” With its increased distance, this form of address allows me to talk with greater ease about routine matters related to sustaining the body as well as to managing life-threatening illnesses. My father identifies with his father, Nathan Silin, for whom I was named, who died before I was born. I am more comfortable removing myself from such a generational link in order to fulfill my caregiving responsibilities.