My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (19 page)

As we get older, Dick becomes our high school English teacher and we also know that Gwen complains about the frequent play rehearsals that keep her husband in school so late. We do see her once a year when she attends the opening night performance. Short and heavy set, Gwen seems older than Dick, an inappropriate partner, I 120 n jonathan g. silin

think, for someone of his intense energy. In retrospect, I understand that while I am intrigued by their interracial marriage I also do not want to believe that Dick has any partner other than us, the students whom he obviously cares so much about. The existence of a spouse suggests that we might not always assume primacy in his life, that adults might manage deep emotional ties to several people at once.

Dick and Gwen’s relationship poses a further complication for me because they do not appear to have any children in their immediate life. Although many of my classmates come from divorced homes—

stepparents, weekend visits, if not joint custody, are an integral part of their world—the complete absence of children challenges my concept of family. Gwen and Dick’s marriage hints that there might be alternative models that I haven’t yet been exposed to. If their life does not focus on raising children, what brings them together? Why do they stay married?

I now realize that Bob and I may have served a similar function for Anne when she was growing up. Knowing us in even the limited way that occurred in her formative years might have enabled Anne to entertain new possibilities for imagining the future, perhaps even a queer future. Queer not necessarily in an explicitly sexual way, although there is always that, but queer in a socially nonconforming way, at least when viewed against the backdrop of the choices that her own parents had made.

There is no small irony in the fact that my appreciation of silence is in part what allows me to bear witness to my father’s suffering in his last years. For while this appreciation is deeply embedded in my gay history—filled as it was with a curiosity about social differences of all kinds and the management of secrets—initially such an anathema to him, it is ultimately essential to tolerating his difficult times. Caring for my father expands my understanding of silence from a socially oppressive phenomenon to a medium through which complex interpersonal communications also transpire. This new awareness of how silence can function as communicative action does not replace but m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 121

rather exists alongside my earlier understandings so powerfully en-capsulated in the Silence = Death slogan of 1980s AIDS activists.

Finally, teaching about the tension between silence and voice, trying to make sense of the unspoken communications with my father, I look to queer theorist Eve Sedgwick for help. Prompted by a cancer diagnosis to reflect on her life, Sedgwick reads the classic Buddhist writings. Eschewing autobiography, the more traditional vehicle authors frequently use when facing death, she discovers in these texts a kind of pedagogical meditation in which the deathbed is continually produced as a privileged scene of teaching. Here too she finds the student and teacher roles are interchangeable. The caregiver receives far more than she is ever able to give. Means and ends are confounded.

Death is a means to some further ends. Death is a problem to be solved with skillful means. We strive to live with the continual consciousness of death and to die as we have lived.

In
Touching Feeling
Sedgwick recognizes that a central role of the teacher is to point to the world, identifying a problem or experience worthy of the student’s attention. She is not very sanguine, however, about the process entailed in such pointing. She is drawn to the space between language and experience, the object and its signifier, means and ends. In Buddhist writing, this pedagogical conundrum is referred to as “pointing at the moon.” As Walter Hsieh comments in
A Treasury of Mah¯ay¯ana S¯utras:

Employing speech as a skillful means, the Buddha spoke many sutras, which should only be taken as “the finger that points to the moon,” not the moon itself. The Buddha said, “I have not taught a single word during the forty-nine years of my Dharma preaching.” The sutras often admon-ish us to rely on meaning rather than on mere words. . . . Readers should bear in mind that it is not the words themselves but the attachment to words that is dangerous.

Dangerous attachments. Words and texts can take on a life of their own, cut off from the experiences in which they are grounded. Lives 122 n jonathan g. silin

like my father’s can produce fewer and fewer texts and are lived at an increasing distance from those who love them. What exactly am I learning about silence at my father’s bedside?

After many anxious and guilt-ridden conversations, my brother and I decide that we can no longer manage my father’s care at his apartment. He will remain permanently in the nursing home where he has gone after suffering a broken hip in 2000. His response to our carefully worded presentation is oblique, “Well . . . I am pretty well adjusted here for the period that they would find acceptable. After all, they aren’t going to get people with a twenty-year life expectancy. I am not rehabilitated yet.”

I am taken aback, worried that he doesn’t understand the permanent nature of the decision. When I reiterate that he will be moving to another floor and giving up his greatly prized single room, he indicates optimism as well as realism, “I may be dreaming,” he writes, “but I keep feeling that maybe I will progress to better days.”

A week later I am still pressing home the point, hoping for what?

Accusations, regrets, resolutions, cathartic words? It’s just after dinner. Because of my father’s difficulties swallowing, meals can last an hour or more. And because he communicates only with pen and paper, these are quiet occasions. I am eager to leave and eager for reassurance. “Dad, you know, if there’s anything you want to talk about, well, this might be a good time,” I say. I hand him the yellow legal pad on which he slowly and carefully prints these words, “Of course there is a lot I could talk about. But most of it is too painful to even think about.” Indeed, it’s too painful to think about because it has already been thought. He is pointing to the moon; the pointing and the moon are both the same and distinct.

I am still for a long time. Then I tell him, “Well, if you ever feel like talking, I am strong enough to hear what you have to say.” Of course, this bravado indicates the very opposite, my vulnerability rather than any strength. With a detached smile and a turn toward the television set, my father terminates our conversation. A master of words has spoken through his silence.

8

My Father, His Psychiatrists, and Me

Every analysis, in a sense, is about the obstacles to memory: people come for psychoanalysis

because the way they are remembering their

lives has become too painful; the stories they are telling themselves have become too coercive and restrictive. In so far as they have a dominant story about who they are, they have a repetitive story. And repetition, for Freud, is forgetting in its most spellbinding form.

a da m p h i l l i p s ,
Flirtation

Back when my father was eighty-seven, a time at which many bodies break down beyond repair, and no longer a candidate for medical interventions available to younger, more vital men, he was patched together with the help of a feeding tube, hearing aids, a walker, diapers, and the twelve medications that allowed him to get through each day.

Weakened and depressed by repeated illnesses, he has reason enough to be angry. Nonetheless, his sudden outbursts have become so frequent and intimidating that I am increasingly reluctant to call or visit, let alone speak with him about issues critical to his care. In more 123

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reflective moments, my father counsels me not to be afraid and insists that I can ask him anything. These reassurances don’t carry much weight with me these days.

Having lost control over his body, my father tries to assert his authority in other arenas. In the period between his first and second cancer surgeries, he redoubles his efforts to manage his personal finances. He is unable to remember facts and figures as he once did or to do the complicated mental math that my entire family had always been in awe of. He urges me to use the new hand-held calculator that sits on his desk but does not resort to it himself. Treating me like an incompetent employee who does not devote sufficient time to the job, he showers me with bitter harangues about my failure to keep him informed of his income and expenses. But no amount of information can satisfy him now because he retains little and because he is no longer amenable to rational argument.

After one particularly acrimonious dispute has died down, I comment on his determination to stay on top of things. Alluding to our argument, my father responds with a self-satisfied laugh, “Yeah, I knew you were coming so I marshaled my energy.” I laugh along with him and admit that I felt ambushed, totally unprepared for his sudden attack. In truth, I am made uneasy by my father’s rapid shifts of mood and his canny insights. His laughter sounds unnatural, the lingering residue of an earlier hospital psychosis. A masklike persona hides an incomprehensible personality shift.

At the same time, I can’t help but wonder when I became the enemy, an intruder whom my father prepares to do battle with. Was it the day I took my parents to the lawyer who pointed out the inadequacies of their carefully drawn but long-outdated plans for their final years? Was it the day when, because he was suffering from the effects of severe dehydration, my mother and I coerced him to go to the hospital against his will? Or was it some far more distant event, even the sum of our history together, that makes me both a loved and a provocative presence to him? My father’s ambivalence toward me, the m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 125

caregiver who has assumed responsibility for financial and medical decision making, is never hidden, always on display.

Once my father takes aim, I am an easy mark for his rage. With inadequate internal defenses, I soak up his anger and anxiety like a dry sponge. When he is in the hospital, I wake up in the middle of the night worrying if he is asleep or needs help getting to the bathroom.

It is an unsettling feeling as I imagine myself in his room but am unable to protect him from discomfort, and I can’t fall back to sleep.

We have made a mess of the boundaries that might have enabled us to maintain a healthier degree of sovereignty in our own psychic domains.

I know that my father’s anger is a sign of life, a vital assertion of his presence in the world. He will not be ignored. He rails against the gap between the image he once projected—in charge, self-sufficient, proudly independent—and the reality of who he has become, someone reliant on others to satisfy the most basic needs, from eating and drinking to getting out of bed and dressing in the morning. But he rails against more than the loss of physical mobility. According to the Rousseauean ideal, a truly free person “wants only what he can get, and does only what pleases him.” Happiness is possible only when our powers and desires are in accord. My father is a slave caught between his desires and his inability to fulfill them. Rousseau’s maxim aside, contemporary psychologists suggest that the story of human development may be understood as the growing recognition of this tension, of the space between self and other, as well as our growing skill at securing what we want. In old age, my father is painfully aware of the gap between his wants and his ability to fend for himself. He is a good learner but not a fast learner and is slow to adapt to these changed circumstances.

My social worker friends tell me that the elderly want to talk about the past. They say that constructing a coherent life narrative is a therapeutic process through which my parents will be able to place events and people in meaningful relationship to each other. Revising their 126 n jonathan g. silin

story to incorporate recent illnesses will help them to attain control over uncontrollable events, to understand the new catastrophes in terms of familiar themes. Through such talk they may give shape and finality to their losses. At a time when visits to professionals dominate daily life, my parents can assert expertise with the authoritative telling of their lives.

Although such a life-review process is not one in which they normally engage with me, I do see it in action on the cold, rainy winter day that a nurse comes to evaluate my parents for enrollment in Medicaid. They have fiercely fought the Medicaid designation but have finally resigned themselves and know that the interview is critical to remaining in their own apartment. I arrive late, tied up in city traffic, and harassed, but the nurse arrives even later and more harassed. I presume that the nurse will want to hear directly from my parents so that she can assess their emotional and cognitive impairments as well as their physical disabilities. I understand my job as facilitative and plan to stay in the background as much as possible. At the same time I am eager to monitor my parents’ storytelling so that the medical details, diagnoses, and limitations of their functioning insure their eligi-bility for Medicaid.

I need not have worried. My father does a full and complete job of recounting the last years. He subtly and coolly displays his intellect and connectedness to the world. Before my arrival he has even located the 1989 MRI documenting his spinal stenosis, the disease that has made his walking so precarious, which the nurse will look at gravely but respectfully return to him for safekeeping. He will also pull items from a notebook overflowing with health updates, information about stocks and investment options, and news clippings about research on the radiation scarring that has left his throat burned and filled with mucus. The experienced nurse quickly adjusts to my father’s speech, which is very slow and barely audible. Surprisingly he doesn’t mind when I add dates or resequence events. At times like this, after the battle about applying for Medicaid has long passed, we can work like a team. He knows that Medicaid assistance is the only m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 127