My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (2 page)

Despite my reliance on early childhood skills, I did not see my mother and father as children. No matter how dependent they became, they were still my parents. Our history was not erased by their changed circumstances, no matter how often I was called upon to contain their feelings of loss and anxiety. I tried to perform the role of reassuring presence in their life. Just as I learned during the first fire drills of each school year to say with a calm authority to the apprehensive four-year-olds by my side, “I will make sure that nothing happens to you. I will take care of you,” so I learned to talk with my mother about her upcoming cataract surgery and to my father about the replacement of his gastronomy tube. But to imagine that our roles were reversed would have undermined their dignity while burdening me with confusing emotions.

In his book
In the American West,
the photographer Richard Ave-don said of his work, “A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph, it is no longer a fact m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n xvii

but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” In the end, it is my telling of our family story that is recorded here. I have tried to situate this telling in the idiosyncrasies of my perspective. There are certainly other perspectives from which the story might have been written, and there are other authors in my family who may one day choose to do just that. For the moment, I can only hope that my parents would feel that their final years have been well told, and their experiences imbued with meanings not too terribly distant from ones that they would recognize, if not necessarily claim as their own.

1

New Responsibilities

If you want to endure life, prepare for death.

sigmund freud, “Thoughts for

the Times on War and Death”

We are in the lawyer’s office. My father walks with a metal cane with four prongs at the bottom to steady himself. The combination of spinal disease and partial loss of sight makes his balance precarious.

My mother, dressed in a Depression-era brown suit, raincoat, and hat to match, still moves quickly and independently. She is forever pressing ahead of my father, seemingly unaware of how slowly he moves.

The stomach surgery and torn knee ligaments that will soon impede her mobility have not yet taken their toll. She clutches a manila envelope. We are here at my insistence to review the legal documents—

wills, powers of attorney, living wills—that are designed to ensure a measure of control over the uncertainties that inevitably surround illness and death.

I am beginning to feel the weight of new responsibilities. But I am totally unprepared for what I hear, and don’t hear, once we are installed in the glass-walled conference room. We sit at the far end of a long table, my mother and father next to each other on one side and 1

2 n jonathan g. silin

I on the other. When Mr. Halperin enters, he sits at the head of the table, between us, in the negotiator’s position. A short, slightly over-weight, solid-looking burgher in dark blue suit, this man of affairs is considerably younger than I. I am sharply conscious of my own age, fifty-one at the time, and wonder if my parents’ fragile appearance somehow makes me look even older. He talks easily and with confidence. I am reassured. Despite my parents’ resistance, I have done the right thing bringing them here.

My father speaks slowly and deliberately as he provides the demo-graphic information requested, including details about my brother and his wife and child. When he finishes, there is a long silence.

Something is wrong. My heart is pounding, my hands are shaking, and adrenaline is coursing through my body. Then, overcoming a deep sense of terror, emboldened by a mix of anger, defiance, and urgency, I speak the unspeakable. I announce that I too live with someone. I too am an adult with a life partner who cannot be expunged from the record. Without hesitation, Mr. Halperin turns to me and notes the information I provide about Bob, my partner of twenty-five years.

When I finally look up at my parents, their faces register shock and distress. They say nothing.

It can’t be the information I convey that leaves my parents silent.

After all, I have been openly gay for decades, Bob regularly attends family functions, and they actually seem to like him. No, it is my insistence that Bob be written into the official story of our family that upsets my parents so deeply. In more generous moments, I think about how difficult it must be for my conventional, middle-class parents to speak about a gay relationship. In some ways their vocabulary has not caught up with their behavior. In other ways their cordial but emotionally distant relationship with Bob is not unlike their relationship with my brother’s wife. Although she is an officially documented member of the family, she is not mentioned in their wills. My brother and I are to receive income from a trust, and upon our deaths the money will go to my niece.

Mr. Halperin, a specialist in elder care, quickly declares my par-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 3

ents’ plan inadvisable; the small size of the estate would provide little income and be quickly consumed by bank fees. Later, when I point out the inequity of the arrangement since I don’t have children, my parents express outrage at the idea that someone who is not a blood relative might ultimately inherit their money. Mr. Halperin ends the meeting with a description of the financial risks that my parents incur by retaining direct control over their resources should they require prolonged hospitalization or care at a nursing home. He advises them to place their money in a Medicare trust immediately.

We leave the meeting dazed. I because of the emotional energy required to assert Bob’s place in the family, and my parents because they are forced to confront the inadequacy of their carefully wrought plans. Implicit too is the message that their youngest son, the rebel of the family who is not supposed to care about material matters, has taken the lead in developing a practical strategy for the future. Suddenly the ground has shifted. We are crossing a border into another country, the country of the frail elderly.

Although my parents are yet to suffer the multiple medical crises that will bring us to the heart of this new territory, a subtle psychological shift begins in Mr. Halperin’s conference room. It’s been a long and difficult passage from the time when my parents were newly retired and still independent to the present, when they are reliant on a cornucopia of medications and round-the-clock health aides to get through the day. In the beginning, neither they nor I knew where we were going, or even that we were in the midst of a journey. We were reluctant travelers who would have preferred to stay just where we had been during the prior decades. But within two years, a series of life-threatening illnesses rapidly propelled us forward into the domain of the frail elderly. We were each in our own way still struggling to understand the changed situation and our radically altered relationship.

After our meeting with Mr. Halperin that afternoon, I place my parents in a taxi and head for the subway. At Bank Street College, where I teach teachers, there will surely be sympathetic listeners for 4 n jonathan g. silin

the drama that has just played itself out. Although the degree of direct involvement differs, everyone has a story to tell about aging parents. While we once talked about students, proposed changes in the curriculum, and our visits to local schools as we waited to use the copy machine, now my colleagues and I are more often overheard discussing the merits of various nursing homes, health aides, and geria-tricians. Like my immediate peers, I find it difficult to establish the right distance from my parents. At times I am envious of my older brother, who has lived in Asia since his graduate school days and long ago established the geographic and emotional space that characterizes his response to their needs. As I struggle to maintain practical and psychological boundaries when assisting my parents, time becomes blurred. Even as my new role evokes memories of childhood, I am forced to abandon images of my parents as omniscient and invulnerable and myself as the one in need of care and protection. I am forever a child—even as I have become the decision maker and emotional center of the family.

In the beginning of my parents’ decline, I spent a great deal of time testing the present against what I remembered of the past, mourning my lost youth and the parents who were part of it. It seemed the only way to make sense of what was happening, of the radically changed relationship we had entered. My memories were hazy, and aspects of my parents I hadn’t seen before disoriented me. I had a sense of loss at the same time as I wasn’t quite clear about what I had given up. Was my father cantankerous and depressed or socially skilled and ambitious? Was my mother confident and extremely capable or shy and rid-dled with self-doubt? How could I reconcile the disparate images of now and then, of them and me?

Because I am an early childhood educator, I have many opportunities to think about the life cycle in more disciplined, less emotionally laden ways—observation in classrooms, work with teachers, and study of the scientific literature that describes human development.

Spending so much time with my parents, I find that I am not only revisiting my own past but also the very idea of childhood. The as-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 5

sumption that childhood is a long-ago event—one that is portrayed in popular books as leaving us either with scars that never completely heal or with deep nostalgia for an idyllic time that can never be recovered—no longer seems certain. The memories, relationships, and ways of knowing I thought I had abandoned years ago are still a dynamic part of the present. Perhaps development works through addition rather than substitution, with our new skills and insights joining rather than replacing old ones. Perhaps childhood is less a foundational moment fixed in the distant past than an open book that can be edited and reinterpreted over time.

In class the night after the meeting with Mr. Halperin, my parents’

lawyer, we discuss Amy Tan’s
The Joy Luck Club
. My niece, Anne, who grew up in Hong Kong and whose mother is Taiwanese, tells me that it is a book filled with stereotypes and that misrepresents Chinese culture. Nevertheless, I am still drawn to its central theme of loss and reconciliation, unashamedly moved by its sentimentality and descriptions of intergenerational conflict. When the book’s protagonist, June Woo, resists the suggestion of the club that she travel to China to tell her half-sisters about her mother’s death—“What will I say?

What can I tell them about my mother? I don’t know anything. She was my mother”—I feel the truth of her words in the pit of my stomach. In the class, I talk about the ineffable mysteries that often surround the people whom we know most intimately, as if our very closeness prevents us from seeing and appreciating the whole. Images from the afternoon fill my head. How do my parents understand this last period of their lives? What do they make of my efforts to help them organize their affairs? Why are they so reluctant to trust me?

Further on in the book, when another middle-aged daughter gains enough distance to recognize that her mother is no longer the formidable enemy she once imagined—“I could finally see what was really there: an old woman, a wok for her armor, a knitting needle for her sword, getting a little crabby as she waited patiently for her daughter to invite her in”—I think about being caught up in power struggles with my parents, struggles I presumed long over. We argue 6 n jonathan g. silin

over everything from household help and an appointment with the heart specialist to the purchase of a hearing aid and an application for a bank card. The frustration of trying to help two fiercely independent people sometimes causes me to lose all perspective and patience.

I am drawn back to the classroom by my twenty-something students, all women, who resonate with the stories of mother-daughter conflict in Tan’s book but complain that they have trouble telling the characters apart. They blame the author for failing to draw distinguishing psychological portraits of the mothers and daughters. I talk about cultural differences and the Western emphasis on the individual, and about the differences between novels, such as Amy Tan’s, in which the characters are defined by how they act or fail to act and novels that are predicated on extended exploration of their protagonists’ interior lives. I even manage to speak about some of the cultural myths to which my niece had alerted me. Afterward, however, as the students gather up their notebooks, half-eaten sandwiches, and containers of cold soup and coffee, I am left to gather together the emotional fragments of my own day.

During class I have tried to fend off thoughts of my aging parents even as I wonder if there are any larger lessons in their story for the students. Despite my parents’ growing fears and vulnerabilities, they are not childlike in any way. Nor do they give any indication that they expect or would like to be cared for. We have begun a complex dance in which I am learning to offer assistance, and they are learning to accept their new limitations. Never an accomplished dancer, I stumble frequently as I try to master new steps. I wonder about who is leading and who is following and find that I must listen carefully, for the music changes daily. Sometimes it is slow and sweet as we remember the past together, sometimes it is fast and staccato as we are pressed to make critical healthcare decisions. At other moments it seems that we are all on the same dance floor moving to different tunes.

This dance brings to the fore painful memories of my parents’ frequent and intrusive interventions into my own life. Hovering over me m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 7

as a child, they sought to read every emotional undercurrent for indications of restless waters, muddied streams, and paralyzing logjams.

While they celebrated my most minor achievements with pride, they also did not hesitate to secure professional assistance in the form of tutors and counselors if academic or emotional progress was in doubt.