My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (24 page)

went to the hospital and she had her baby and it died. It was born too early. My mommy was crying.”

When the group gathers on the rug, Lenore asks the children who have contributed that morning if she can read their News of the Day out loud. Keisha sits next to Lenore again and is indeed eager to have her news read. When asked if there is anything she wants to add, she says “no.” Lenore herself then reviews the basics of pregnancy and childbirth that have been part of the ongoing curriculum. She reassures the children that only in rare circumstances do babies die. The class listens quietly and closely to everything that Lenore says.

In succeeding weeks Keisha’s entries return to the theme of loss:

“My hamster died. They were fighting.” “My fish died and my bird died.” “I thought I lost the book but my mommy found it on the hamster cage.”

My students have many questions. How does Lenore manage with twenty-seven children? How did she respond to Keisha when she first heard her story? What kind of administrative support does she have for these difficult conversations?

When Lenore leaves, Suzanne comments that she was struck by the silence of the other children in the classroom when Keisha’s news was read. As Suzanne speaks and others respond, I thought back to my experience just after Bob died. Upon returning to work, I wanted people to know but it was too soon for conversations of any sort. So with the help of a close friend I crafted a brief response to acknowledge the sympathy expressed by colleagues and to make clear that I would not engage in talk about the topic.

Feeling uneasy yet determined, I tell the class my own story and how it influences my reading of Keisha’s behavior. As they say, you could hear a pin drop in our room.

Then Dan breaks the silence. He recounts the time that Steven, one of his first graders, told the class about the death of his grandmother. Dan notes that other students responded by offering their own stories of loss but did not speak directly to Steven. Dan felt dis-156 n jonathan g. silin

appointed by this conversation. He describes the children as egocen-tric. I, on the other hand, see the long shadow still cast by Piaget in Dan’s words, a shadow that always underestimates children’s cognitive and emotional lives. For me, despite the absence of direct expressions of sympathy, the children’s counter-stories are best interpreted as attempts to identify and empathize with Steven.

Again, there is another long pause in our own conversation. The silence is palpable. Taking what feels like a further risk, I speak about the many losses endured by my colleagues in recent years. My instinct is to listen when someone wants to talk and, now that I am ready, to answer with my own experience. I am unable to imagine what it is like for Jeannie to lose her husband, Katherine her life partner, or Ken his father. Perhaps, not unlike Dan’s students, I reach out by sharing my own life.

As our conversation winds down that night, I wonder what my students understand about my own stories of managing loss. I remember that earlier in the semester, Deanna said she would not read a children’s book about a homeless family because she did not want to cry in front of her class. Like others in our group, she felt that children could not tolerate seeing adult expressions of vulnerability. Do my students need the same kind of protection? Have I gone too far?

Considering Suzanne’s concerns and my own, I ask the group if my stories have made me vulnerable in their eyes. Have I lost authority when talking about Bob’s death?

As a teacher educator, I feel responsible for making my pedagogy visible and legible, no matter how discomforting that might be. If I want my students to take risks in their classrooms, don’t I have to do the same? That night we leave thoughtfully and quietly. Something has changed for all of us. Our class of eighteen individuals is definitely becoming a group. We are working hard to understand how authentic learning occurs in the classroom.

Distracted by Bob’s death, my ability to care for my parents is severely compromised. That first December my brother and I decide to move m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 157

my mother from the large apartment where we grew up and which she has lived in for nearly fifty years into her sister’s even larger apartment. There is no other choice but a nursing home. Neither alternative is acceptable to my mother. Unfortunately, my parents have long ago run out of money and there are limits to my brother’s resources, which have sustained them for several years. My mother is in a state of despair. Life as she knows it is coming to end. Her grief is deep and all too real.

Although I try to encourage my mother’s participation in select-ing the furniture and few small objects she will take with her, she is paralyzed. I insist that the apartment remain completely intact until she walks out the front door. The chaos on the inside is not to be mirrored by disorder on the outside. Here I am undoubtedly speaking for myself as well. I cannot tolerate yet another disruption in the world I have known. I am ready to reconstruct a new home for my mother but not to dismantle the old. I leave that task to other family members.

Having heard endless accounts from friends of ugly family squab-bles about the division of property, I arrange to go through my parents’

apartment with my niece on an afternoon when my mother is at the nursing home. Anne and I have always worked well together and she is empowered to speak for her parents. I understand that the vase that stood for so long on the entryway table and filled weekly with fresh flowers, the set of china handed down from a favorite grandmother and only used on special occasions, and even the jewelry that made my mother appear so elegant on rare nights out, will soon end up out of sight, stored away in boxes. With this knowledge in mind, dividing up the furniture and other objects of monetary or sentimental value proceeds easily. We alternate choices, make concessions, note our sometimes different, sometimes similar sense of aesthetics, all while sharing stories elicited by the task at hand.

Fortunately, when my mother sees her familiar possessions assembled in her new room she is genuinely pleased. It is an auspicious beginning for what turns out to be the best possible compromise for all concerned. My aunt, at ninety-two, two years older than my mother, 158 n jonathan g. silin

is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Her initial worries about the loss of privacy that could happen with the new living arrangements do not materialize. Her own life is becoming increasingly circumscribed and self-absorbed. The sisters, each with her own caregiver, seem to genuinely enjoy each other’s company, and benefit from the distractions provided by the other’s visitors. My aunt, more outgoing, more able to confront life’s vicissitudes, more willing to see the positive, shares with my mother not only a ninety-year history but also a propensity for critique of the caregivers to whom they are both in reality closely attached. It is as if this dinnertime ritual of criticism draws them together for a few minutes each night, an act of resistance to their dependency as well as an evocation of an era gone by.

While not her choice, my mother’s move was fortunate in other ways that could not have been predicted at the time. In March, after several bouts of pneumonia, my father suddenly dies. Already ensconced in her sister’s apartment, my mother has ready-made company and cannot sink into complete despair. I do not think she would have tolerated the death of my father and the loss of familiar surroundings had one followed immediately upon the other.

I am not with my father when he dies. I visit him several days before, prompted by a call from the nursing home. Going through the giant blue binder that contains his most recent medical history, the floor nurse cannot find a “do not resuscitate” (DNR) order on file.

Would I please fill one out or speak with my father about it?

In the late morning of a fine March day I walk from my office to my father’s room in the nursing home. He is most alert and at his best before lunch, and my mother will not yet have arrived, a potentially complicating factor. I find him surprisingly calm and relaxed. It seems as if the bouts of pneumonia that he suffered from all winter have drained him of the dementia and extreme mood swings. I stand close by his bedside so he can see me with his good eye and hear me clearly.

After two pairs of hearing aids disappear, we do not bother with a third. They are simply too small or too valuable to be tracked by the nursing home staff. I explain the reason for my visit. My father looks m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 159

at me with understanding and replies in his increasingly weak but still legible print, “Of course I want a DNR order. I’ve always wanted one.”

His tone is almost indignant. How could his wishes have not been known and carried out? “OK, Dad,” I reply with great relief, no longer put off by his minor assertions of authority. “Do you want to sign it yourself or should I?” His response, “You sign it,” is both a dismissive command and an indication of trust. Nothing is ever simple.

After I take care of the paperwork, I return to spend an unusually easy hour with my father. One topic leads comfortably into the next.

As I walk back to my office I am thankful for the satisfying interview.

The clarity and crispness of the day echoes the mood in my father’s room. I know it’s been a special time but not exactly how special until several days later.

Again it is the floor nurse who calls in late afternoon to say that the nursing home is sending my father to the hospital emergency room. They have been trying unsuccessfully over the past week to get him an appointment with a pulmonologist and have determined on the emergency room strategy as the fastest way to get him evaluated.

I know this unhappy strategy only too well and that my father might be stranded in a hospital corridor for many hours waiting to be seen.

Partially blind, his writing now deteriorated so that it is almost impossible for strangers to read, he may be forced to lie on a gurney unable to communicate. The nurse assures me that of course they will send his chart with him, but it is against policy to send a human being. It is not a life-threatening situation. Then why not wait until the morning, when it is more feasible for him to be accompanied by a family member? Is the situation more serious than she is willing to let on?

How hard has the home really tried for the pulmonologist’s assessment in the preceding weeks? Is this simply bad timing, or a lack of forethought?

I have just returned to Amagansett from New York and immediately call my brother, who happens to be in the city. He is reluctant to leave his business meeting. I explain in graphic detail what my father’s experience is likely to be in the emergency room. Within the hour my 160 n jonathan g. silin

brother calls from the hospital, where he has been able to locate my father. No doctor has examined him yet. An hour later there is another call. A doctor has just seen my father and diagnosed him with sepsis, a severe and often fatal infection. My brother reports that even though they have started him on massive doses of antibiotics, in the doctor’s words, “the prognosis isn’t good.” I am in shock. From a pul-monary assessment to a deadly infection? When did it begin? Before he got to the hospital? In the emergency room itself, a function of a severely compromised immune system? Of course my brother can’t answer these questions, nor can I convince him to stay any longer.

It’s close to 7 pm. I get the doctor’s phone number and am surprised to reach her immediately. Yes, she has seen my father. I push for a definitive statement about the “bad prognosis.” She is friendly and professional but resists my prodding. Finally hearing my insistence, she uses guarded, carefully chosen words to tell me that “in cases like your father’s, if he doesn’t respond to the drugs within two or three hours, he may not last the night.”

By now I’ve missed the last bus to New York and I don’t trust myself alone on the long drive. Perhaps more to the point, I am not impelled to be with my father. I believe that our “final” moment has occurred earlier in the week, when he directed me to sign the DNR

order. He was calm, in charge, almost heroic during that encounter and there is part of me that wants to remember him that way. There is part of me too that is exhausted by the years filled with all of the unheroic moments when his needs took precedence over everyone else’s. In what turns out to be this final night of my father’s life, I am paralyzed by the inevitability of another loss only eight months after Bob’s death. I keep my physical distance because I need to sustain an emotional barrier. In this way I am selfish and self-protective. These are hardly admirable emotions, hardly the thoughts of an ideal caregiver, but all too real nonetheless.

I want someone to be with my father and in my eyes that person should be my brother. I call my brother at home and tell him what the m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 161

doctor has said. He does not believe that my father recognizes him any longer and sees no reason to go back to the hospital. The one thing we agree upon is not to call my mother, who seems too frail to withstand an all-night bedside vigil. At 11:00 pm my brother calls from my father’s room. He has enlisted Anne to accompany him. The drugs have not taken effect and my father mostly sleeps. Why stay?

The next day I learn that my brother and Anne wait for a while longer and then, when asked to leave the room for a few minutes while the nurses try to make my father more comfortable, leave. My father dies alone somewhere between 3 and 4 am. I am not surprised by the 5 am call with the news. It’s not like the call about Bob’s death.

I experience no disbelief and very little emotion at all other than relief that his interminable suffering has ended and that we have managed a successful final interview. I do wonder, why now? Why not two years ago or two weeks from now? The moment of death is completely arbitrary.

In the months to follow I forgive myself as I know my father would have forgiven me for being an imperfect caregiver, for not rushing to his beside in the middle of the night. More disquieting is the unexpected guilt that I experience when thinking about my father’s death at all. I am torn between two losses and believe that all my emotional attention rightfully belongs to Bob. Yet images of my father periodi-cally intrude into the carefully measured spaces that I have created to contemplate my life with and now without Bob. It’s an awkward, unsettling internal competition, one that neither Bob nor my father would approve, one that I hope is ended in these pages, in this attempt to make sense of the final years of my father’s life.