My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (3 page)

When I was in the throes of an adolescent identity crisis, struggling to manage my first gay love affairs, my mother’s letter to the psychiatrist requesting information about my treatment seemed unforgivable to me. The fact that she was a former mental health professional made my outrage at her failure to respect the confidential nature of the therapeutic relationship all the more bitter.

Now I have become the intrusive one, no longer trusting my parents to provide accurate reports of their medical interviews. Some time ago, I timidly asked my father’s permission to call his doctor. I was taken aback by his response, “Of course. You
should
call. You’re my son.” I immediately reproached myself for having waited too long to do what sons
should
do. On reflection, I understood his reply not as a rebuke but as an invitation to become more actively involved in his care. My father was instructing me about what he expects and needs.

My mother too has ideas about what a son should do, although they are not about speaking to others, but about how to communicate in a crisis. These instructions were delivered from her bed in the intensive care unit of the hospital, on the day following the surgery to repair an ulcer that had burst through the lining of her stomach, when peritonitis threatened her life. My mother’s speech was slurred, the lingering effects of multiple painkillers, but her presence of mind was unshaken. She lay immobile, tubes of every description leading into and out of her body. When I entered the room, I immediately took her hand. Naturally shy and undemonstrative, I have been taught by HIV/AIDS the necessity of overcoming this reticence. Just as quickly, my mother asked, “Is your hand shaking?” My mother had not been given to straight talk in the past, and I was taken aback. Her words seemed out of character. “No,” I lied in response to her query as she 8 n jonathan g. silin

went on sternly, “Because I don’t need that.” My mother was clearly telling me what she needed, and I tried to provide the strength she was asking for. Later, when my father tried to tease her about getting better so that she could look after him, the expression on her face told me that she wasn’t amused. She wanted only to be cared for, intoler-ant at the moment of anyone else’s weaknesses.

Sometimes my parents’ instructions were less direct and more subtle, as on the day we were squeezed into the booth of a coffee shop not far from the apartment that my father’s eldest sister had lived in for many years. Nearly ninety, she had moved into a nearby nursing home. It was an unusual event for us to be eating lunch together, but then so was the occasion, a respite from sorting through the contents of her soon-to-be-relinquished apartment. My father cleaned his hands with a Wash’n Dri towelette, one of the great modern conveniences for someone phobic about germs and eating in unfamiliar places. After some talk about the remaining tasks—securing a reputable antiques appraiser, the difficulties of arranging the Salvation Army pickup, the appropriate order in which various family members might stake their claims on cherished objects—I cleared a space for my own impatient query. Why had it taken two years to let go of the apartment? I wanted to know. How could they rationalize paying so much rent for so long on an unoccupied apartment? By then my father was eating his tuna fish directly from the single-serving-size can so as to avoid the unsanitary procedure of picking up a sandwich.

My mother pecked, birdlike, at her food. They were both clearly uncomfortable with my line of questioning. My father frowned and remained silent. “Far too much to eat,” my mother evasively exclaimed, as if overwhelmed by the untidy aesthetics of the egg salad that oozed from between the slices of rye bread. Finally, my father ventured that he had been waiting for the right moment. I pressed forward. How did he know that she was ready now? A man who usually enjoyed a large vocabulary and the hunt for the perfect words to describe a person or event, my father was suddenly and surprisingly inarticulate. He resisted my probes, as if I had asked an embarrassingly personal ques-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 9

tion. He acknowledged that although he knew that giving up the apartment was inevitable, he had had no idea when that moment would come. In the last several months, however, my aunt had made no references to her former home or possessions. It was not that she had forgotten the apartment so much as that it had disappeared from her immediate view. She was ensconced in the nursing home routines and knew no other life.

Although everything that my father said made sense, I found myself dissatisfied with his explanation and the reluctant way in which it was proffered. I knew my father was a kind and thoughtful person; after all, he had even arranged for my aunt to make one last visit to the apartment before it was dismantled. And several weeks later, I was impressed by the controlled and generous way my aunt talked about the furniture that I had taken from her apartment—the dining room table that now sits neatly against the wall in the small house in which Bob and I have lived for so long and that miraculously expands to accommodate twelve for our frequent holiday dinners, the two darkly lacquered and vaguely oriental side chairs that provide our otherwise ordinary living room with a touch of elegance, the little black chest of drawers that so conveniently contains our wills and other important papers. Yet it took several years for me to appreciate the wisdom of my father’s judgment. I came to understand how important the passage of time could be in helping my parents themselves adjust to previously unacceptable conditions, to the loss of control over their bodies and of the independence they cherished. I saw how being consumed with getting through the present could trump nostalgia for the past, and how a preoccupation with what has been lost can be cur-tailed by an attentive gesture in the moment.

As an educator, I should not have been surprised that the instruction my parents offered in the coffee shop required several years to take hold. I am supposed to know about the complex ways that teaching and learning occurs, about the difficulties of separation from loved ones and the comforting, transitional objects that contain our sadness and our memories. After all, beginnings and endings aren’t so very dif-10 n jonathan g. silin

ferent. They are times in our lives when autonomy and dependency, desire and self-sufficiency, affiliation and separation are experienced in heightened forms.

Despite these many parallels, my knowledge of early childhood is far more complete than my knowledge of old age, my educator voice far more certain than my eldercare skills. I have only to recall my increasingly frequent and anxious visits with my parents when I was still overwhelmed by their problems and my own desire to fix them. I fret-ted uselessly about their apartment that suffered from decades of neglect. I saw carpets worn black with dirt, chairs lumpy with broken springs, lamps covered with torn shades. I desperately wanted these things to matter to my parents—but they didn’t. I tried to organize the kitchen counters littered with dozens of pillboxes, bottles of cough syrup, and warnings about the dangers of the very drugs keeping them alive. As we talked of symptoms and treatment options, I feverishly sorted through piles of unopened mail, stacks of unread magazines, accumulations of unused coupons. I wanted to create order out of the confusion brought on by so much illness.

When I come to visit, it always seems that I am leaving too soon.

There is never enough time. When I arrive, I focus on my mother, whose first question is about the length of my stay and the bus that I will take home. Although she continues to glance anxiously at her watch throughout the visit, the conversation shifts to the events of my week. Always the great escape artist, eager to pretend that everything is okay and to find relief from her own difficulties in other people’s lives, she does not want to talk about herself and the endless round of doctors’ appointments that mark her days. From a distance, I understand that for my mother, denial has been an effective survival strategy. Up close, I experience impatience, sometimes anger. It is often impossible to determine problems in need of attention and hard to always fill the void left by her lack of self-representation with di-verting stories from my own life.

After attending to my mother, I turn to my father, knowing that m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 11

neither he nor I will be satisfied with the evening’s accomplishments.

It’s not for lack of planning, but in his late eighties he tires easily and has difficulty staying focused. I try to set out a short agenda. I wait till we have settled in a bit. When he is especially fatigued or withdrawn, this entails a silent sitting together. If he is outgoing and energetic, he reports the latest crisis precipitated by a misplaced bill or a govern-ment form in need of completion. Experience teaches me that any one of these tales of loss and recovery can take over the entire evening. I listen with care but don’t ask too many questions.

Given my father’s desire to take an active part in managing his own affairs and my commitment to a collaborative effort, I soon venture my own list of concerns, the product of a week’s deliberation.

While my father is often caught up in the most immediate events—

making sure that the rent is paid no later than the tenth of the month or that his taxes are posted by April 15—my interests might best be classified as midrange—bringing some order to the Byzantine banking arrangements that make it impossible to keep accurate records or setting up a visit to a psychiatrist to adjust the antidepressant drugs that no longer seem effective. Our concerns are different. Although my father has demonstrated every determination to live through several medical catastrophes, he grows impatient and angry with discussions about the future. I, on the other hand, who did not know a treasury note from a junk bond just a few years ago, now wake up at night obsessed with the latest interest rates and best forms of investment.

Thinking that one or both of my parents may live into their nineties, I want us to be prepared as best we can.

By the end of the visit, we have negotiated a program that includes one issue from his list and one from mine. We are both exhausted and cranky. Perhaps he is right anyway; better to stay in the moment than worry about an unpredictable future. Needing to catch my bus, I know I haven’t stayed long enough. How could it ever be enough?

Part of me leaves my parents as an adult leaves a young child on the first day of school, wondering if she can really make it on her own.

Will the home health aide be up to the task of caring for my parents?

12 n jonathan g. silin

Will they behave or will some sudden outburst cause her to quit? Another part of me leaves as a child leaves a parent, ambivalent about my ability to survive without them. Infirmities aside, my parents still provide a slim barrier against my mortality. At the same time, I imagine the relief I will feel when they are dead. These guilty thoughts are only tempered by sadness at their severely diminished capacities.

2

Out of Control

To tolerate life remains, after all,

the first duty of all living beings.

s i g m u n d f r e u d , “Thoughts for

the Times on War and Death”

The clock on the newly installed electronic signboard looks official, almost believable. It reads 3:04, the precise moment my train is supposed to arrive. I am outside, on platform number one of Newark’s Penn Station, avoiding the damp waiting area with its musty smells and crowded benches. Leaning over the track, peering ahead, seeing no movement of any kind, I calculate the chances—fifty-fifty—of completing a phone call before the train pulls in. It is a courtesy call to my parents—“Okay if I stop by?” I will ask politely—knowing full well there is nothing they can say that will stop me.

It’s been a better than usual day. The Jefferson Avenue School has a large cluster of teachers working with the major urban school-reform project for which a colleague and I serve as the researchers/

evaluators. The principal has even provided us with a small office, and I don’t have to ask for the key to the men’s room, as I do at our ten other sites. The office is crammed with old metal filing cabinets, 13

14 n jonathan g. silin

desks, and storage boxes belonging to a previous reform effort that has long since been disbanded. But it’s a good place to hang a coat, store a backpack, and seek a few minutes respite from a round of classroom observations.

Inevitably I come away from these visits impressed by the struggle of the teachers to meet the many needs of their students who are growing up in severely decaying neighborhoods. The teachers must also circumvent the multiple obstacles placed in their paths by the district bureaucracy. Everywhere I see reams of meaningless paperwork, including elaborate lesson plans without relevance to the children’s lives and individual education plans for learning disabled students without resources to implement them. The teachers’ desks are piled high with batteries of standardized tests and guidebooks to new reading and math programs that will be deployed in their under-staffed and overpopulated classrooms. A calendar distributed by the district displays eight different diagnostic tests that must be adminis-tered a total of twenty-one times between September and June in the kindergarten. Some tests are given several times a year and others require the teacher to sit with each child for ten uninterrupted minutes, no mean feat for even the most well-organized teacher alone in a room with twenty-three five-year-olds.

Images from the day—Catherine’s extraordinary conversation with her kindergartners, Stephanie’s calm control of her second grade, and the chaos of Diane’s first grade—fill my head as I reach for the phone, awkwardly crouch down to the key pad, and begin the laborious task of punching in the twenty-three digits required by my credit card call. As I wait, listening to the ringing of the phone and for the sound of an approaching train, I wonder who will answer.

While my mother was once guardian of the phone and monitor of all worldly contact, my father has just begun to usurp this function. An important practical and symbolic shift indicating his renewed interest in social life, it is testimony to the workings of a powerful new drug cocktail—an antipsychotic to reduce agitation, a tranquilizer to in-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 15