My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (8 page)

Or reports from my own friends about elderly parents who, when faced with certain suffering and death, stopped eating and drinking.

Clearly some people in their final weeks or months are able to sort through their options, identify the quality-of-life limits they might tolerate, and orchestrate an ending that makes sense to them. My father, in contrast, seems to have turned a corner that makes such calm y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 43

culations impossible. Perhaps, given his constitution, they would never have been possible.

One thing is certain, the time for existential conversations about contingency and possibility, choice and mortality, is long gone. The terms for these deliberations set out by Camus and Sartre, Malraux and Beauvoir—the bad faith manifested in denying possibility, succumbing to fixity, and believing that time will not run out—still ring in my own ears. But they were laid down in another era, by thinkers who were faced with other kinds of life-and-death decisions necessitated by political and social commitments. For his part, my father sees no acceptable choices, there is no future worth living for, and good faith is a luxury that younger men concern themselves with. At the same time, he can hardly be said to be giving up and clearly does not want to die. Propelled forward by anger and anxiety, he pursues the impossible, a life without hope in the future, a life in which minute-to-minute, day-to-day survival is all that really matters.

My own days are now framed by the essential moments of the human condition, our natality, how to conceive of and nurture the beginning of life, and our mortality, how to live alongside someone who is dying. To me, caring for the very young and the very old is best understood as an ethical responsibility, a societal good in itself that should be separated from any ideas about future rewards. In a democracy that celebrates autonomy, self-sufficiency, and the accumulation of capital for the future, it may be especially hard to focus on the moment-to-moment needs of the dependent. The rewards of care are less tangible and the challenges to our value system that much greater.

My niece finds it difficult to look directly at my father’s situation and shuts out the confusing emotions that it elicits. In a similar way, when scientists and educators define children as undeveloped, they collude in trying to keep at bay the sometimes threatening emotions that are buried inside us. Locating irrational, impulsive, and pleasure-seeking behaviors in children allows us to see ourselves as rational, in control, and altruistically motivated. I am afraid that too often, well 44 n jonathan g. silin

intentioned caregivers such as my parents turn children into a ser-viceable other, one that reinforces their own identities as adults and justifies their control of young people’s lives. Like my parents more than half a century ago, professionals today believe that children require constant watching to insure that they do not get out of hand and challenge adult ways of organizing the world. Assisted by all manner of new technologies, classrooms, afterschool programs, and summer camps are set up to keep children physically in view at all times while increasingly sophisticated psychological assessments and academic tests bring to light qualities once hidden from sight.

And perhaps, for Anne and myself, it is no different with the elderly. We are frightened by what we see. My father forces me to confront mortality, to feel old before my time. I try to keep some distance in word and deed. If I describe him as needy, failing, and deeply depressed, then surely I am self-sufficient, thriving, and optimistic. If I declare him irrational and out of control, then surely I am reasonable and in charge. How can I possibly know what it would be like to live with all my senses askew and basic biologic functions mediated by mechanical devices or the assistance of others? How can I know what it means to have little regard for past accomplishments and future projects? Like children, the elderly force us to reorder our priorities, to step back from our concerns for tomorrow, and attend more closely to this day.

I was in graduate school when I first began to develop my criticisms of child development theory. Skeptical of the way it functions to distance teachers from their students, I wanted to explore the common ground adults share with children, the existential themes and ways of knowing that bind us together in one world. Other early childhood specialists were curious when I asked them to consider what is gained and what is lost when adults define children as “undeveloped,” in need of just the right amount and kind of protective nurture to mature properly. Ultimately, however, my peers in the field were unable to give up the security of the child development canon. When I comm y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 45

pleted my doctoral work, I was often a finalist, but did not receive the job offer I sought—a tenure-track professorship.

Then my words were couched in philosophical and political language. Now there is a much larger body of empirical evidence to substantiate my criticisms of developmentalism and educational practices that continually direct us toward the child’s future. Now too I have a heightened sensitivity to time gone by and of the options no longer available to my parents or to me. At first, I did not realize how threatened I felt by their despair, their lack of hope. But over time, I have come to understand the central place of hope in our arsenal of survival strategies. In hope we defend against the past; the future will be better. In hope we implicitly acknowledge our disappointments; something wasn’t right back then. Hope allows us to imagine a state of affairs in which the past is ameliorated and our deepest losses are compensated.

Theories and practices focusing exclusively on what children will become rather than what they are, however, reflect a kind of blind hope. Blind, that is, because it defends against remembering the ravages of personal and social histories. I think of myself as an advocate for a more modulated form of hope built on a willingness to look at the present and back at the past without allowing ourselves to be overcome by what we see.

Adults are hopeful because of the children. Children in turn contain this precious investment made by their elders. When time and illness destroyed my parents’ defenses and left them quite naked, they took little interest in my potential or my accomplishments. It was not my desire for their approval, although there is always that, but the withdrawal of their investment that signaled our changed relationship and triggered my deepest anxieties. Despite their many weaknesses, my parents were still powerful in ways that I am sure they didn’t imagine. I was angry about their ability to deprive me of the status they conferred at my birth, emblem of hope. At the same time I accepted their new self-absorption; after all, they were finally leaving the future to me.

4

Psychic Reality

[A] life as led is inseparable from a life as told—

or more bluntly, a life is not “how it was” but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold: Freud’s
psychic reality
. . . . So perhaps a metaphysical change is required to alter the narratives that we have settled upon as “being” our lives.

j e r o m e b ru n e r , “Life as Narrative”

Growing up, each of us builds an understanding of who our parents are and how our family functions. We construct an overarching narrative of our life and tell particular stories that capture the complex interpersonal dynamics that thread their way through our days. We tell these stories over and over again because they enable us to make sense of our experience and lend credence to the larger narrative. We come to believe in their reality. Over time these stories, our memories of the past, become fixed, and reinterpretation less likely.

Although my work is bound up with children and the role of autobiography in teacher education, my own childhood stories remained as immutable as anyone else’s. For me, however, when the overarching narrative finally became unsettled, it was not by a “meta-47

48 n jonathan g. silin

physical” change but by my parents’ all too physical decline and the frequent bedside scenes that followed.

The first time my mother lies in the critical care unit of a local hospital, in the spring of 1996, with her long hair unpinned, released from the tight French roll in which it is usually bound, I am stunned to see glimmers of youthful openness in her face. The medical crisis has caught her off guard, and she reveals an emotional accessibility that had disappeared many years ago. It is as if the surgeon’s knife has not only cut out the bleeding ulcer but also punctured an invisible wall surrounding her inner self. Here once again is the conscientious young parent capable of genuine empathy and pleasure in the achievements of her child. At the same time as I am thankful for this opportunity to think of my mother as the loving caregiver, I see with greater clarity the person she has become—fearful, anxious, and suspicious of others.

My mother had once projected competence and confidence. A social worker and businesswoman, she had lived through two successful careers. At home, continually challenging my extreme shyness, she encouraged me to be more adventurous—to climb to the top of the jungle gym unaided, attend a second-grade classmate’s birthday party, or risk the terrors of sleepaway camp. Whatever fears and insecurities my mother may have had at that time were kept in check by a stronger sense of parental responsibility.

In contrast, my father, while a loving and engaged parent, was subject to severe depression. I did not see him as possessing particular social skills or emotional resilience. In 1997, a year after my mother’s hospitalization, just after the first of his surgeries for cancer of the larynx, sitting at his hospital bedside late in the afternoon, I understand something quite different. As he recovers from throat surgery and is still unable to use his newly reconstructed voice box, an unfamiliar nurse is attaching a clear plastic bag of life-sustaining fluids to an IV

pole. My father taps the nurse on the shoulder to gain his attention, picks up a yellow pad, and writes a brief note in his cryptic handwriting. The nurse, who has temporarily stopped his work, breaks into a m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 49

broad smile as he deciphers the words, looks directly at my father, and says “Benjamin,” his own name. My father smiles back, and Benjamin returns to the task at hand. I am in awe of this simple interchange. My father is able to generate a life-sustaining fluid of another kind.

As a child, I knew my father to be a demanding, exacting, often exasperating person. Now I also know my father as a person who easily forms relationships. He treats the hospital staff with respect, as individuals. They respond in kind. My father is able to make his way in a large and frightening institution while ensuring some control over the course of his treatment. He skillfully collaborates in his own care when dealing with professionals of one stripe or another.

Although events change people, they also bring out aspects of character that have always existed. The past has become unfastened from its secure moorings in my memory. I wonder if my mother was as confident as she once appeared, as my memory has captured her. Was my seemingly intractable shyness an inherent character trait or the reflection of a complex maternal relationship? I understand that beneath the surface of her always encouraging words, my mother may have communicated deep ambiguity about separation and the risks of independence. Perhaps too my father was far more socially accomplished than I had realized, and my older brother far less able to deal with the “real” world than I had grasped.

Now, when my brother and I are faced with two frail parents, the entire family drama has to be restaged. As a child, I played the role of the “sensitive/creative” younger sibling. Resisting the confines of my middle-class upbringing, I became the black sheep—college dropout, gay man, nursery school teacher. My brother, more competitive and conforming, became a prosperous international businessman.

As adults, we do not live in the same world. It seems as if he has never seen anyone seriously ill; never known anyone who has died.

My experience of being a sexual outsider, and of working with young children and people with HIV/AIDS, has given me a different perspective on what matters most in our lives. Within our family I have become the responsible one, grounded in the mundane realities of 50 n jonathan g. silin

caring for fragile lives—finding domestic help, speaking with doctors, monitoring finances.

Until the precipitous decline in their early eighties, my parents frequently shared memories of their childhoods and retold our family history. There were the stories of my own childhood—the blizzard of

’48 when I was stranded in a snowdrift and the police had to be called; the summer of ’50 when I refused to enter the busy dining room of the Catskill resort until everyone sang “Happy Birthday”; the spring of ’52 when my father taught me to ride a two-wheeler that had been passed down from a neighboring cousin. I often grew impatient with these familiar renditions of the past as well as with my parents’ questions about childhood friends who had long since disappeared from my life. It became hard to tell what I actually remembered and what I had been told, what I had experienced and what my parents wanted to encode as part of the family saga.

Now my parents are no longer so easily seduced by nostalgia. They seldom seek the intimacy that is evoked by the sharing of personal memories. Concerned about my mother’s growing withdrawal after her surgery, I proffer invitations to remember herself at other points in time. She does not accept the bait, does not want to recall her full and busy life. Although my father can be both philosophical and practical about the future, surviving the regular medical crises requires all his energy. The unyielding demands of the body imprison my parents in the present.

Ironically, I find myself increasingly drawn to the past. As do most children, when I was growing up I saw my parents as omniscient. My father knew everything from how to count by tens, knot a tie, and hit a home run, to the names of all the state capitals and former presidents of the United States. My mother not only knew small things like how to tie a shoelace or a perfect bow on a birthday present, she also knew deeper psychological truths like the importance of self-confidence and the difficulty of trying new activities. There was always certainty in what my parents did and what they thought.