My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (9 page)

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Entering adolescence, I began to understand that despite their different realms of knowing, they shared a deep belief in the natural superiority of their children. This superiority, when realized through academic distinction and participation in the full panoply of extra-curricular activities, would lead to later successes. Acceptance at the right college assures admission to an elite professional school, which in turn lays the groundwork for a life of economic security, perhaps even public recognition. Because the world is a threatening place, we must either enter armed with sufficient credentials to protect ourselves or face the irreversible outcomes of our early mistakes.

I grew up in bondage to the future. And, inevitably, I rebelled

—dropping out of college, actualizing my homosexual desires, and rejecting a safe career. I found support for my moment-to-moment orientation among the existentialist writers popular with disaffected youth in the 1950s. They taught me about choice and possibility, resistance and rebellion, contingency and the value of keeping death in front of us at all times. Later, I carried these interests with me into the classroom. As a new teacher, undaunted by Piaget’s pronouncements about limited intellectual abilities and warnings from psychoanalysts about potential emotional upsets, I explored the children’s here-and-now understandings of death. I decried the absence of books that would help other teachers do the same. Still further on, when AIDS

became an overwhelming presence in my personal and professional life, I championed discussions of HIV and other difficult social issues with young children. In this way I continued to resist assumptions about what children can and can’t understand, about the differences between the young and the old.

On the rare occasions that my parents become nostalgic about the past, I remind them of their persistent attempts to control my future.

My parents acted as if their constant surveillance would assure the outcomes they desired. With this belief, they validated their personal sacrifices and tried to negate the gratuitous nature of life.

My parents were models of self-sacrificing, child-centered caregivers who appeared to have few interests beyond the welfare of their 52 n jonathan g. silin

family. Seldom did they display physical or emotional affection toward each other. I sometimes wonder what my childhood would have been like if I had experienced a few healthy doses of benign neglect.

What if my overly zealous middle-class parents had spent less time reading about the ages and stages of child development and more time tending to their own needs as adults? As the oldest in his working-class family, my partner, Bob, was privy to some of the pleasurable rituals that his parents indulged in. His mother, who worked as a housekeeper for much of her life, participated in weekly card nights around the kitchen table with her sisters and friends. Highballs were plentiful, off-color jokes abounded, and children were momentarily forgotten. Bob’s father, who worked in a factory during the day, played the drums at night. When he was younger there were even engage-ments at local clubs for his trio.

It’s not that my parents lacked for friends, but the tenor of their interactions were different. There were nightly phone calls to my father requesting advice about the stock market, business opportunities, or healthcare decisions. My mother fielded calls and occasional crisis visits from women friends seeking a sympathetic ear about a nasty divorce or an unmanageable depression. For myself, I was fascinated by a bevy of visiting aunts and uncles who would inevitably arrive in New York City with restaurant reservations in place, theatre tickets in hands, and a full calendar of social events planned. Closer to home I was intrigued and intimidated by my mother’s sister and her husband who, unlike my own parents, openly displayed their mutual attraction as well as their fierce disagreements, something my parents considered unacceptable. I grew up understanding little about how people live through passionate attachments to each other or the world, let alone how they let off steam and played together.

Revengefully, now as I try to help my parents manage, I want to tell them that all of their conscientious care—their attempts to shield me from discomforting emotions and to provide me with armor against a threatening world—was of no avail. But I don’t. All my diplomas didn’t protect me from illness or knowledge of death. Nor m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 53

has my respectable income made me a stranger to personal unhappiness. Above all I want to tell them that I was right about the future and they were wrong. But I don’t. I know that to say this would be to say the obvious, to cruelly underline the lessons that their final years are teaching them only too well.

Instead I focus on taking charge of my own memories, and the possibilities of editing them in fresh ways. Perhaps this interest is simply an artifact of time. For, until the recent hospital dramas, I have consciously sought to reassure myself that childhood is securely anchored in the early years, a fixed and knowable entity whose difficult emotions would not intrude upon the present. Through countless hours of therapy as a young adult living on my own, I had gained sufficient distance to cautiously look back at the homeland I had just left and to construct a story that would contain my feelings and explain who I had become. I seldom saw my parents during this period, and, when I did, the meetings were strained and uncomfortable. The psychological journey that I was engaged in seemed to require complete physical separation. I declared a moratorium on direct contact as I struggled to unpack the baggage that I had brought with me from childhood into the adult world.

I emerged from my twenties with a guidebook that helped me to appreciate the people and places of my childhood. Critical images had acquired explanatory captions and freshly drawn maps clarified the routes I had taken to achieve independence from my family. The unruly passions and conflicted relationships of childhood were organized in such a way that they were no longer quite so threatening.

This work of putting the past into an understandable set of stories allowed me to move forward with my life, to become a gay man comfortable with a still marginal social identity and capable of intimate, loving relationships.

I have never had a good sense of direction, and throughout my thirties and forties this guidebook allowed me to adhere to familiar ways of interacting and conversational themes when visiting my parents. We always remained on safe, clearly marked highways and 54 n jonathan g. silin

steered clear of dangerously ill-lit emotional alleys. These alleys, filled with my resentments over their controlling, intrusive, and ambitious ways, exuded the potential for unbearable emotional toxicity. My parents wanted to hold on to me at all costs and could not imagine a relationship that allowed for greater elasticity and independence. Reliving our early enmeshment did not feel like the way to move into the future but rather a retreat into an unacceptable past.

My feelings were no family secret. Back in my early twenties my mother’s sister invited me to afternoon tea. It was an unusual occasion, and once the formalities were completed and we settled in for our chat, I was unprepared for the subject matter—the unfathomable pain I was causing my parents. How could I, the youngest and most beloved of children in our extended family, be so angry and rejecting of my well-meaning parents? What could cause me to place such a distance between them and myself? Despite my deep respect for my aunt

—and part of me had to admire this direct intervention on behalf of her sister—I had little to say in response to her queries. It was all still too raw and tender. And what to do about that huge white elephant in the room, my unacknowledged gay life? The determined explorations that had begun in my early teens had resulted in serious if tu-multuous relationships with a number of older, married and single, gay men. In those pre-Stonewall days, I could only imagine how news of these relationships would be greeted. Understood? What forms of remediation might my clinically oriented family deem necessary to correct such obvious pathology?

Needless to say, fifteen years later when Bob was introduced into the family circle, his patently loving and steady manner helped to smooth out some of the rougher edges. Of course, as with any child in a committed relationship, it was less easy for my family to infantilize my life or to claim me for their own emotional needs. Nevertheless, when my mother’s sister had to make a difficult choice about invitations to an anniversary dinner hosted at an exclusive French restaurant with limited seating, she apologetically told me there was no room for Bob. Outraged, and unwilling to attend, I was persuaded by m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 55

Bob that I should not meet her act of estrangement with one of my own. Due to a last-minute cancellation, a place was finally found, but throughout the event memories of prior dinners in this five-star venue underwritten by an early boyfriend served as a reminder of the hidden life that had had its perks.

In retrospect, I see this incident of the early 1980s as occurring midway on the arc of family acceptance. My aunt was embarrassed and apologetic. She knew that she had behaved badly, and such social exclusions did not happen again.

Until my fifties, I have little reason to redraw the maps created in my twenties that had prevented me from getting lost or disoriented when dealing with my parents. Then I discover that the emotional terrain has been slowly transformed by the passage of time and the ravages of disease. I see that new maps are required to guide us through previously unimaginable scenes, such as my father’s near death from dehydration and my mother’s recurring ministrokes that leave her with many small cognitive impairments.

Indeed, it might be most realistic to say that my father’s reluctant hospitalization in 1998 does not end when he is wheeled out the front door into the waiting ambulette. Although he leaves physically stronger than when he entered, he also leaves mentally shaken. With the remnants of a hospital-induced psychosis common among the elderly, he frequently constructs elaborate stories that contain only a grain of truth. Like memories of childhood, his tales of the hospital require that the listener attend to the emotional message rather than literal accuracy of the narrative. The hospitalization itself is bracketed by an inaugural moment when his resistance to admission gives way under the pressure of my mother’s desperate plea—“I want you to go.

Do it for me. Do it now”—and a concluding moment that takes place two weeks after he is discharged.

Just as on the first occasion, we are assembled in the dining room, my father at the table, my mother on the sofa. Again, my niece has discreetly placed herself in the living room, able to hear but not to 56 n jonathan g. silin

participate directly in the conversation. Today my father is opening and sorting his mail, a time-consuming activity that he does with fierce concentration. Hunched over the table, he does not look up when I enter the room, but I can see that his face is drawn and tense.

Nor does he offer words of greeting when I place my hands on his brittle, bony shoulders.

I am confused and made uncomfortable by my father’s steely silence as I converse with my mother about routine matters. Remembering my visit the preceding week, when my father didn’t want to talk about the hospital or his health, I try to navigate the minefield of other potentially explosive subjects in search of safe ground. I receive only the briefest replies to my attempts at conversation. But when I ask about a new system my niece and I have devised for sorting the mail, it is as if I have hit a land mine. He suddenly explodes in a tirade of recriminations about losing control of his affairs and my failure to treat him with respect. His jaw begins to quiver and tears stream down his cheeks. His neck is bent so far over now that his chin is practically touching his chest. I can barely see his face, which seems to have dis-solved in a featureless blur. Sobbing uncontrollably, his nose running like a small child’s, my father has become unrecognizable.

In retrospect, it could have been any topic that opened the floodgate to my father’s emotions. The particular one I chose goes to the heart of his feelings of dependence, his declining ability to care for my mother, and my usurpation of his responsibilities. It’s also time to acknowledge the changes brought by the hospital stay, to say that there is no cure and will be no cure for the multiple impacts of age, only a life sustained with ever more supports from others. My father voices regret about the prior medical interventions—the multiple radiation therapies and first throat surgery—that have kept him alive.

He wishes he were dead. He continues, he says, for my mother’s sake and because he knows she won’t live long after him. His words are direct and pitiless.

I am looking at my father and thinking about my mother, wondering if she is able to take in all that he has had to say. By now there m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 57

are plenty of tears in my own eyes as I try to acknowledge how inexplicably difficult his life must be. At the same time I am impelled to defend our attempts to help him and our commitment to honoring his wishes. I say how painful it is to hear his harsh, unrelenting criticisms of my mother as she tries to minister to his needs with her own limitations and remind him that each of us, in our own way, is suffering the moment. He does not respond to any of my emotion-laden words.

Instead, he picks up papers from the table and reads them with intensity born of the desire to quell his own turbulent feelings. For now the bills, receipts, and notices that proliferate at a time in life when we can least manage them protect him from my probing questions and from his own. They connect him to a safer, less threatening world.

And I too retreat from the intensity of the moment It’s the summer of 1951. My father has just returned from the hospital after what today would be classified as routine surgery. The French doors leading to my parents’ bedroom are closed, an unusual daytime occurrence. As I pass by, I can hear my father crying. I can’t see into the room because, like the walls throughout the apartment, the glass panes of the doors are painted battleship gray. Nor would I have wanted to look. I am too frightened and do not understand why my father would be upset about coming home. No one offers an explanation for his sadness. Later, over lunch, my mother suggests that I spend a few days at my grandmother’s house while my father recuperates. I feel this to be an honor, a sign of my maturity. Unacknowledged is my sense of relief in this exile from the site of much parental pain.