My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents by Jonathan Silin (free novels .txt) 📗

Jamal, on the other hand, does not appear to have strong and effective advocates to secure the Ritalin that he needs, nor is anyone available to help him regain control at school. Growing up in a world in which politicians are pushing for more and more testing and standardized, skill-driven curricula, Jamal’s present life is being sacrificed for a future that may or may not come to pass. Perhaps I am unduly sensitive to the problem of time, but I worry that concerns about employment in the years ahead distract immediate attention from the Medicaid system that fails to fill Jamal’s prescription and the social world that makes such a prescription necessary. I want the same thing for the children in Jamal’s neighborhood as I want for my parents in Manhattan, a present that contains the richness of their history and the sense of a meaningful future. Caring for my parents, I see what it is like to be locked in the moment, devoid of all connections backward or forward. They can only think from day to day, their calendar marked by visits to various doctors and visits from other healthcare personnel—therapists, nurses, and caseworkers. Given the narrowing of their physical powers and the heightening of their medical vulnerability, they no longer act as if they can shape the future. They don’t look forward. Events that once might have been a source of pleasure, plans for a Thanksgiving dinner or the purchase of an apartment by my niece, are assessed only for the potential risks they hold. The future is filled with anxiety rather than with potential moments to define the self and to leave one’s mark on the world.

What has surprised me most is that my parents’ inability to look forward is balanced by an equally daunting resistance to looking back.

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I remind my father, the former high school football player and college basketball star, of the benefits of regular exercise and encourage him to go outside more often. As I deliver my lecture I recall the way he would deliver the same lecture to me when I first went away to school.

Then, he counseled me to take up a sport and to attend Saturday afternoon football games as a way to lift my spirits and participate in the larger social world. Now, I exercise regularly, moving over the years from distance running and tennis, far too hard on middle-aged knees, to swimming and biking. I try to humor my father by reminding him of the wisdom of his own advice and the irony that it is I who has become the sports enthusiast. He refuses to accompany me on my trip back to a time when I could see no future and felt constantly betrayed by my own body and its desires for other men. I think that he should gain satisfaction from knowing that I have learned a lesson from him, but he doesn’t. I think that I should understand how so many illnesses have lead to a total self-absorption that excludes reminiscences, but I don’t.

Both the past and the future are territories that my father no longer travels to. He judges me, and other caregivers, by what we can do for him today, not by what we may have meant to him yesterday or the promise that we embody for tomorrow. It’s no longer possible to appeal to a shared history, to trust that has been built over time. Betrayal is as recent as the last telephone conversation, a refusal of consent to an ill-conceived financial scheme or to call the doctor about a minor discomfort. As my father’s body crumbles, so does the architec-ture of time that once supported it.

At night the scene in Diane’s classroom haunts me. I dream that I am a student teacher who has been asked to settle the children before a group meeting. I am unable to get their attention. They ignore me just as they ignored Diane. I wonder at the continuing impact of my days in hard-pressed urban schools. After all, I have seen it before—

children out of control, some needing therapy or psychotropic drugs, some needing only a more meaningful curriculum; teachers in tears, unable to maintain order, let alone live up to their ideals. But in the m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 29

past my parents did not follow me into the classroom with quite the same persistence.

As a young teacher, I learned to recognize the subtle ways in which my personal history influenced my work with children. I tried hard not to project onto them my own childish needs or to demand from them satisfactions more appropriately found in my adult life. Now that the claims of my parents have become so great and my self-doubts about how to manage them so large, my emotions have become more tangled again. The dreams of unruly children and my inability to control them tell the story of my unruly parents and my failed attempts to bring order to their lives.

Diane and I live in different worlds and have very different relationships to our charges. Like Diane, however, I must find a way to contain the anxiety that makes my father unmanageable and worry about the impact of his behavior on those around him. I know what it is to be paralyzed, afraid of someone who is both more vulnerable and more out of control than I am. I beg the experts and rail against the doctors who withhold the more powerful drugs needed to subdue my father’s fears. I can only begin to imagine Diane’s frustration at the social-service bureaucracies that prevent Jamal from receiving his medications.

Our circumstances are not the same, but the underlying themes ruling Diane’s work with children and the care of my parents are similar. I want to be close enough to understand them but distanced enough so as not