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

It’s just not that simple.

The demand for simplicity, however, goes to the heart of the problem. Adults want to believe that they inhabit a logical cause-and-effect world. After all, it’s easier to live with certainty and determin-ism than with contingency and possibility. We are reluctant to acknowledge that our connections to the past and to the children before us are messy, multidimensional, and continuously shifting.

In 1968, when I entered the early childhood classroom, I vividly recall telling people who questioned my career choice that educators can have a critical impact on children when they are very young. My best friend had taught with great enthusiasm in the initial summer of Head Start, and like him, I understood social change as a grassroots process and those roots as best nurtured in the early years.

Today, my graduate students continue to believe in the foundational nature of the early years that will set the pattern for later development. They tell me that they want to teach because they have always loved children and have never had a vocational doubt. Or, like m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 37

myself at their age, they want to change the world through education, often a more recently acquired desire. Perhaps because of the need to create a distance between past and present, and to experience themselves as responsible adults, capable of being caregivers, they emphasize the differences between children and adults. Despite the subtleties of some developmental theory and the messiness of their lived experience, students portray the road from childhood to adulthood as orderly and well marked. They have read the seminal thinkers—Erikson, Freud, Piaget—and come away with a simplified template.

While each of these theorists writes about different if overlapping domains of development—emotional, cognitive, psychosocial—they all document universal stages of development through which everyone passes, albeit at varying speeds. Change is linear, sequential, and progressive. On the way to graduate school, for example, many of my students have come to believe that the basic struggle between parent and child over attachment and separation is concluded by age three.

Caring for my parents, however, I am realizing something quite to the contrary. After all, we are still striving to understand how we are alike and how we are different. We grapple with the changing responsibilities and gifts that result from our close connection. And most importantly, I continue to learn and to know through the body, not just through words. A renewed intimacy occurs as I help my father to navigate from bed to bathroom, shamelessly discuss the daily difficulties of a bladder and bowel gone awry, or simply run my hand across the brittleness of his malnourished shoulders.

Most developmentalists would have us believe that adulthood is a time of new and therefore better powers. Theirs is a story of progress and enlightenment. But perhaps adulthood is a time in which we have expanded but not necessarily improved our tools for making sense of our experience, and when we all benefit by staying in touch with childhood ways of being in the world. It is the context that elicits and shapes our current responses, and in the context of parental care, I am almost always both child and adult.

38 n jonathan g. silin

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When I arrive at my parents’ house late that August night, my father is still refusing to go to the hospital. He is waiting up for me along with my mother, the aide, Marlene, and Anne, my twenty-three-year-old niece. He is seated in a wheelchair, barely able to hold his head up, eyes closing midsentence as his words trail off. Called to attention, he asks for yet another glass of cold water, and has sufficient strength to complain that it is neither cold enough nor full enough. In truth, he is unable to swallow at all; the smallest sip of water precipitates a coughing crisis in which everything is returned.

My father claims to follow me as I lay out the two possible scenarios—voluntary and immediate hospitalization or imminent collapse that will force us to take him to the emergency room against his will.

At this moment I cannot imagine leaving him to die at home, nor do I think he is in a condition to make such a decision.

As he nods off yet again, I remember prior conversations, not so far distant in time, that contrast dramatically with our present failed attempt at communication.

We were standing at the bathroom sink in the spring of 1997 as my father indulged in an hour-long bedtime ritual. I was leaving for an extended speaking tour in Australia in a few weeks and worried that he might have a potentially life-threatening fall by getting out of bed unassisted in the middle of the night. Neither my concerns nor his reluctance to accept help were new. But now I summoned a fresh determination to get to the heart of the matter before my trip. I asked if the debilitation caused by so many illnesses had made him want to end his life. I told him that, if he had had enough suffering, we would find a way for him to die quickly and peacefully. I didn’t know where these cool, confident words were coming from. Despite having seen recent newspaper articles, TV documentaries, and films on the subject, I had no idea how such a carefully planned death would be accomplished.

But I needn’t have worried. His slow and thoughtful reply reassured me that “No, it’s not that bad yet.” Reluctantly submitting to my logic, he agreed to call for help in the future.

m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 39

Now I long for the brevity and directness of this earlier conversation and feel the frustration of my protracted attempts to gain and hold my father’s attention. Neither of us is able to say the right thing.

I decide to put