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

Anne, who has waited in the living room with my mother during this private bedroom interview, wants to know what will happen if my father won’t go to the hospital in the morning. Hers is a youthful question that assumes an inevitable drama of opposing wills that can only be resolved by a unilateral decision or the use of force. I feel boxed in by the “what if” nature of her question, which poses life as a matter of stark blacks and whites rather than muted grays and partial compromises. I have no answer for her. She asks questions that I am unready for. I am only prepared to stay rooted in the present.

Despite Anne’s prodding questions that push me forward in time, her presence is welcome in an unexpected way. As I slip and slide between my roles as loving child and responsible adult, she reminds me that sometimes my years of accumulated experience can make a difference. Caring for people with HIV/AIDS has helped me to curb my natural impatience and to tolerate uncertainty and indecision. In moments of crisis, I try to stay in the present and to move cautiously; de-ferral holds open possibilities that we cannot yet calculate. Anxious talk of tomorrow draws us away from the pain of today. It functions as a distraction from suffering we cannot alleviate, wrongs we cannot right.

In the morning when I return to my father’s side, there appears to be very little change in his condition. He tries to force food and water down his throat without success, and I continue to try to reason with him. We are both getting nowhere. Then suddenly my mother, who has been silently watching and senses our stalemate, gets up from her chair, walks slowly and painfully across the room, bends over my father and, looking straight into his face, implores, “I want you to go to the hospital. Do it for me. Do it now.” I am exasperated and embarrassed by this unabashed begging. But after all my carefully worded statements about choices and control, she speaks directly from the 40 n jonathan g. silin

heart. I check my irritation, knowing that this moment is as much, if not more, hers than mine. She is learning, in her eighty-seventh year, to make a demand for herself, to cash in on their sixty-year-old marriage ticket to purchase a few more weeks, months, perhaps years of life together. She has earned the right to speak and soon earns his reluctantly proffered words, “All right, I’ll go.”

I am more sad than relieved to hear his final consent. I feel that together, my mother and I have broken his will. I tell myself that, given his severely weakened condition, my father’s refusal to go to the hospital is neither rational nor reflective of his “true” desires. I tell myself that hydration and the gastronomy tube for direct feeding into the stomach do not constitute radical interventions, though they will prolong his life. Yet confidence that we are doing the right thing seems to slip from my grasp because I keep forgetting that my father is not in possession of his faculties and that we are no longer adolescent son and middle-aged parent fighting over a curfew hour. In concert with my mother, I have helped to orchestrate a Pyrrhic victory in a tortuous battle of wills rather than the kind of collaborative healthcare decision I had hoped would be possible.

In the hours to come I am consoled by the way my father becomes calm, relaxed, and patient. Perhaps he is relieved, but I don’t ask.

While he is lying on a gurney in the emergency room hallway, an orderly offers him a cup of water. For the first time in weeks he speaks the truth, “Thank you, but no. You see, I can’t swallow anything.” My father gives himself over to the care of others. There is no dissembling in the hospital. Throughout the following week there is never a moment of recrimination, never a note of anger in his voice. He shows more consistent good humor, even his long silenced sense of humor, than he has in the preceding two years.

Later that first night, reviewing the events of the day, my niece accuses my mother and me of having forced my father into the hospital against his will. I am stung by her words, primarily because they resonate with my own doubts. I have tried to imagine myself in his body at this time. I am not terribly successful, but the exercise tells me that m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 41

there is much that I don’t know, enough so that I don’t feel comfortable making an end-of-life decision for him.

Anne can’t understand why my father goes on, given the extreme limitations of his life, but, when pressed, she is reluctant to imagine an alternative scenario to the one that has taken place: my father collapsing in our unprepared midst. She confides that she and her boyfriend have decided on permanent DNR (do not resuscitate) tattoos so that there will be no mistaking their desires. And therein lies the nub of the problem: what are the desires of my father, eighty-seven, frail and frightened?

Over the preceding days I have tried to listen to his behavior as well as his words in my attempt to assess his intentions. While he was refusing to go to the hospital, he feverishly persisted in attempts to eat, drink, and swallow medications. He even said he would go into the hospital if his cancer surgeon, halfway around the world and un-reachable just then, ordered him to go. He did not want to accept responsibility for prolonging his own life. Once in the hospital, he is an active participant in his recovery, taking pride in the total hours he manages to sit in a chair, an important element in recovery from the pneumonia with