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

While I once thought my father would not want to suffer unduly or to live with severely diminished capacities, I am learning something different. As life narrows, it becomes that much more precious.

My niece has a very different perspective. Despite the periodic career anxieties and personal identity crises that I imagine may cause her to doubt the future, she does have a lifetime ahead of her. Ripping out a few tattered, barely legible pages at the end of the book of life may seem reasonable. Most of the preceding pages have not yet been written anyway, and it is impossible to imagine the subtleties of plot that will knit together the beginning and the end of the text. At fifty-four, having passed life’s midpoint, I have begun to experience some of the inevitable failings of the body that may foreshadow the final chapters.

I have learned to live with physical limitations that would have been 42 n jonathan g. silin

unacceptable a scant ten years ago. Besides, I have known too many people with HIV/AIDS to think that we can predict the future or that death always comes at the end of a full life.

My father wants to live at all costs. He also wants to live on his own terms. When the terms are no longer his to make—if they ever were—he feels caught in a vise of unacceptable choices. He wants the feeding tube, which he sees as a sign of further medicalization and loss of control, only if additional surgery on his throat fails. At the same time, he knows that he will not live to have the surgery unless he agrees to the feeding tube. He wants the tube and doesn’t want it.

He tells me that these opposing desires are not contradictory, and he is right. Paralyzed by what he sees as untenable choices, he forces me to decide for him. I give primacy to his overriding commitment to go forward and momentarily set aside the feelings of defeat elicited by the compromises that this entails.

In the end, the story of this hospitalization turned out not to be a dramatic one of choosing life or death but a far murkier tale about my father’s further loss of physical and mental control. The underlying subtext is my assumption of responsibility for deciphering his desires.

There will be no philosophically considered, carefully modulated, Kevorkian death for my father. He will want all the interventions and fight at every turn to have his way.

I am honored by my father’s trust and the intimacy that has grown between us. At the same time, I am angered by the new burdens he has placed on me and unnerved by his refusal to make critical decisions for himself. Perhaps my head is filled with too many film and television images of people in midlife who, when faced with a terminal illness, choose to die peacefully surrounded by family and friends.

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