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

also punctured an invisible wall surrounding her inner self. Here once again is the conscientious young parent capable of genuine empathy and pleasure in the achievements of her child. At the same time as I am thankful for this opportunity to think of my mother as the loving caregiver, I see with greater clarity the person she has become—fearful, anxious, and suspicious of others.

My mother had once projected competence and confidence. A social worker and businesswoman, she had lived through two successful careers. At home, continually challenging my extreme shyness, she encouraged me to be more adventurous—to climb to the top of the jungle gym unaided, attend a second-grade classmate’s birthday party, or risk the terrors of sleepaway camp. Whatever fears and insecurities my mother may have had at that time were kept in check by a stronger sense of parental responsibility.

In contrast, my father, while a loving and engaged parent, was subject to severe depression. I did not see him as possessing particular social skills or emotional resilience. In 1997, a year after my mother’s hospitalization, just after the first of his surgeries for cancer of the larynx, sitting at his hospital bedside late in the afternoon, I understand something quite different. As he recovers from throat surgery and is still unable to use his newly reconstructed voice box, an unfamiliar nurse is attaching a clear plastic bag of life-sustaining fluids to an IV

pole. My father taps the nurse on the shoulder to gain his attention, picks up a yellow pad, and writes a brief note in his cryptic handwriting. The nurse, who has temporarily stopped his work, breaks into a m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 49

broad smile as he deciphers the words, looks directly at my father, and says “Benjamin,” his own name. My father smiles back, and Benjamin returns to the task at hand. I am in awe of this simple interchange. My father is able to generate a life-sustaining fluid of another kind.

As a child, I knew my father to be a demanding, exacting, often exasperating person. Now I also know my father as a person who easily forms relationships. He treats the hospital staff with respect, as individuals. They respond in kind. My father is able to make his way in a large and frightening institution while ensuring some control over the course of his treatment. He skillfully collaborates in his own care when dealing with professionals of one stripe or another.

Although events change people, they also bring out aspects of character that have always existed. The past has become unfastened from its secure moorings in my memory. I wonder if my mother was as confident as she once appeared, as my memory has captured her. Was my seemingly intractable shyness an inherent character trait or the reflection of a complex maternal relationship? I understand that beneath the surface of her always encouraging words, my mother may have communicated deep ambiguity about separation and the risks of independence. Perhaps too my father was far more socially accomplished than I had realized, and my older brother far less able to deal with the “real” world than I had grasped.

Now, when my brother and I are faced with two frail parents, the entire family drama has to be restaged. As a child, I played the role of the “sensitive/creative” younger sibling. Resisting the confines of my middle-class upbringing, I became the black sheep—college dropout, gay man, nursery school teacher. My brother, more competitive and conforming, became a prosperous international businessman.

As adults, we do not live in the same world. It seems as if he has never seen anyone seriously ill; never known anyone who has died.

My experience of being a sexual outsider, and of working with young children and people with HIV/AIDS, has given me a different perspective on what matters most in our lives. Within our family I have become the responsible one, grounded in the mundane realities of 50 n jonathan g. silin

caring for fragile lives—finding domestic help, speaking with doctors, monitoring finances.

Until the precipitous decline in their early eighties, my parents frequently shared memories of their childhoods and retold our family history. There were the stories of my own childhood—the blizzard of

’48 when I was stranded in a snowdrift and the police had to be called; the summer of ’50 when I refused to enter the busy dining room of the Catskill resort until everyone sang “Happy Birthday”; the spring of ’52 when my father taught me to ride a two-wheeler that had been passed down from a neighboring cousin. I often grew impatient with these familiar renditions of the past as well as with my parents’ questions about childhood friends who had long since disappeared from my life. It became hard to tell what I actually remembered and what I had been told, what I had experienced and what my parents wanted to encode as part of the family saga.

Now my parents are no longer so easily seduced by nostalgia. They seldom seek the intimacy that is evoked by the sharing of personal memories. Concerned about my mother’s growing withdrawal after her surgery, I proffer invitations to remember herself at other points in time. She does not accept the bait, does not want to recall her full and busy life. Although my father can be both philosophical and practical about the future, surviving the regular medical crises requires all his energy. The unyielding demands of the body imprison my parents in the present.

Ironically, I find myself increasingly drawn to the past. As do most children, when I was growing up I saw my parents as omniscient. My father knew everything from how to count by tens, knot a tie, and hit a home run, to the names of all the state capitals and former presidents of the United States. My mother not only knew small things like how to tie a shoelace or a perfect bow on a birthday