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

I emerged from my twenties with a guidebook that helped me to appreciate the people and places of my childhood. Critical images had acquired explanatory captions and freshly drawn maps clarified the routes I had taken to achieve independence from my family. The unruly passions and conflicted relationships of childhood were organized in such a way that they were no longer quite so threatening.

This work of putting the past into an understandable set of stories allowed me to move forward with my life, to become a gay man comfortable with a still marginal social identity and capable of intimate, loving relationships.

I have never had a good sense of direction, and throughout my thirties and forties this guidebook allowed me to adhere to familiar ways of interacting and conversational themes when visiting my parents. We always remained on safe, clearly marked highways and 54 n jonathan g. silin

steered clear of dangerously ill-lit emotional alleys. These alleys, filled with my resentments over their controlling, intrusive, and ambitious ways, exuded the potential for unbearable emotional toxicity. My parents wanted to hold on to me at all costs and could not imagine a relationship that allowed for greater elasticity and independence. Reliving our early enmeshment did not feel like the way to move into the future but rather a retreat into an unacceptable past.

My feelings were no family secret. Back in my early twenties my mother’s sister invited me to afternoon tea. It was an unusual occasion, and once the formalities were completed and we settled in for our chat, I was unprepared for the subject matter—the unfathomable pain I was causing my parents. How could I, the youngest and most beloved of children in our extended family, be so angry and rejecting of my well-meaning parents? What could cause me to place such a distance between them and myself? Despite my deep respect for my aunt

—and part of me had to admire this direct intervention on behalf of her sister—I had little to say in response to her queries. It was all still too raw and tender. And what to do about that huge white elephant in the room, my unacknowledged gay life? The determined explorations that had begun in my early teens had resulted in serious if tu-multuous relationships with a number of older, married and single, gay men. In those pre-Stonewall days, I could only imagine how news of these relationships would be greeted. Understood? What forms of remediation might my clinically oriented family deem necessary to correct such obvious pathology?

Needless to say, fifteen years later when Bob was introduced into the family circle, his patently loving and steady manner helped to smooth out some of the rougher edges. Of course, as with any child in a committed relationship, it was less easy for my family to infantilize my life or to claim me for their own emotional needs. Nevertheless, when my mother’s sister had to make a difficult choice about invitations to an anniversary dinner hosted at an exclusive French restaurant with limited seating, she apologetically told me there was no room for Bob. Outraged, and unwilling to attend, I was persuaded by m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 55

Bob that I should not meet her act of estrangement with one of my own. Due to a last-minute cancellation, a place was finally found, but throughout the event memories of prior dinners in this five-star venue underwritten by an early boyfriend served as a reminder of the hidden life that had had its perks.

In retrospect, I see this incident of the early 1980s as occurring midway on the arc of family acceptance. My aunt was embarrassed and apologetic. She knew that she had behaved badly, and such social exclusions did not happen again.

Until my fifties, I have little reason to redraw the maps created in my twenties that had prevented me from getting lost or disoriented when dealing with my parents. Then I discover that the emotional terrain has been slowly transformed by the passage of time and the ravages of disease. I see that new maps are required to guide us through previously unimaginable scenes, such as my father’s near death from dehydration and my mother’s recurring ministrokes that leave her with many small cognitive impairments.

Indeed, it might be most realistic to say that my father’s reluctant hospitalization in 1998 does not end when he is wheeled out the front door into the waiting ambulette. Although he leaves physically stronger than when he entered, he also leaves mentally shaken. With the remnants of a hospital-induced psychosis common among the elderly, he frequently constructs elaborate stories that contain only a grain of truth. Like memories of childhood, his tales of the hospital require that the listener attend to the emotional message rather than literal accuracy of the narrative. The hospitalization itself is bracketed by an inaugural moment when his resistance to admission gives way under the pressure of my mother’s desperate plea—“I want you to go.

Do it for me. Do it now”—and a concluding moment that takes place two weeks after he is discharged.

Just as on the first occasion, we are assembled in the dining room, my father at the table, my mother on the sofa. Again, my niece has discreetly placed herself in the living room, able to hear but not to 56 n jonathan g. silin

participate directly in the conversation. Today my father is opening and sorting his mail, a time-consuming activity that he does with fierce concentration. Hunched over the table, he does not look up when I enter the room, but I can see that his face is drawn and tense.

Nor does he offer words of greeting when I place my hands on his brittle, bony shoulders.

I am confused and made uncomfortable by my father’s steely silence as I converse with my mother about routine matters. Remembering my visit the preceding week, when my father didn’t want to talk about the