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

hospital or his health, I try to navigate the minefield of other potentially explosive subjects in search of safe ground. I receive only the briefest replies to my attempts at conversation. But when I ask about a new system my niece and I have devised for sorting the mail, it is as if I have hit a land mine. He suddenly explodes in a tirade of recriminations about losing control of his affairs and my failure to treat him with respect. His jaw begins to quiver and tears stream down his cheeks. His neck is bent so far over now that his chin is practically touching his chest. I can barely see his face, which seems to have dis-solved in a featureless blur. Sobbing uncontrollably, his nose running like a small child’s, my father has become unrecognizable.

In retrospect, it could have been any topic that opened the floodgate to my father’s emotions. The particular one I chose goes to the heart of his feelings of dependence, his declining ability to care for my mother, and my usurpation of his responsibilities. It’s also time to acknowledge the changes brought by the hospital stay, to say that there is no cure and will be no cure for the multiple impacts of age, only a life sustained with ever more supports from others. My father voices regret about the prior medical interventions—the multiple radiation therapies and first throat surgery—that have kept him alive.

He wishes he were dead. He continues, he says, for my mother’s sake and because he knows she won’t live long after him. His words are direct and pitiless.

I am looking at my father and thinking about my mother, wondering if she is able to take in all that he has had to say. By now there m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 57

are plenty of tears in my own eyes as I try to acknowledge how inexplicably difficult his life must be. At the same time I am impelled to defend our attempts to help him and our commitment to honoring his wishes. I say how painful it is to hear his harsh, unrelenting criticisms of my mother as she tries to minister to his needs with her own limitations and remind him that each of us, in our own way, is suffering the moment. He does not respond to any of my emotion-laden words.

Instead, he picks up papers from the table and reads them with intensity born of the desire to quell his own turbulent feelings. For now the bills, receipts, and notices that proliferate at a time in life when we can least manage them protect him from my probing questions and from his own. They connect him to a safer, less threatening world.

And I too retreat from the intensity of the moment It’s the summer of 1951. My father has just returned from the hospital after what today would be classified as routine surgery. The French doors leading to my parents’ bedroom are closed, an unusual daytime occurrence. As I pass by, I can hear my father crying. I can’t see into the room because, like the walls throughout the apartment, the glass panes of the doors are painted battleship gray. Nor would I have wanted to look. I am too frightened and do not understand why my father would be upset about coming home. No one offers an explanation for his sadness. Later, over lunch, my mother suggests that I spend a few days at my grandmother’s house while my father recuperates. I feel this to be an honor, a sign of my maturity. Unacknowledged is my sense of relief in this exile from the site of much parental pain.

My grandmother lives only a few blocks away, and I have the run of her apartment. I know every corner but most especially the kitchen with its icebox, upright telephone, and wooden counters. Here she produces cheese and rye bread sandwiches, carefully wrapped in waxed paper and rubber bands, for our daily picnics in Riverside Park.

Here too she mixes Coca Cola with milk at meal times to lessen its pernicious impact on my growing body but otherwise indulges all my 58 n jonathan g. silin

gustatory whims. My grandmother does her best to entertain me and I am appreciative of her efforts. But by the end of the week I am homesick and feeling my own kind of sadness. At home my father is clearly back in control of his emotions, and I do not hear him cry again.

It is only the following summer that I myself experience the difficulties of a return to once-familiar surroundings. Whereas my father’s hospital stay was involuntary, I had eagerly chosen to go away to summer camp. It is the first afternoon back at home, and I am seated in my regular place at the kitchen table with its slightly sticky-to-the-touch oilcloth covering bearing a pattern of clustered, just-ripe cherries. Although it is August, my mother is preparing hot cocoa at the stove, a transitional food to recall the cold mornings I have just spent in the Adirondacks. She is gently quizzing me about the summer. As she knows only too well, I’ve had a bad time of it. At seven, I was woefully unprepared for the long separation, cried myself to sleep every night, and could barely read her letters or open the carefully wrapped packages without becoming tearful. I forbade either of my parents to call me. The sound of their voices filled me with sadness and longing. Now that I am safely home, looking out of the window past the one tall building that partially obstructs our otherwise dramatic view of the Hudson River and the New Jersey palisades, my emotions are a complete jumble. And much to everyone’s surprise when my mother places the hot cocoa in front of me, I burst into uncontrollable sobs. I don’t want hot cocoa after all, nor do I