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

my parents. Familiarity with Montessori methods, for example, informed the way that I carefully parsed apart the simplest tasks. Two weeks prior to Thanksgiving, I began to hear my mother’s worries about organizing the annual Christmas gifts for the apartment building employees. Like cooking with children in the classroom, I knew the importance of having all the materials—crisp, new ten-dollar bills, cards, envelopes, stamps, pens, and list of employees—arranged in advance. I also knew the importance of routines. Over and over again I repeated the new schedule for the health aides. As if preparing for the departure of a much-loved student teacher from the kindergarten, I carefully calculated the amount of warning that my parents needed before making changes in household help. Like my students, I wanted my parents to have sufficient time for processing the information and achieving emotional closure, but not so much time that they experienced the disabling fears that could be precipitated by alterations in their domestic arrangements.

Despite my reliance on early childhood skills, I did not see my mother and father as children. No matter how dependent they became, they were still my parents. Our history was not erased by their changed circumstances, no matter how often I was called upon to contain their feelings of loss and anxiety. I tried to perform the role of reassuring presence in their life. Just as I learned during the first fire drills of each school year to say with a calm authority to the apprehensive four-year-olds by my side, “I will make sure that nothing happens to you. I will take care of you,” so I learned to talk with my mother about her upcoming cataract surgery and to my father about the replacement of his gastronomy tube. But to imagine that our roles were reversed would have undermined their dignity while burdening me with confusing emotions.

In his book In the American West, the photographer Richard Ave-don said of his work, “A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph, it is no longer a fact m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n xvii

but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph.

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” In the end, it is my telling of our family story that is recorded here. I have tried to situate this telling in the idiosyncrasies of my perspective. There are certainly other perspectives from which the story might have been written, and there are other authors in my family who may one day choose to do just that. For the moment, I can only hope that my parents would feel that their final years have been well told, and their experiences imbued with meanings not too terribly distant from ones that they would recognize, if not necessarily claim as their own.

1

New Responsibilities

If you want to endure life, prepare for death.

sigmund freud, “Thoughts for

the Times on War and Death”

We are in the lawyer’s office. My father walks with a metal cane with four prongs at the bottom to steady himself. The combination of spinal disease and partial loss of sight makes his balance precarious.

My mother, dressed in a Depression-era brown suit, raincoat, and hat to match, still moves quickly and independently. She is forever pressing ahead of my father, seemingly unaware of how slowly he moves.

The stomach surgery and torn knee ligaments that will soon impede her mobility have not yet taken their toll. She clutches a manila envelope. We are here at my insistence to review the legal documents—

wills, powers of attorney, living wills—that are designed to ensure a measure of control over the uncertainties that inevitably surround illness and death.

I am beginning to feel the weight of new responsibilities. But I am totally unprepared for what I hear, and don’t hear, once we are installed in the glass-walled conference room. We sit at the far end of a long table, my mother and father next to each other on one side and 1

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I on the other. When Mr. Halperin enters, he sits at the head of the table, between us, in the negotiator’s position. A short, slightly over-weight, solid-looking burgher in dark blue suit, this man of affairs is considerably younger than I. I am sharply conscious of my own age, fifty-one at the time, and wonder if my parents’ fragile appearance somehow makes me look even older. He talks easily and with confidence. I am reassured. Despite my parents’ resistance, I have done the right thing bringing them here.

My father speaks slowly and deliberately as he provides the demo-graphic information requested, including details about my brother and his wife and child. When he finishes, there is a long silence.

Something is wrong. My heart is pounding, my hands are shaking, and adrenaline is coursing through my body. Then, overcoming a deep sense of terror, emboldened by a mix of anger, defiance, and urgency, I speak the unspeakable. I announce that I too live with someone. I too am an adult with a life partner who cannot be expunged from the record. Without hesitation, Mr. Halperin turns to me and notes the information I provide about Bob, my partner of twenty-five years.

When I finally look up at my parents, their faces register shock and distress. They say nothing.

It can’t be the information I convey that leaves my parents silent.

After all, I have been openly gay for decades, Bob regularly attends family functions, and they actually seem to like him. No, it is my insistence that Bob be written into the official story of our family that upsets my parents so deeply. In more generous moments, I think about how difficult it must be for my conventional, middle-class parents to speak about a gay relationship. In some ways their vocabulary has not caught up with their behavior. In other ways their cordial but emotionally distant relationship with