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

the school-reform project. Given the difficult politics in the school district, do we want to release a report that is highly critical of the current change efforts and that documents the ongoing mistreatment of children and adults in the system? Will we lose our place at the table of reform? Will our adversaries in the district use the report, which is also self-critical, against us?

I am a few minutes late when I enter the president’s office. An administrative foul-up has required that the meeting be held an hour earlier than expected. Slightly out of breath, irritated by the change of time, and hoping to keep my impulse to speak too quickly in check, I am surprised when a women turns to me saying, “We haven’t really started. We were waiting for you.” Although I am one of a handful of men in the college and the only man on this project with a staff of twenty-five, I am suddenly struck by being the only male in the room of five female executives. Can they have been waiting for me to lay out the agenda? I don’t want to be the dominating male, although this is unlikely, given that the president is always well prepared and is known to have done an especially close reading of the report. Concerned about how the college represents itself to the larger educational public, she questions whether our ethnographic approach to research will convince elected officials and funders of the value of our work. In the age of educational standards and intensified testing, what kind of research will be most effective in helping others to understand the benefits of progressive education?

While some in the room express hesitations about the impact of the report on our future relations with the school district, my overriding concern is our commitment to the teachers and staff who have told us their stories and which we have tried to represent. Our obliga-tion, I volubly argue, is to them, and our ability to continue telling their stories will be severely compromised if we withhold the report from wide-scale circulation. I say that if teachers and staff feel that they have been misrepresented, then we must bear the consequences.

A consensus for widespread distribution builds as the meeting ends.

On the inside I participate in a very different dialogue. For I am 84 n jonathan g. silin

only too aware that in other contexts, I am much less confident, unwilling to accept the imagined consequences of sharing my documentation projects. Where my parents are involved, practical and ethical considerations give way under the weight of the emotional baggage I bring to researching their lives and mine.

In need of validation, I send my essays to two cousins with explicit instructions not to share them with other family members. I am only too happy for strangers to read these ruminations on aging, but the more people who know my parents read the essays, the deeper my feelings of disrespect. One cousin advises me to show them the work. She says that she would be proud to have children who write so lovingly about her. But she speaks as a sixty-year-old at the height of her powers, not as a fragile eighty-seven-year-old near the end of life. I don’t believe she knows what it has been like for me to be the perennial target of blame, the container of so much parental anger and anxiety.

Nor is this a role I ever anticipated playing in my parents’ life. Indeed it is only in 1990, at age forty-five, that I have my first insight into the nature of the drama that I am destined to participate in.

My father is undergoing risky and complicated surgery to save the sight in his one good eye. My mother, my aunt, and I are waiting for him when he returns from the operation. Only local anesthetic is used during such surgeries, and my father lies fully awake but motionless in the bed. My mother and aunt hover over the patient, trying to make him comfortable. I stand at a distance. Suddenly I hear him call out my name in terror, declare the operation a failure, and blame me for having allowed it to happen. My father believes that he is permanently blind because he can’t see anything at all. A surgical patch, which will be removed in twenty-four hours, covers his good eye. I am paralyzed and cannot respond. My own vision is beginning to blur. I feel dizzy and unsteady on my feet. As my father continues to wail in despair, my mother tries to calm him. I slip out of the room and find a seat on a window ledge in the hallway. I place my head between my legs as I have been taught to do in these situations, but the dizziness m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 85

continues. I can hear my father calling my name. My aunt, thinking I haven’t heard his cries, comes to get me. Still overwhelmed and unable to stand, I tell her that I will return as quickly as I can. But it is ten minutes before I am composed enough to take my father’s hand and reassure him that in fact the operation is a success and that he will have his sight back the following day. Once he is quieted, he reassures me that he is not in pain. We both marvel at his report of being able to overhear the doctor’s talking during the operation and to feel the pressure of their tools resting on his chest as they proceeded with the delicate procedure. By the time he is ready to doze off, I am exhausted too.

I leave with my father’s cries ringing in my ears. I am ashamed by my inability to respond. Since my father does not have tubes leading to and from his body, I know it is the emotion of the