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

to seek a second or third opinion. The handwriting is on the wall, and there is little to be said when we return to my parents’ apartment.

On the bus home that afternoon I think about how often and confidently I tell my own students that they are asking the wrong question. Usually this occurs when they seek advice about why a class situation went awry or how to intervene when children are fighting.

My students quickly learn that I have less interest in how they get out of a messy lesson or how to disentangle two children than in why the situation arose in the first place. What kind of planning went into the lesson? Does the physical and social environment encourage displays of aggression?

In contrast to Dr. Lee’s focus on fixing what is broken or failing, which I will be ever thankful for, I am concerned with preventing problems from arising in the first place. Yet now I often think about Dr. Lee’s words. They were all right and all wrong. While he made me feel naïve and foolish, he also made me realize in a moment’s time 108 n jonathan g. silin

what was at stake. I wonder if he would have been quite so successful had he been less harsh. Would I be more effective if I found a gentler way to redirect my students’ attention? I don’t know the answers to these questions. I do know that our meeting that Saturday morning brought with it a new appreciation for how, at least in some situations, identifying the right question can be a matter of survival. Perhaps, after all, my interests in beginnings and endings, time and memory, autonomy and dependence aren’t so terribly different from Dr. Lee’s interests in keeping the airways free and open. A brief week later, when my mother and I say goodbye to my father before his operation, somewhere deep in the bowels of that gigantic hospital, we do not know if his larynx will be salvaged. I do know that keeping my father’s airways open trumps my concerns about sustaining his voice and, as we will learn later, even concerns about swallowing food and water.

Seven hours later, seated in a sterile gray room, the youthful and considerably more relaxed Dr. Lee, still dressed in green operating suit, plastic shower cap, and tennis sneakers, patiently assures us that he has been able to save two-thirds of my father’s right larynx. After three weeks of being unable to speak my father will regain a natural if somewhat sandpapery voice. (We don’t know that two years on the cancer will return, necessitating the removal of his remaining larynx along with the power of speech.)

Seeing my father in the recovery room later that afternoon, still heavily sedated, lifeless and waxy yellow, the frustration of being temporarily without voice does not seem so pressing. He has weathered the operation well, and I know that he will eventually be able to speak when the shunt in his throat is removed. It is only the next morning, as I enter his room, that the full impact of his situation becomes evident to me. Angry, in fact filled with rage, he keeps trying to speak, and yet no words emerge from his mouth. Then I notice, on the bed, the first of the yellow legal pads that are to be his primary mode of communication. Written in his clearest print, all capital letters, are these instructions—GET MY SON IMMEDIATELY—followed by my phone number.

m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 109

Asking my father to nod when I suggest various reasons for his distress, it quickly becomes clear to me that the room that he has been moved to, containing three other patients and no real partitions, is far too public a space for this very private, partially blind, and voiceless octogenarian. My father is not appeased by the promise of increased medical attention in this “step-up” unit designed for higher-risk patients. Phobic about germs, he has never shared a hospital room with another person before, and his current vulnerability makes his demand for another room hard for me to resist.

As I begin to negotiate with the hospital personnel for a new room, the words my father has written in my absence resonate throughout my body. Although my mother is standing by his side during this time, a position she took up over sixty years ago, he knows that her own frailties will render her ineffectual. How few words it takes for my father to communicate his panic and dependency. How unnecessary it is to speak about my responsibility.

In the weeks following the throat surgery, my father learns to communicate with gesture and pen. His needs and his discomforts take on a regular pattern. After a short while, it is easy enough to second-guess his wishes. The legal pads allow for more complex conversations. I come to accept the silence as the only way to wait out the recovery.

There is little to be said.

I am not there three weeks later when the shunt is removed, and my father speaks his first words. My brother calls me from the hospital room and casually asks if I want to speak with my father. For the first time in my life, the sound of his voice brings tears to my eyes.

Sitting with my father day after day, I am aware of the complicated, changing textures of our silences. There are moments when the silence seems to create an unbridgeable gap that separates us into different worlds. There are others when it allows us to be together peacefully, without straining to make small talk or to interpret our frequently misunderstood words. Silence is a relief, a refuge in which we can be present without demanding or intruding. For me, it is a new way to express care.

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I have not always appreciated the ambiguities of silence or understood the many different ways