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

always that, but queer in a socially nonconforming way, at least when viewed against the backdrop of the choices that her own parents had made.

There is no small irony in the fact that my appreciation of silence is in part what allows me to bear witness to my father’s suffering in his last years. For while this appreciation is deeply embedded in my gay history—filled as it was with a curiosity about social differences of all kinds and the management of secrets—initially such an anathema to him, it is ultimately essential to tolerating his difficult times. Caring for my father expands my understanding of silence from a socially oppressive phenomenon to a medium through which complex interpersonal communications also transpire. This new awareness of how silence can function as communicative action does not replace but m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 121

rather exists alongside my earlier understandings so powerfully en-capsulated in the Silence = Death slogan of 1980s AIDS activists.

Finally, teaching about the tension between silence and voice, trying to make sense of the unspoken communications with my father, I look to queer theorist Eve Sedgwick for help. Prompted by a cancer diagnosis to reflect on her life, Sedgwick reads the classic Buddhist writings. Eschewing autobiography, the more traditional vehicle authors frequently use when facing death, she discovers in these texts a kind of pedagogical meditation in which the deathbed is continually produced as a privileged scene of teaching. Here too she finds the student and teacher roles are interchangeable. The caregiver receives far more than she is ever able to give. Means and ends are confounded.

Death is a means to some further ends. Death is a problem to be solved with skillful means. We strive to live with the continual consciousness of death and to die as we have lived.

In Touching Feeling Sedgwick recognizes that a central role of the teacher is to point to the world, identifying a problem or experience worthy of the student’s attention. She is not very sanguine, however, about the process entailed in such pointing. She is drawn to the space between language and experience, the object and its signifier, means and ends. In Buddhist writing, this pedagogical conundrum is referred to as “pointing at the moon.” As Walter Hsieh comments in A Treasury of Mah¯ay¯ana S¯utras:

Employing speech as a skillful means, the Buddha spoke many sutras, which should only be taken as “the finger that points to the moon,” not the moon itself. The Buddha said, “I have not taught a single word during the forty-nine years of my Dharma preaching.” The sutras often admon-ish us to rely on meaning rather than on mere words. . . . Readers should bear in mind that it is not the words themselves but the attachment to words that is dangerous.

Dangerous attachments. Words and texts can take on a life of their own, cut off from the experiences in which they are grounded. Lives 122 n jonathan g. silin

like my father’s can produce fewer and fewer texts and are lived at an increasing distance from those who love them. What exactly am I learning about silence at my father’s bedside?

After many anxious and guilt-ridden conversations, my brother and I decide that we can no longer manage my father’s care at his apartment. He will remain permanently in the nursing home where he has gone after suffering a broken hip in 2000. His response to our carefully worded presentation is oblique, “Well . . . I am pretty well adjusted here for the period that they would find acceptable. After all, they aren’t going to get people with a twenty-year life expectancy. I am not rehabilitated yet.”

I am taken aback, worried that he doesn’t understand the permanent nature of the decision. When I reiterate that he will be moving to another floor and giving up his greatly prized single room, he indicates optimism as well as realism, “I may be dreaming,” he writes, “but I keep feeling that maybe I will progress to better days.”

A week later I am still pressing home the point, hoping for what?

Accusations, regrets, resolutions, cathartic words? It’s just after dinner. Because of my father’s difficulties swallowing, meals can last an hour or more. And because he communicates only with pen and paper, these are quiet occasions. I am eager to leave and eager for reassurance. “Dad, you know, if there’s anything you want to talk about, well, this might be a good time,” I say. I hand him the yellow legal pad on which he slowly and carefully prints these words, “Of course there is a lot I could talk about. But most of it is too painful to even think about.” Indeed, it’s too painful to think about because it has already been thought. He is pointing to the moon; the pointing and the moon are both the same and distinct.

I am still for a long time. Then I tell him, “Well, if you ever feel like talking, I am strong enough to hear what you have to say.” Of course, this bravado indicates the very opposite, my vulnerability rather than any strength. With a detached smile and a turn toward the television set, my father terminates our conversation. A master of words has spoken through his silence.

8

My Father, His Psychiatrists, and Me

Every analysis, in a sense, is about the obstacles to memory: people come for psychoanalysis

because the way they are remembering their

lives has become too painful; the stories they are telling themselves have become too coercive and restrictive. In so far as they have a dominant story about who they are, they have a repetitive story. And repetition, for Freud, is forgetting in its most spellbinding form.

a da m p h i l l i p s , Flirtation

Back when my father was eighty-seven, a time at which many bodies break down beyond repair, and no longer a candidate for medical