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

interventions available to younger, more vital men, he was patched together with the help of a feeding tube, hearing aids, a walker, diapers, and the twelve medications that allowed him to get through each day.

Weakened and depressed by repeated illnesses, he has reason enough to be angry. Nonetheless, his sudden outbursts have become so frequent and intimidating that I am increasingly reluctant to call or visit, let alone speak with him about issues critical to his care. In more 123

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reflective moments, my father counsels me not to be afraid and insists that I can ask him anything. These reassurances don’t carry much weight with me these days.

Having lost control over his body, my father tries to assert his authority in other arenas. In the period between his first and second cancer surgeries, he redoubles his efforts to manage his personal finances. He is unable to remember facts and figures as he once did or to do the complicated mental math that my entire family had always been in awe of. He urges me to use the new hand-held calculator that sits on his desk but does not resort to it himself. Treating me like an incompetent employee who does not devote sufficient time to the job, he showers me with bitter harangues about my failure to keep him informed of his income and expenses. But no amount of information can satisfy him now because he retains little and because he is no longer amenable to rational argument.

After one particularly acrimonious dispute has died down, I comment on his determination to stay on top of things. Alluding to our argument, my father responds with a self-satisfied laugh, “Yeah, I knew you were coming so I marshaled my energy.” I laugh along with him and admit that I felt ambushed, totally unprepared for his sudden attack. In truth, I am made uneasy by my father’s rapid shifts of mood and his canny insights. His laughter sounds unnatural, the lingering residue of an earlier hospital psychosis. A masklike persona hides an incomprehensible personality shift.

At the same time, I can’t help but wonder when I became the enemy, an intruder whom my father prepares to do battle with. Was it the day I took my parents to the lawyer who pointed out the inadequacies of their carefully drawn but long-outdated plans for their final years? Was it the day when, because he was suffering from the effects of severe dehydration, my mother and I coerced him to go to the hospital against his will? Or was it some far more distant event, even the sum of our history together, that makes me both a loved and a provocative presence to him? My father’s ambivalence toward me, the m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 125

caregiver who has assumed responsibility for financial and medical decision making, is never hidden, always on display.

Once my father takes aim, I am an easy mark for his rage. With inadequate internal defenses, I soak up his anger and anxiety like a dry sponge. When he is in the hospital, I wake up in the middle of the night worrying if he is asleep or needs help getting to the bathroom.

It is an unsettling feeling as I imagine myself in his room but am unable to protect him from discomfort, and I can’t fall back to sleep.

We have made a mess of the boundaries that might have enabled us to maintain a healthier degree of sovereignty in our own psychic domains.

I know that my father’s anger is a sign of life, a vital assertion of his presence in the world. He will not be ignored. He rails against the gap between the image he once projected—in charge, self-sufficient, proudly independent—and the reality of who he has become, someone reliant on others to satisfy the most basic needs, from eating and drinking to getting out of bed and dressing in the morning. But he rails against more than the loss of physical mobility. According to the Rousseauean ideal, a truly free person “wants only what he can get, and does only what pleases him.” Happiness is possible only when our powers and desires are in accord. My father is a slave caught between his desires and his inability to fulfill them. Rousseau’s maxim aside, contemporary psychologists suggest that the story of human development may be understood as the growing recognition of this tension, of the space between self and other, as well as our growing skill at securing what we want. In old age, my father is painfully aware of the gap between his wants and his ability to fend for himself. He is a good learner but not a fast learner and is slow to adapt to these changed circumstances.

My social worker friends tell me that the elderly want to talk about the past. They say that constructing a coherent life narrative is a therapeutic process through which my parents will be able to place events and people in meaningful relationship to each other. Revising their 126 n jonathan g. silin

story to incorporate recent illnesses will help them to attain control over uncontrollable events, to understand the new catastrophes in terms of familiar themes. Through such talk they may give shape and finality to their losses. At a time when visits to professionals dominate daily life, my parents can assert expertise with the authoritative telling of their lives.

Although such a life-review process is not one in which they normally engage with me, I do see it in action on the cold, rainy winter day that a nurse comes to evaluate my parents for enrollment in Medicaid. They have fiercely fought the Medicaid designation but have finally resigned themselves and know that the interview is critical to remaining in their own apartment. I arrive late, tied up in city traffic, and harassed, but the nurse arrives even later and more harassed. I presume that