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

ous parts of the body messages that are usually sent from the inside, by the brain.

In contrast to his body, which works in slow motion, every movement an effort of extreme will, my father’s mind functions at high speed. Often it seems that too many communications are being sent at once, causing them to become confused and misrouted, content and emotion thrown together pell-mell. After all, isn’t that why we are about to assemble in the doctor’s office? Yet, seeing my father from a distance, as others must see him, a weak and fragile old man, I have second thoughts. Who is really to benefit from this visit? Wouldn’t a more stoic attitude on my part be less taxing on all of us?

As the light changes for a second time, I take a deep breath and hurry across the street. Leaving aside hesitations, I join my father, careful to announce myself in a voice loud enough so that he can hear me but not so intrusively as to startle him. He stops, looks up, and smiles at me warmly.

Although the building is old and probably once contained spacious office suites and apartments, it has been modernized in a hap-hazard way. Everything is cramped and small. The doctor’s waiting room is no more than a hallway with chairs strung out in a line against one wall, and there is no receptionist to greet us. A far cry from the expansive and well-staffed waiting rooms of my youth, here it is hard for the four of us to maneuver in these close quarters—to hang up coats and hats and to find space for the walker, my overstuffed backpack, and the all-important brown paper bag filled with my father’s pills.

The office itself, dominated by a cluttered desk piled high with manila folders and drug samples, requires that I bring in additional seats from the waiting room to accommodate us. Once we are settled inside and after my opening explanation of our visit, Dr. R turns to my father. In a controlled voice, the anger seething just beneath the surface, my father delivers a ten-minute indictment of all those involved in his care. Everyone—family, friends, and professionals—has failed 130 n jonathan g. silin

to respond adequately to his physical needs and to appreciate the depths of his suffering. His words are direct, his thoughts well organized, and his focus clear.

My mother and I are each allotted a brief time to recount our recent experiences with my father. But Dr. R is no family therapist and takes little interest in our stories. He attends only to the identified patient. As we talk, Dr. R dumps out the contents of the brown bag on to the desk and copies down the names and dosages of my father’s medications. Noting the antidepressant drugs, he asks my father if he has been to a psychiatrist before. My father answers by talking about Dr. M, a well-known psychoanalyst whom he saw regularly during the 1950s. Dr. R pursues a line of questioning—did my father sit or lie down during the sessions? Did he go three or five times a week?—designed to reveal if my father was in a classical analysis. No, my father insists, he always sat up and could not possibly afford five sessions a week. He chuckles to himself as he reports that Dr. M found his case so interesting that he often allowed him to pay whatever he could.

From time to time, he even asked my father’s advice about the stock market. My father reserves for himself a special place in Dr. M’s practice and refuses standard categories. When Dr. R makes explicit his own assumption that my father was in therapy for depression, my father reacts quickly and sharply. “No,” he asserts, “I was not depressed, although I didn’t feel great. I went to Dr. M because I was dissatisfied with my life. Because I thought I could do better.”

I am stunned by this carefully considered formulation. During the years of my own psychotherapy, I had developed an understanding of my father as a deeply depressed person, which I had never questioned before. Nor can I reconstruct exactly how this understanding came about. Perhaps it was more a reflection of my own situation than my lived experience of his frequent moodiness, occasional tears, and demanding ways. In contrast to my therapeutic attempts to stave off existential despair and emotional paralysis, my father suggests something quite different about himself—a drive to improve his situation.

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My father was ambitious as well as dissatisfied, determined as well as unhappy.

At this moment in Dr. R’s office, just a few streets north but many decades removed from Dr. M’s practice, my father displays his continuing ability to rise to the occasion, to show himself to best advantage.

He still has resources to draw on, accounts that have not been completely emptied. Despite all his infirmities, my father does not present himself as a victim but rather as someone who wants to live up to his potential. He is ready to accept professional help in a way that preserves his pride and emphasizes his sense of agency. His story of Dr. M

is as much about the present as about the past.

I will never know the truth of my father’s clinical diagnosis, although I did come to know Dr. M, who acted as a kind of family therapist long before that discipline was invented. He is part of my history as well as my father’s, and I remember our first encounter vividly.

I am a shy, anxious child, a bed wetter who, according to my mother’s oft-repeated words, lacks self-confidence. My first visit to Dr.

M is the emotional equivalent of a general checkup. His office, located on the ground floor of narrow brownstone, consists of a waiting room in the front and a