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

Would I please fill one out or speak with my father about it?

In the late morning of a fine March day I walk from my office to my father’s room in the nursing home. He is most alert and at his best before lunch, and my mother will not yet have arrived, a potentially complicating factor. I find him surprisingly calm and relaxed. It seems as if the bouts of pneumonia that he suffered from all winter have drained him of the dementia and extreme mood swings. I stand close by his bedside so he can see me with his good eye and hear me clearly.

After two pairs of hearing aids disappear, we do not bother with a third. They are simply too small or too valuable to be tracked by the nursing home staff. I explain the reason for my visit. My father looks m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 159

at me with understanding and replies in his increasingly weak but still legible print, “Of course I want a DNR order. I’ve always wanted one.”

His tone is almost indignant. How could his wishes have not been known and carried out? “OK, Dad,” I reply with great relief, no longer put off by his minor assertions of authority. “Do you want to sign it yourself or should I?” His response, “You sign it,” is both a dismissive command and an indication of trust. Nothing is ever simple.

After I take care of the paperwork, I return to spend an unusually easy hour with my father. One topic leads comfortably into the next.

As I walk back to my office I am thankful for the satisfying interview.

The clarity and crispness of the day echoes the mood in my father’s room. I know it’s been a special time but not exactly how special until several days later.

Again it is the floor nurse who calls in late afternoon to say that the nursing home is sending my father to the hospital emergency room. They have been trying unsuccessfully over the past week to get him an appointment with a pulmonologist and have determined on the emergency room strategy as the fastest way to get him evaluated.

I know this unhappy strategy only too well and that my father might be stranded in a hospital corridor for many hours waiting to be seen.

Partially blind, his writing now deteriorated so that it is almost impossible for strangers to read, he may be forced to lie on a gurney unable to communicate. The nurse assures me that of course they will send his chart with him, but it is against policy to send a human being. It is not a life-threatening situation. Then why not wait until the morning, when it is more feasible for him to be accompanied by a family member? Is the situation more serious than she is willing to let on?

How hard has the home really tried for the pulmonologist’s assessment in the preceding weeks? Is this simply bad timing, or a lack of forethought?

I have just returned to Amagansett from New York and immediately call my brother, who happens to be in the city. He is reluctant to leave his business meeting. I explain in graphic detail what my father’s experience is likely to be in the emergency room. Within the hour my 160 n jonathan g. silin

brother calls from the hospital, where he has been able to locate my father. No doctor has examined him yet. An hour later there is another call. A doctor has just seen my father and diagnosed him with sepsis, a severe and often fatal infection. My brother reports that even though they have started him on massive doses of antibiotics, in the doctor’s words, “the prognosis isn’t good.” I am in shock. From a pul-monary assessment to a deadly infection? When did it begin? Before he got to the hospital? In the emergency room itself, a function of a severely compromised immune system? Of course my brother can’t answer these questions, nor can I convince him to stay any longer.

It’s close to 7 pm. I get the doctor’s phone number and am surprised to reach her immediately. Yes, she has seen my father. I push for a definitive statement about the “bad prognosis.” She is friendly and professional but resists my prodding. Finally hearing my insistence, she uses guarded, carefully chosen words to tell me that “in cases like your father’s, if he doesn’t respond to the drugs within two or three hours, he may not last the night.”

By now I’ve missed the last bus to New York and I don’t trust myself alone on the long drive. Perhaps more to the point, I am not impelled to be with my father. I believe that our “final” moment has occurred earlier in the week, when he directed me to sign the DNR

order. He was calm, in charge, almost heroic during that encounter and there is part of me that wants to remember him that way. There is part of me too that is exhausted by the years filled with all of the unheroic moments when his needs took precedence over everyone else’s. In what turns out to be this final night of my father’s life, I am paralyzed by the inevitability of another loss only eight months after Bob’s death. I keep my physical distance because I need to sustain an emotional barrier. In this way I am selfish and self-protective. These are hardly admirable emotions, hardly the thoughts of an ideal caregiver, but all too real nonetheless.

I want someone to be with my father and in my eyes that person should be my brother. I call my brother at home and tell him what the m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 161

doctor has said. He does not believe that my father