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

recognizes him any longer and sees no reason to go back to the hospital. The one thing we agree upon is not to call my mother, who seems too frail to withstand an all-night bedside vigil. At 11:00 pm my brother calls from my father’s room. He has enlisted Anne to accompany him. The drugs have not taken effect and my father mostly sleeps. Why stay?

The next day I learn that my brother and Anne wait for a while longer and then, when asked to leave the room for a few minutes while the nurses try to make my father more comfortable, leave. My father dies alone somewhere between 3 and 4 am. I am not surprised by the 5 am call with the news. It’s not like the call about Bob’s death.

I experience no disbelief and very little emotion at all other than relief that his interminable suffering has ended and that we have managed a successful final interview. I do wonder, why now? Why not two years ago or two weeks from now? The moment of death is completely arbitrary.

In the months to follow I forgive myself as I know my father would have forgiven me for being an imperfect caregiver, for not rushing to his beside in the middle of the night. More disquieting is the unexpected guilt that I experience when thinking about my father’s death at all. I am torn between two losses and believe that all my emotional attention rightfully belongs to Bob. Yet images of my father periodi-cally intrude into the carefully measured spaces that I have created to contemplate my life with and now without Bob. It’s an awkward, unsettling internal competition, one that neither Bob nor my father would approve, one that I hope is ended in these pages, in this attempt to make sense of the final years of my father’s life.

I am not a spiritual person, but I am convinced that my father knew in his last weeks that the end was near and that he was prepared as best he could be. He did not leave us money and property, as he had dreamed in his younger days. Nor did he leave a public record of accomplishments that can be recognized by others, something that he hoped his children might achieve. In the last months of his life, how-162 n jonathan g. silin

ever, my father did give me rare, profoundly moving moments of recognition. These moments, many mediated by Bob’s death, do not make up for his demanding and controlling ways that permeated much of my life. They do offer a sense of a circle completed, a life well lived, and a final set of instructions on what it means to be a caregiver to the very end.

Acknowledgments

Nineteenth-century images of Romantic authors writing alone in their rooms, channeling the artistic muse, still cast their long shadow over the twenty-first century. Most books more accurately reflect the complex ways that our lives are bound up with others. They are the products of socially constructed worlds as much as, if not more than, solitary, interior reflection. The acknowledgments that follow—and I apologize in advance to those whom I may have inadvertently failed to mention—attest to the collaborative nature of authorship, even of memoir.

Many members of my chosen family helped to make life tolerable in the face of intolerable losses and understood that for better or worse, my life and my work were inextricably tied together. Thank you—Chelsea Bailey and Marshall Weber, Gail Boldt, Muriel Dimen, Allen Ellenzweig, James and John Haigney, Michael Hampton and Carlos Sandoval, Cindy Jurow, Dolores Klaich, Barry and Arlene Klingman, Michael Piore and Rodney Yoder, Eric Rofes, Erika Shank, Glenn Stancroff, Toba Tucker, and Karen Weiss. I gratefully acknowledge too the support of my Bank Street family, past and present

—Nancy Balaban, Virginia Casper, Harriet Cuffaro, Lia Gelb, Nancy Gropper, Judy Leipzig, Carol Lippman, Mimi Rosenberg, and Edna Shapiro.

Members of my given family have contributed each in his or her own way to sustaining my parents. My brother, Robert, generously 163

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provided the resources necessary to keep my father out of an institution for as long as was possible and insured that my mother never entered one. Anne, my niece and coconspirator in the work of eldercare, always kept me on my toes, asking questions that reminded me of the multiple perspectives that our lives may be viewed from. I am deeply indebted as well to the emotional and practical generosity of my cousins—Jill Prosky and James Posner—without whom my mother’s final years would have been very different indeed. I am thankful too for my mother’s rare moments of laughter and good humor, which punctuated the hard times, and my aunt’s courage and wisdom in the face of adversity, which I can only hope to emulate.

I will never forget the professional caregivers—Yvonne Calvin, Marlene Eubanks, and Sandra Mundy—who so conscientiously looked after my father at home. Despite the many trying moments, they all appreciated his humor, determination to control as much of his life as possible, and ultimate will to survive.

A minigrant from Bank Street College of Education supported initial work on this project. The East End Writers’ Group offered sage critique of the early essays. Other colleagues willingly and insightfully read drafts of the manuscript—Wendy Fairey, Judith Levine, Jo Anne Pagano, Fran Schwartz, and Peter Taubman. My thanks as well to Bill Ayers, who always remembers and isn’t shy. Without the astute and caring stewardship of Helene Atwan, director of Beacon Press, the book would not have seen the light of day.

In the end it was Bob Giard, my partner of thirty years, who made work on this project possible. For it was Bob who taught me how to love and how to forgive, when to fight fiercely and when to let go.

Above all he understood that it is in the smallest acts of human kindness that we often reveal our deepest feelings and our profoundest respect for human life. It is hard