My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents

by Jonathan G. Silin

  Mr. Halperin, a specialist in elder care, quickly declares my par-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 3

  ents’ plan inadvisable; the small size of the estate would provide little income and be quickly consumed by bank fees. Later, when I point out the inequity of the arrangement since I don’t have children, my parents express outrage at the idea that someone who is not a blood relative might ultimately inherit their money. Mr. Halperin ends the meeting with a description of the financial risks that my parents incur by retaining direct control over their resources should they require prolonged hospitalization or care at a nursing home. He advises them to place their money in a Medicare trust immediately.

  We leave the meeting dazed. I because of the emotional energy required to assert Bob’s place in the family, and my parents because they are forced to confront the inadequacy of their carefully wrought plans. Implicit too is the message that their youngest son, the rebel of the family who is not supposed to care about material matters, has taken the lead in developing a practical strategy for the future. Suddenly the ground has shifted. We are crossing a border into another country, the country of the frail elderly.

  Although my parents are yet to suffer the multiple medical crises that will bring us to the heart of this new territory, a subtle psychological shift begins in Mr. Halperin’s conference room. It’s been a long and difficult passage from the time when my parents were newly retired and still independent to the present, when they are reliant on a cornucopia of medications and round-the-clock health aides to get through the day. In the beginning, neither they nor I knew where we were going, or even that we were in the midst of a journey. We were reluctant travelers who would have preferred to stay just where we had been during the prior decades. But within two years, a series of life-threatening illnesses rapidly propelled us forward into the domain of the frail elderly. We were each in our own way still struggling to understand the changed situation and our radically altered relationship.

  After our meeting with Mr. Halperin that afternoon, I place my parents in a taxi and head for the subway. At Bank Street College, where I teach teachers, there will surely be sympathetic listeners for 4 n jonathan g. silin

  the drama that has just played itself out. Although the degree of direct involvement differs, everyone has a story to tell about aging parents. While we once talked about students, proposed changes in the curriculum, and our visits to local schools as we waited to use the copy machine, now my colleagues and I are more often overheard discussing the merits of various nursing homes, health aides, and geria-tricians. Like my immediate peers, I find it difficult to establish the right distance from my parents. At times I am envious of my older brother, who has lived in Asia since his graduate school days and long ago established the geographic and emotional space that characterizes his response to their needs. As I struggle to maintain practical and psychological boundaries when assisting my parents, time becomes blurred. Even as my new role evokes memories of childhood, I am forced to abandon images of my parents as omniscient and invulnerable and myself as the one in need of care and protection. I am forever a child—even as I have become the decision maker and emotional center of the family.

  In the beginning of my parents’ decline, I spent a great deal of time testing the present against what I remembered of the past, mourning my lost youth and the parents who were part of it. It seemed the only way to make sense of what was happening, of the radically changed relationship we had entered. My memories were hazy, and aspects of my parents I hadn’t seen before disoriented me. I had a sense of loss at the same time as I wasn’t quite clear about what I had given up. Was my father cantankerous and depressed or socially skilled and ambitious? Was my mother confident and extremely capable or shy and rid-dled with self-doubt? How could I reconcile the disparate images of now and then, of them and me?

  Because I am an early childhood educator, I have many opportunities to think about the life cycle in more disciplined, less emotionally laden ways—observation in classrooms, work with teachers, and study of the scientific literature that describes human development.

  Spending so much time with my parents, I find that I am not only revisiting my own past but also the very idea of childhood. The as-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 5

  sumption that childhood is a long-ago event—one that is portrayed in popular books as leaving us either with scars that never completely heal or with deep nostalgia for an idyllic time that can never be recovered—no longer seems certain. The memories, relationships, and ways of knowing I thought I had abandoned years ago are still a dynamic part of the present. Perhaps development works through addition rather than substitution, with our new skills and insights joining rather than replacing old ones. Perhaps childhood is less a foundational moment fixed in the distant past than an open book that can be edited and reinterpreted over time.

  In class the night after the meeting with Mr. Halperin, my parents’

  lawyer, we discuss Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. My niece, Anne, who grew up in Hong Kong and whose mother is Taiwanese, tells me that it is a book filled with stereotypes and that misrepresents Chinese culture. Nevertheless, I am still drawn to its central theme of loss and reconciliation, unashamedly moved by its sentimentality and descriptions of intergenerational conflict. When the book’s protagonist, June Woo, resists the suggestion of the club that she travel to China to tell her half-sisters about her mother’s death—“What will I say?

  What can I tell them about my mother? I don’t know anything. She was my mother”—I feel the truth of her words in the pit of my stomach. In the class, I talk about the ineffable mysteries that often surround the people whom we know most intimately, as if our very closeness prevents us from seeing and appreciating the whole. Images from the afternoon fill my head. How do my parents understand this last period of their lives? What do they make of my efforts to help them organize their affairs? Why are they so reluctant to trust me?

  Further on in the book, when another middle-aged daughter gains enough distance to recognize that her mother is no longer the formidable enemy she once imagined—“I could finally see what was really there: an old woman, a wok for her armor, a knitting needle for her sword, getting a little crabby as she waited patiently for her daughter to invite her in”—I think about being caught up in power struggles with my parents, struggles I presumed long over. We argue 6 n jonathan g. silin

  over everything from household help and an appointment with the heart specialist to the purchase of a hearing aid and an application for a bank card. The frustration of trying to help two fiercely independent people sometimes causes me to lose all perspective and patience.

  I am drawn back to the classroom by my twenty-something students, all women, who resonate with the stories of mother-daughter conflict in Tan’s book but complain that they have trouble telling the characters apart. They blame the author for failing to draw distinguishing psychological portraits of the mothers and daughters. I talk about cultural differences and the Western emphasis on the individual, and about the differences between novels, such as Amy Tan’s, in which the characters are defined by how they act or fail to act and novels that are predicated on extended exploration of their protagonists’ interior lives. I even manage to speak about some of the cultural myths to which my niece had alerted me. Afterward, however, as the students gather up their notebooks, half-eaten sandwiches, and containers of cold soup and coffee, I am left to gather together the emotional fragments of my own day.

  During class I have tried to fend off thoughts of my aging parents even as I wonder if there are any larger lessons in their story for the students. Despite my parents’ growing fears and vulnerabilities, they are not childlike in any way. Nor do they give any indication that they expect or would like to be cared for. We have begun a complex dance in which I am learning to offer assistance, and they are learning to accept their new limitations. Never an accomplished dancer, I stumble frequently as I try to master new steps. I wonder about wh
o is leading and who is following and find that I must listen carefully, for the music changes daily. Sometimes it is slow and sweet as we remember the past together, sometimes it is fast and staccato as we are pressed to make critical healthcare decisions. At other moments it seems that we are all on the same dance floor moving to different tunes.

  This dance brings to the fore painful memories of my parents’ frequent and intrusive interventions into my own life. Hovering over me m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 7

  as a child, they sought to read every emotional undercurrent for indications of restless waters, muddied streams, and paralyzing logjams.

  While they celebrated my most minor achievements with pride, they also did not hesitate to secure professional assistance in the form of tutors and counselors if academic or emotional progress was in doubt.

  When I was in the throes of an adolescent identity crisis, struggling to manage my first gay love affairs, my mother’s letter to the psychiatrist requesting information about my treatment seemed unforgivable to me. The fact that she was a former mental health professional made my outrage at her failure to respect the confidential nature of the therapeutic relationship all the more bitter.

  Now I have become the intrusive one, no longer trusting my parents to provide accurate reports of their medical interviews. Some time ago, I timidly asked my father’s permission to call his doctor. I was taken aback by his response, “Of course. You should call. You’re my son.” I immediately reproached myself for having waited too long to do what sons should do. On reflection, I understood his reply not as a rebuke but as an invitation to become more actively involved in his care. My father was instructing me about what he expects and needs.

  My mother too has ideas about what a son should do, although they are not about speaking to others, but about how to communicate in a crisis. These instructions were delivered from her bed in the intensive care unit of the hospital, on the day following the surgery to repair an ulcer that had burst through the lining of her stomach, when peritonitis threatened her life. My mother’s speech was slurred, the lingering effects of multiple painkillers, but her presence of mind was unshaken. She lay immobile, tubes of every description leading into and out of her body. When I entered the room, I immediately took her hand. Naturally shy and undemonstrative, I have been taught by HIV/AIDS the necessity of overcoming this reticence. Just as quickly, my mother asked, “Is your hand shaking?” My mother had not been given to straight talk in the past, and I was taken aback. Her words seemed out of character. “No,” I lied in response to her query as she 8 n jonathan g. silin

  went on sternly, “Because I don’t need that.” My mother was clearly telling me what she needed, and I tried to provide the strength she was asking for. Later, when my father tried to tease her about getting better so that she could look after him, the expression on her face told me that she wasn’t amused. She wanted only to be cared for, intoler-ant at the moment of anyone else’s weaknesses.

  Sometimes my parents’ instructions were less direct and more subtle, as on the day we were squeezed into the booth of a coffee shop not far from the apartment that my father’s eldest sister had lived in for many years. Nearly ninety, she had moved into a nearby nursing home. It was an unusual event for us to be eating lunch together, but then so was the occasion, a respite from sorting through the contents of her soon-to-be-relinquished apartment. My father cleaned his hands with a Wash’n Dri towelette, one of the great modern conveniences for someone phobic about germs and eating in unfamiliar places. After some talk about the remaining tasks—securing a reputable antiques appraiser, the difficulties of arranging the Salvation Army pickup, the appropriate order in which various family members might stake their claims on cherished objects—I cleared a space for my own impatient query. Why had it taken two years to let go of the apartment? I wanted to know. How could they rationalize paying so much rent for so long on an unoccupied apartment? By then my father was eating his tuna fish directly from the single-serving-size can so as to avoid the unsanitary procedure of picking up a sandwich.

  My mother pecked, birdlike, at her food. They were both clearly uncomfortable with my line of questioning. My father frowned and remained silent. “Far too much to eat,” my mother evasively exclaimed, as if overwhelmed by the untidy aesthetics of the egg salad that oozed from between the slices of rye bread. Finally, my father ventured that he had been waiting for the right moment. I pressed forward. How did he know that she was ready now? A man who usually enjoyed a large vocabulary and the hunt for the perfect words to describe a person or event, my father was suddenly and surprisingly inarticulate. He resisted my probes, as if I had asked an embarrassingly personal ques-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 9

  tion. He acknowledged that although he knew that giving up the apartment was inevitable, he had had no idea when that moment would come. In the last several months, however, my aunt had made no references to her former home or possessions. It was not that she had forgotten the apartment so much as that it had disappeared from her immediate view. She was ensconced in the nursing home routines and knew no other life.

  Although everything that my father said made sense, I found myself dissatisfied with his explanation and the reluctant way in which it was proffered. I knew my father was a kind and thoughtful person; after all, he had even arranged for my aunt to make one last visit to the apartment before it was dismantled. And several weeks later, I was impressed by the controlled and generous way my aunt talked about the furniture that I had taken from her apartment—the dining room table that now sits neatly against the wall in the small house in which Bob and I have lived for so long and that miraculously expands to accommodate twelve for our frequent holiday dinners, the two darkly lacquered and vaguely oriental side chairs that provide our otherwise ordinary living room with a touch of elegance, the little black chest of drawers that so conveniently contains our wills and other important papers. Yet it took several years for me to appreciate the wisdom of my father’s judgment. I came to understand how important the passage of time could be in helping my parents themselves adjust to previously unacceptable conditions, to the loss of control over their bodies and of the independence they cherished. I saw how being consumed with getting through the present could trump nostalgia for the past, and how a preoccupation with what has been lost can be cur-tailed by an attentive gesture in the moment.

  As an educator, I should not have been surprised that the instruction my parents offered in the coffee shop required several years to take hold. I am supposed to know about the complex ways that teaching and learning occurs, about the difficulties of separation from loved ones and the comforting, transitional objects that contain our sadness and our memories. After all, beginnings and endings aren’t so very dif-10 n jonathan g. silin

  ferent. They are times in our lives when autonomy and dependency, desire and self-sufficiency, affiliation and separation are experienced in heightened forms.

  Despite these many parallels, my knowledge of early childhood is far more complete than my knowledge of old age, my educator voice far more certain than my eldercare skills. I have only to recall my increasingly frequent and anxious visits with my parents when I was still overwhelmed by their problems and my own desire to fix them. I fret-ted uselessly about their apartment that suffered from decades of neglect. I saw carpets worn black with dirt, chairs lumpy with broken springs, lamps covered with torn shades. I desperately wanted these things to matter to my parents—but they didn’t. I tried to organize the kitchen counters littered with dozens of pillboxes, bottles of cough syrup, and warnings about the dangers of the very drugs keeping them alive. As we talked of symptoms and treatment options, I feverishly sorted through piles of unopened mail, stacks of unread magazines, accumulations of unused coupons. I wanted to create order out of the confusion brought on by so much illness.

  When I come to visit, it always seems that I am leaving too soon.

  There is never enough time. When I arrive, I focus on
my mother, whose first question is about the length of my stay and the bus that I will take home. Although she continues to glance anxiously at her watch throughout the visit, the conversation shifts to the events of my week. Always the great escape artist, eager to pretend that everything is okay and to find relief from her own difficulties in other people’s lives, she does not want to talk about herself and the endless round of doctors’ appointments that mark her days. From a distance, I understand that for my mother, denial has been an effective survival strategy. Up close, I experience impatience, sometimes anger. It is often impossible to determine problems in need of attention and hard to always fill the void left by her lack of self-representation with di-verting stories from my own life.

  After attending to my mother, I turn to my father, knowing that m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 11

  neither he nor I will be satisfied with the evening’s accomplishments.

  It’s not for lack of planning, but in his late eighties he tires easily and has difficulty staying focused. I try to set out a short agenda. I wait till we have settled in a bit. When he is especially fatigued or withdrawn, this entails a silent sitting together. If he is outgoing and energetic, he reports the latest crisis precipitated by a misplaced bill or a govern-ment form in need of completion. Experience teaches me that any one of these tales of loss and recovery can take over the entire evening. I listen with care but don’t ask too many questions.

  Given my father’s desire to take an active part in managing his own affairs and my commitment to a collaborative effort, I soon venture my own list of concerns, the product of a week’s deliberation.