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

by Jonathan G. Silin

  After thirty years together the law deems me unsuitable to carry out Bob’s final wishes. Who might know them better? Whose authority should supersede my own?

  Although we do not have the documents that would prove valid across state lines, we did possess a deeply satisfying relationship that offers the emotional comforts and practical supports necessary to productive adult lives. With Bob’s death, I lose my bearings. Daily events no longer have meaning and bigger existential questions are unapproachable.

  I miss Bob in the myriad ways that living and working together for thirty years in the same small house makes inevitable. At the same time, I am surprised to find that from the first I am able to do certain kinds of work. That summer, as a close friend stands guard over the front door, turning away visitors wishing to extend their sympathies, I complete my course syllabus, send out two conference proposals, and edit a paper for publication. Only now however, three years later, have I been able to return to the intensely autobiographical and highly theoretical essays that have characterized my scholarship over the last twenty years.

  Soon after that first fall semester begins, I see an old colleague and friend in the hallway at the graduate school where I teach. She has written to me over the summer but this is our first meeting. Perhaps because of our history, and because her own husband had died only recently, it is easy for her to read my face, filled as it is with discomfort and all the concerns for my own viability brought on by such an unanticipated loss. We stand there awkwardly. As she struggles to find words of consolation, I remind her of how, only weeks after her husband’s death, she had so graciously given out diplomas at the graduation ceremonies. She admits that she, too, is amazed when she looks back at pictures of that day. It was the students’ time, their moment m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 149

  to be recognized for the achievement that graduation signaled. In her slow, thoughtful manner she summarizes, “Over time, I think it is different, not easier. It never really gets better.” Finally, she adds, “You do what is necessary.”

  Through the rollercoaster ride since Bob’s death, the ambush of surprising emotions that continues to meet me at every turn, these words remain a reassuring touchstone. I certainly feel that I am doing the necessary as I head to New York City a week after Bob’s death, even before the “cremains” are actually returned, let alone the clothing, cameras, and papers that he traveled with, everything identified with its own bright orange tag connected by old-fashioned copper wire—ROBERT GIARD; 172; CASE NO. 319; JUL 02. My destination is the office of one of our oldest friends, a lawyer. As a gay man I am keyed to the potential for mishap, for interventions from long-silent family members who may contest a will or make a claim despite all the legal documents that should make such events impossible. I have only to think back to the scene in the lawyer’s office that opens this book and the manner in which my parents had essentially, if un-intentionally, written me out of their wills, to know that I am doing what is necessary to protect myself and to protect Bob’s work. I have no reason to suspect any untoward interference from Bob’s family. I just want to make sure that everything is in order. That’s what gay people with a sense of history do.

  I go to this meeting alone, my backpack filled with various legal papers along with a list of questions. I eschew the offers of close friends to accompany me. I am still running on overdrive, plowing ahead, numb but in charge. The meeting occurs without incident and the estate specialist who my friend has asked to join us is clear about what needs to be done. Nevertheless, when I walk out of that law office and onto Fifth Avenue, something has changed. I feel weak and hollow, as if I might be blown over by the slightest wind on that breezeless July day.

  For one thing, I know that I can no longer manage alone. Until this time, friends in my neighborhood visit each day. They take turns 150 n jonathan g. silin

  answering the endless telephone calls, bringing food, helping to make decisions. They return home at night. Suddenly that will not be enough. I walk for a while until I find a public phone, no small achievement in the age of cellular phones and e-mail. I call my cousin and ask her to come to Amagansett. It is Wednesday and she can be there by Friday. “Would that be OK?” she asks. “No,” I reply. Can she arrive by tomorrow afternoon when Bob’s obituary is scheduled to appear in the local paper? It will undoubtedly prompt more calls from which I want to be protected. For the first time in the week since Bob’s death, I feel that I am falling apart, a full-scale meltdown is in progress. My cousin’s commitment to Thursday secured, I call an old friend whose initial suggestion of a visit I had rejected. Now I am ready and she will need to be there as soon as my cousin leaves. I am constructing a human fence tough enough to protect me, porous enough to mediate the world when required, and malleable enough to support my baffling moods and emotions.

  Then I inexplicably find myself on the subway heading uptown toward my father’s nursing home. My niece has taken responsibility for informing my mother about Bob but I know that no one has spoken with my father. While my mother, accompanied by her health aide, visits him daily, winding her way through the two lines of wheelchairs that are often to be found outside his door for the postlunch change of scene, their attempts at communication are often botched. Both suffer from hearing and vision loss. She cannot read his finely printed words. He cannot hear her comments. More importantly, the ministrokes, which she has endured without major damage, have left her with minor cognitive deficits. She does not have the flexibility to adjust to my father’s many moods. Of course, she knows when he is depressed, angry, or out of control but is unable to see subtle difference or to modify her own responses accordingly. To me, it seems that my mother is neither able to give my father what he needs nor to get back anything to sustain her own fragile life. Nevertheless she goes every day. When snowstorms make travel hazardous she sends her health aide as her ambassador. She cannot tolerate the idea that my father m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 151

  might pass one day without seeing a member of the family and thus feel abandoned. It takes many months to convince my mother that a “day off ” to keep a medical appointment is not a disloyal or unloving act.

  Truth be told, because my father slips so easily between manic and depressive states and suffers from prolonged periods of dementia, it is often hard to know what to expect upon entering his room. At times he is not even in the room but out in the hallway frantically writing notes and wildly gesticulating about the staff’s refusal to take him to the development office so that he can give the nursing home a million-dollar gift. On other days, he schemes about installing two telephones, one on either side of his bed, even though he is voiceless and unable to carry on a conversation. On yet other days he is absorbed by some small affront or failure of the staff to respond quickly enough to his request for suctioning. Most offensive is their insistence that he get out of the bed for a few hours each day, which he feels is too great an effort.

  Going to visit my father is a journey for which I pack carefully.

  Beyond a great deal of protective gear, I try to manage something di-verting as well. On some days I bring old family photos. At first blush, what might appear to be severe dementia will then give way to a few minutes of focused attention. When I thrust the pictures in front of my father, he can identify everyone, including himself at age five, standing alone in front of the family home in Erie, Pennsylvania, dressed in an English-style winter coat with velvet collar. Occasionally the photos lead to family stories; mostly they end with a simpler labeling project. I am never sure how much he can comprehend. Several weeks after viewing the picture of himself at five, for example, I watch my father write the barber, whose prior attempts to trim his now long hair he graciously but forcefully resists, that he would be pleased if she could cut his hair, “in the manner of a small boy.”

  On another day, in desperation to end a tantrum about the telephone lines, I pull my recently published book from my backpack. He takes it from my hands, examines it sl
owly and carefully, and then 152 n jonathan g. silin

  writes, “Is it only published in paperback? No hard cover?” Rebuke, sincere inquiry, subtle put-down? I respond with laughter, naming his return to this world, and speak for a few minutes about the contents of the book before he drifts off to sleep.

  Surely he is pleased, however, the day I come to his room directly after giving a talk a few blocks north at Columbia University. Then I report reading a narrative about his love of language. He smiles appreciatively but expresses no desire to read it himself. While nursing home residents often imagine that they are temporarily staying in a hotel, my father, ever the intellectual, sometimes believes that he is living in a university, the psychologists and psychiatrists who test him part of the faculty who simply enjoy his company.

  I have no idea how my father will respond to the news I carry in my backpack that July afternoon three years ago. Walking across 112th Street in Manhattan, I rely on my experiences with HIV/

  AIDS. I remember how it feels when impelled to do things for myself, not necessarily for the person who is sick—a cross-country visit to someone in a coma, a phone call to someone else with dementia, so many words spoken that cannot possibly be understood. I never regret these actions, but neither am I confused about their purpose. As on this day, I act out of my own needs, not anticipating a response from the other. I feel that no matter my father’s emotional state, telling him about Bob’s death is the only respectful thing to do, the only way to acknowledge that he still matters to me and is part of the world. Despite all his erratic behavior, there is an ethical and emotional imper-ative that draws me toward him. And I am not to be disappointed.

  When I arrive he is calm, and after some banter about his latest discontents, I tell him why I have come. He listens carefully but does not respond. As with young children, I reframe my comments and use other words to make clear that he will never see Bob again. I try to check for his comprehension—no written response, no change of facial expression. I decide to drop the subject. After all, I am not there for his sympathy. We sit quietly together and he peruses the newspaper. Then it is time for me to go, my mission accomplished. We are m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 153

  not an openly affectionate family, hugging and kissing not part of our usual comings and goings. My father is sitting in his wheelchair and as I lean down to look him in the eye and say goodbye, he reaches up with his bony, arthritic hands and pulls me toward him, planting a deep kiss on my forehead. Then I know he understands.

  In the following weeks I am preoccupied with securing Bob’s ashes from the funeral home in Chicago and his possessions from the police department, and finally organizing a memorial service. I do not get to New York City nor is my mother mobile enough to come to the service. The afternoon before the memorial my father writes to my mother, “If the service for Bob is tomorrow, could you call Jonathan for me.” I am amazed that he knows the exact day of the memorial.

  My mother’s approach is to avoid bringing up such subjects. Of course, she follows his instructions. I am moved by his attention then and even more on my next visit when I find these words on his pad, “It was a sad day for me when I realized that Bob was gone.” What more could a gay son want from his father? So close to the end of his own life, what more does he possibly have to give?

  My return to work that fall after Bob’s death is not easy. At the end of the semester, a few students write in their course evaluations that I am distant and unapproachable. Those comments surprise one of my colleagues, who reads them as she prepares for my annual review.

  Her own experience with me has been very different, involving many lively conversations about our work. She asks me if I have told my students about my partner’s death. When I say that I carefully considered this possibility and decided not to, she wonders aloud if the students’

  comments might reflect that decision.

  Despite the many unconventional aspects of my pedagogy—

  speaking openly about being a gay man working with young children, requiring students to write personal narratives, engaging with postmodern theory, and conducting conversations about controversial subjects with children—I do not want to talk with my students about Bob’s death. I worry that such a disclosure will place an undue burden 154 n jonathan g. silin

  on them—students whom I don’t know well and many of whom are struggling to become adults. Would a perception of my vulnerability affect their ability to challenge me and test their ideas against my own? I am not willing to risk becoming another person for whom they will need to care, nor do I trust my ability to handle the complex emotions that such an announcement might evoke in my students or in me.

  Slowly, however, I begin to question this self-imposed silence. I am committed to transparency as an essential way of prompting students to examine their assumptions about teaching and learning. I ask them to consider how sharing particular information, life experiences, and ways of thinking might help them understand themselves better, or expand their own students’ horizons. Needless to say, I ask the same questions of myself.

  With respect to Bob’s death and its implications for who I am as a teacher, I do not have very good answers yet. For two years, not talking about his death may have been the way that life-altering event entered my pedagogy. An open exploration of moments when teachers and students choose to remain silent, a topic that I am newly curious about, may help my own students to understand that profound loss is almost always part of the classroom, whether acknowledged or not.

  Then something happens that gives me the chance to move through the silence. It is the night that I invite Lenore Furman to talk about the “News of the Day” book she writes in her kindergarten classroom. Before group meeting each morning, children have a chance to dictate an event that has occurred outside of school. Lenore brings a sample book to our class as well as a video of an especially memorable day.

  Keisha’s mom is eight months pregnant and everyone is waiting excitedly, if somewhat impatiently, for the birth of Keisha’s first sibling. Then, after missing several days of school, Keisha comes back.

  She sits down quietly next to Lenore. Invited to add something to the News of the Day book, Keisha carefully tells this story: “My mom had m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 155

  went to the hospital and she had her baby and it died. It was born too early. My mommy was crying.”

  When the group gathers on the rug, Lenore asks the children who have contributed that morning if she can read their News of the Day out loud. Keisha sits next to Lenore again and is indeed eager to have her news read. When asked if there is anything she wants to add, she says “no.” Lenore herself then reviews the basics of pregnancy and childbirth that have been part of the ongoing curriculum. She reassures the children that only in rare circumstances do babies die. The class listens quietly and closely to everything that Lenore says.

  In succeeding weeks Keisha’s entries return to the theme of loss:

  “My hamster died. They were fighting.” “My fish died and my bird died.” “I thought I lost the book but my mommy found it on the hamster cage.”

  My students have many questions. How does Lenore manage with twenty-seven children? How did she respond to Keisha when she first heard her story? What kind of administrative support does she have for these difficult conversations?

  When Lenore leaves, Suzanne comments that she was struck by the silence of the other children in the classroom when Keisha’s news was read. As Suzanne speaks and others respond, I thought back to my experience just after Bob died. Upon returning to work, I wanted people to know but it was too soon for conversations of any sort. So with the help of a close friend I crafted a brief response to acknowledge the sympathy expressed by colleagues and to make clear that I would not engage in talk about the topic.

  Feeling uneasy yet determined, I tell the class my own story and how it influences my reading of Keisha’s behavior. As they say, you could hear a pin drop in our room.
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  Then Dan breaks the silence. He recounts the time that Steven, one of his first graders, told the class about the death of his grandmother. Dan notes that other students responded by offering their own stories of loss but did not speak directly to Steven. Dan felt dis-156 n jonathan g. silin

  appointed by this conversation. He describes the children as egocen-tric. I, on the other hand, see the long shadow still cast by Piaget in Dan’s words, a shadow that always underestimates children’s cognitive and emotional lives. For me, despite the absence of direct expressions of sympathy, the children’s counter-stories are best interpreted as attempts to identify and empathize with Steven.

  Again, there is another long pause in our own conversation. The silence is palpable. Taking what feels like a further risk, I speak about the many losses endured by my colleagues in recent years. My instinct is to listen when someone wants to talk and, now that I am ready, to answer with my own experience. I am unable to imagine what it is like for Jeannie to lose her husband, Katherine her life partner, or Ken his father. Perhaps, not unlike Dan’s students, I reach out by sharing my own life.

  As our conversation winds down that night, I wonder what my students understand about my own stories of managing loss. I remember that earlier in the semester, Deanna said she would not read a children’s book about a homeless family because she did not want to cry in front of her class. Like others in our group, she felt that children could not tolerate seeing adult expressions of vulnerability. Do my students need the same kind of protection? Have I gone too far?

  Considering Suzanne’s concerns and my own, I ask the group if my stories have made me vulnerable in their eyes. Have I lost authority when talking about Bob’s death?

  As a teacher educator, I feel responsible for making my pedagogy visible and legible, no matter how discomforting that might be. If I want my students to take risks in their classrooms, don’t I have to do the same? That night we leave thoughtfully and quietly. Something has changed for all of us. Our class of eighteen individuals is definitely becoming a group. We are working hard to understand how authentic learning occurs in the classroom.