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

  My Father’s Keeper

  My Father’s Keeper n

  The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents Jonathan G. Silin

  Beacon Press

  Boston

  Beacon Press

  25 Beacon Street

  Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892

  www.beacon.org

  Beacon Press books

  are published under the auspices of

  the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

  © 2006 by Jonathan G. Silin

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  09 08 07 06

  8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.

  Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Silin, Jonathan G.

  My father’s keeper : the story of a gay son and his aging parents / Jonathan G. Silin.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-8070-7964-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Adult children of aging parents—

  United States—Biography. 2. Caregivers—United States—Biography. 3. Aging parents—Care—United States. 4. Gay men—United States—Family relationships.

  5. Sons—United States—Family relationships. I. Title.

  HQ1064.U5S536 2005

  306.8740973—dc22

  2005030371

  Three of the chapters in this book have been published in different forms, including:

  “The Future in Question,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing; “Reading, Writing, and the Wrath of My Father,” Reading Research Quarterly; “My Father, His Psychiatrists, and Me,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality.

  For my father

  Writing books as the highest means of defense against dangers from inside and outside. . . .

  a n n a f r e u d

  Contents

  Prelude xi

  1. New Responsibilities 1

  2. Out of Control 13

  3. The Future in Question 31

  4. Psychic Reality 47

  5. Reading, Writing, and the Wrath of My Father 67

  6. Unspoken Subjects 91

  7. The Other Side of Silence 105

  8. My Father, His Psychiatrists, and Me 123

  Coda 145

  Prelude

  The desire to write is not so much nostalgia for the past but a preoccupation with the future.

  s t e p h e n a p p e l , Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy The year I turned fifty I finally understood that my parents were dying. Not all at once, but slowly, by degrees. It was a call to their doctor to remind him about an angiogram that had gone unscheduled for many weeks that brought this truth home to me. I inquired if he had forgotten it. No, he replied, it’s just that the priorities had shifted. As the diagnoses mounted—coronary disease, ulcers, cancer, glaucoma—the strategies changed rapidly. Other tests were more urgently needed. New interventions had taken precedence. I found it difficult to keep up with this marathon course of treatments, the American way of death.

  My sister-in-law, who studies Buddhist meditation, didn’t understand all this frantic activity. She told me it was better to accept the inevitable. In self-defense I told her that I was not trying to extend my parents’ lives beyond their “natural” limits, only to contain their deaths. I wanted to hold some of their anxieties and fears for them, to sustain a modicum of practical and emotional order in a chaotic time.

  I knew my sister-in-law was right, but her advice was diluted by the twelve thousand miles between Hong Kong and Amagansett, New xi

  xii n jonathan g. silin

  York, that separated our lives. By then, with a torrent of phone calls to make, forms to fill out, and doctors to see, willy-nilly I was in the middle of a process that seemed to be spinning out of control.

  I can only tell the story of my parents’ last years from my own perspective. The losses I experienced were mostly psychic, whereas my parents’ losses were all too real, including the physical and mental ca-pabilities, the independence and autonomy that characterized their prior lives. At the same time, we shared a rapidly growing familiarity with the world of the frail elderly. Wheelchairs and walkers, ambulettes and guardrails, health aides and therapists of every description became a way of life for all of us.

  In the midst of illnesses, agonizing decisions, and the strains of precarious daily lives, we drew closer than we had ever been before.

  My brother in Asia did his best to appear at times of crisis, but he was neither constitutionally nor practically capable of shouldering the day-to-day burdens of care. My niece, who lived in New York during most of my parents’ difficult years, was able to participate in their care for extended periods of time, an undertaking that sorely taxed her previously close relationship with them.

  As primary caregiver, most critical for me was the support of my partner, Bob, and the deep connection that he built with my parents.

  When dispatched to bring my mother home from the hospital, who else but Bob would allow my mother, a lifelong smoker, the illicit pleasure of a cigarette after a month of enforced abstinence. I imagine them just a few feet away from the hospital entrance; my mother knew her etiquette, leaning against the wall of the old limestone and red brick building, chatting casually about the beautiful spring day. Finally discharged, my mother prepared herself to make the first of what would turn into multiple transitions from hospital to home with the help of the addictive substance that was the source of many of her ongoing medical problems. She trusted Bob. Only when she was ready would he insist that she remain safely in place while he searched for a taxi to transport them home.

  m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n xiii

  Three years later, when my father determined to forgo an operation that would potentially prolong his life beyond the three months he might otherwise have—a decision he would inexplicably reverse at the very last minute—who else but Bob could accompany me from his hospital room to my mother’s dining room to bring her the news.

  In bathrobe and slippers, crumbled on the couch, her eyes brimming with tears, my mother was in desperate disbelief. She had opposed my father’s decision, which she viewed as an act of personal desertion and unacceptable despair. No matter how he suffered or how debilitated he became, life without my father was unimaginable. For me, playing this new role of intermediary between my parents would have been impossible without Bob’s calm demeanor and compassionate heart.

  While I did most of the explaining, rationalizing, and hand-holding that night, Bob was the frame that held the fraught picture in place.

  Together we could do what was necessary.

  Freud makes clear that the unconscious knows nothing about time and logic. Because I write from both unconscious and conscious sources, my perspective is not chronological. Informed by the emotions and themes that played themselves out over the last decade, the narrative gives short shrift to the real-time sequence of events. I recognize that for some readers a more precise accounting of the facts that gave rise to the stories that follow will offer some assistance in making sense of the often senseless experiences they chronicle.

  The central events of the book took my parents from being elderly and independent to being elderly, frail, and completely dependent on others. The first draft of the manuscript was completed more than a year before my father’s death in March 2002. The last draft was finished a month before my mother’s in May 2005. Because I began writing scraps of narrative at the onset of my parents’ decline
in 1995, the project bears both the strengths and weaknesses of a lengthy history. In retrospect, it is still easier to know the terminus than the start-ing point of this narrative. I took on the mantle of caregiver in a slow, incremental process—marked by many bitter battles over domestic xiv n jonathan g. silin

  control and small poignant moments of mutual recognition—rather than in a few dramatic incidents through which a shift in roles is un-deniably inscribed in the book of life.

  My parents proved to be tenacious survivors who clung to life until the very end. Although my father had already lost the sight in one eye to glaucoma and the ability to walk safely to severe spinal stenosis by his mid-eighties, it was not till 1997, at age eighty-six, that he was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx, a disease that may recur but that does not generally travel to other parts of the body. His first surgery, a partial laryngectomy, left him with a weak voice and greatly impaired ability to swallow. Within a year, he required the insertion of a gastronomy tube to assure sufficient hydration and food. While not in itself a serious procedure, the insertion of the gastronomy tube precipitated a serious emotional crisis for my father, a realization that even his best efforts at compliance could not overcome the unexpected effects of the initial surgery. Then, a year later, in the winter of 1999, the cancer returned, requiring the removal of his remaining larynx. Ironically, while this intervention brought with it the complete loss of speech, it also restored his ability to swallow. My father could eat and drink again, but his communications were now permanently confined to pen and paper. In the following year, at age eighty-nine, he fell and broke his hip. Although it was repaired without difficulty, because of his greatly reduced mobility it was no longer possible to organize care at home. He was forced to take up permanent residence in the nursing home where he had gone for rehabilitation and where he died two years later.

  The story of my mother’s decline begins in 1995, at age eighty-three, when an ulcer threatened to break through the lining of her stomach and cause imminent death from peritonitis. A prolonged hospitalization left her severely depressed and unable to take care of my father. Three years later, in the summer of 1998, as she was preparing to celebrate her sixty-second wedding anniversary, she fell and broke her hip. Despite being confined to a walker and suffering frequent, less-damaging falls, numerous small strokes, heart problems, m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n xv

  and an addiction to cigarettes that continued through her very last bout with pneumonia, my mother lived for two years after my father and died in May 2005 at age ninety-two.

  At different places in my telling of this story different aspects of my perspective take prominence over others. Just as this is not a chronological telling, so the identities from which I write are never isolated but always overlapping and interacting. Most obviously I am the middle-aged son caring for his parents, trying first to discern and then honor their wishes. At the same time I am the gay man who becomes the emotional and practical center of his heterosexual family.

  My history as an outsider and black sheep, along with my experiences caring for people with HIV/AIDS, informs the story as much as my profession—early childhood educator.

  In truth, I am more practiced in writing scholarly essays than in recording personal events. My understanding of the value of storytelling, however, is rooted in my life as a gay man and educator. As someone who has benefited from the movements for social change in the 1960s and ’70s, I am primed to look with a critical eye at traditional forms of science and to listen for stories that go against the grain. I know from firsthand experience that psychiatrists and psychologists once routinely passed wrongful judgments on lesbians and gay men. I know too that traditional theories of child development often functioned to normalize some children and families while pathologizing others. I have learned to value first-person narratives for the compelling ways they can testify to the emotional truths of our lives.

  Documenting my parents’ final decade highlighted the fluid movement between my personal and professional lives. I found myself, for example, teaching my graduate education students about lifespan development rather than focusing on the early years, when changes are more rapid and obvious. I wanted my students to think about how child-parent relationships evolve over time and to provide frequent opportunities for them to rethink the past through narrative writing.

  xvi n jonathan g. silin

  Even as my teaching changed, I was surprised to realize how frequently I used my professional knowledge with my parents. Familiarity with Montessori methods, for example, informed the way that I carefully parsed apart the simplest tasks. Two weeks prior to Thanksgiving, I began to hear my mother’s worries about organizing the annual Christmas gifts for the apartment building employees. Like cooking with children in the classroom, I knew the importance of having all the materials—crisp, new ten-dollar bills, cards, envelopes, stamps, pens, and list of employees—arranged in advance. I also knew the importance of routines. Over and over again I repeated the new schedule for the health aides. As if preparing for the departure of a much-loved student teacher from the kindergarten, I carefully calculated the amount of warning that my parents needed before making changes in household help. Like my students, I wanted my parents to have sufficient time for processing the information and achieving emotional closure, but not so much time that they experienced the disabling fears that could be precipitated by alterations in their domestic arrangements.

  Despite my reliance on early childhood skills, I did not see my mother and father as children. No matter how dependent they became, they were still my parents. Our history was not erased by their changed circumstances, no matter how often I was called upon to contain their feelings of loss and anxiety. I tried to perform the role of reassuring presence in their life. Just as I learned during the first fire drills of each school year to say with a calm authority to the apprehensive four-year-olds by my side, “I will make sure that nothing happens to you. I will take care of you,” so I learned to talk with my mother about her upcoming cataract surgery and to my father about the replacement of his gastronomy tube. But to imagine that our roles were reversed would have undermined their dignity while burdening me with confusing emotions.

  In his book In the American West, the photographer Richard Ave-don said of his work, “A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph, it is no longer a fact m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n xvii

  but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph.

  All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” In the end, it is my telling of our family story that is recorded here. I have tried to situate this telling in the idiosyncrasies of my perspective. There are certainly other perspectives from which the story might have been written, and there are other authors in my family who may one day choose to do just that. For the moment, I can only hope that my parents would feel that their final years have been well told, and their experiences imbued with meanings not too terribly distant from ones that they would recognize, if not necessarily claim as their own.

  1

  New Responsibilities

  If you want to endure life, prepare for death.

  sigmund freud, “Thoughts for

  the Times on War and Death”

  We are in the lawyer’s office. My father walks with a metal cane with four prongs at the bottom to steady himself. The combination of spinal disease and partial loss of sight makes his balance precarious.

  My mother, dressed in a Depression-era brown suit, raincoat, and hat to match, still moves quickly and independently. She is forever pressing ahead of my father, seemingly unaware of how slowly he moves.

  The stomach surgery and torn knee ligaments that will soon impede her mobility have not yet taken their toll. She clutches a manila envelope. We are here at my insistence to review the legal documents—

  wills, powers of attorney, living wills—that are designed to ensure a measure of control over
the uncertainties that inevitably surround illness and death.

  I am beginning to feel the weight of new responsibilities. But I am totally unprepared for what I hear, and don’t hear, once we are installed in the glass-walled conference room. We sit at the far end of a long table, my mother and father next to each other on one side and 1

  2 n jonathan g. silin

  I on the other. When Mr. Halperin enters, he sits at the head of the table, between us, in the negotiator’s position. A short, slightly over-weight, solid-looking burgher in dark blue suit, this man of affairs is considerably younger than I. I am sharply conscious of my own age, fifty-one at the time, and wonder if my parents’ fragile appearance somehow makes me look even older. He talks easily and with confidence. I am reassured. Despite my parents’ resistance, I have done the right thing bringing them here.

  My father speaks slowly and deliberately as he provides the demo-graphic information requested, including details about my brother and his wife and child. When he finishes, there is a long silence.

  Something is wrong. My heart is pounding, my hands are shaking, and adrenaline is coursing through my body. Then, overcoming a deep sense of terror, emboldened by a mix of anger, defiance, and urgency, I speak the unspeakable. I announce that I too live with someone. I too am an adult with a life partner who cannot be expunged from the record. Without hesitation, Mr. Halperin turns to me and notes the information I provide about Bob, my partner of twenty-five years.

  When I finally look up at my parents, their faces register shock and distress. They say nothing.

  It can’t be the information I convey that leaves my parents silent.

  After all, I have been openly gay for decades, Bob regularly attends family functions, and they actually seem to like him. No, it is my insistence that Bob be written into the official story of our family that upsets my parents so deeply. In more generous moments, I think about how difficult it must be for my conventional, middle-class parents to speak about a gay relationship. In some ways their vocabulary has not caught up with their behavior. In other ways their cordial but emotionally distant relationship with Bob is not unlike their relationship with my brother’s wife. Although she is an officially documented member of the family, she is not mentioned in their wills. My brother and I are to receive income from a trust, and upon our deaths the money will go to my niece.