My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents, Jonathan Silin [uplifting novels .TXT] 📗

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.

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Even as my teaching changed, I was surprised to realize how frequently I used my professional knowledge with