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

Knowing much about the dailyness of my parents’ lives leads me to make new comparisons. I want to replicate their best qualities and rewrite their less endearing traits. Bob teases me when I worry about the future at the expense of enjoying the present, “You’re getting more like your father every day.” He wants to continue with our plan to rent a house in the south of France from a writer friend even though I have suddenly lost all my consulting contracts and will come back to no work. He is used to living on the financial edge; the house is a bargain, a dream fulfilled. “How can we not go?” he asks. When I am reluctant to see other people, to give up a weekend of work and privacy to enjoy time at the beach with friends, Bob chides, “Be careful, or otherwise you will end up a recluse like your mother.” I give in to his more social nature and am happy for the decision. Bob sees my parents in me and he is mostly right. I am more readily fooled by the huge dis-crepancies in our outward life circumstances and it isn’t easy for me or for them to see the underlying patterns of behavior that connect us.

Connecting patterns. Oddly enough, my most recent therapist, Dr. C, an openly gay man, inherited the office at the therapeutic nursery school where Dr. M and I talked in 1978. This link between Dr. C

and Dr. M is reinforced when Dr. C shares with me a recent dream he has had about the office. Here Dr. C displays some of his own therapeutic daring, a willingness to use himself to provoke my own reflec-140 n jonathan g. silin

tion. I don’t know if Dr. C actually met or worked with Dr. M. It is sufficiently complicated for me to know that Dr. C has sat where Dr. M once sat, the same place that decades earlier Dr. M may have thought about my father, his infant son, and even my grandfather. For just as Dr. C has listened to my family saga, and helped me to edit and reimagine my stories, so must Dr. M have heard my father out. Dr. M

was undoubtedly the recipient of emotions intended for, and shaped by, my father’s relationship with his father, Nathan Silin, for whom I was named. Queer genealogies.

We are two generations of men, my father and I, who share not only an abiding interest in children but also therapists with similar commitments. And my grandfather? While he was of Freud’s generation, with no therapeutic canon or army of therapists to consult quite yet, I have increasingly wondered about the legacy that he be-queathed to my father and through him to me. Nathan, who died in 1940, four years before my birth, has always been portrayed as a distant if benevolent patriarch whose behavior was beyond reproach. He was the man of learning who earned his passage to America by traveling across Russia taking inventory of the Catholic churches in the four different languages that he spoke and wrote. Once here, he was the itinerant peddler turned successful merchant who fathered six children, all of whom attended college. Active in the local Jewish community, Nathan was an ideal citizen, husband, and father, someone who took the time to write regularly to each of his children while they were away at school. Little wonder that my own father has difficulty living up to these images and that he cannot permit himself to be a success. Tyrannized by his ideals, he keeps a hypervigilant watch on his own behavior and on that of the ones he loves. This pat-rimony, which excludes all reference to pleasure and desire, is one that I resist but that I all too easily succumb to. It is the narrow patri-mony of work and self-sacrifice that Bob understands so well when he alerts me to the decisions that will narrow my social landscape and only reinforce my risk-averse nature.

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I have not seen Dr. M since 1978. Occasionally I hear his name mentioned in professional circles, and from time to time my father wistfully wonders if he is still alive and seeing patients. As in my childhood, my father refers to Dr. M by his first name, Theodore, be-stowing a kind of respectful intimacy on their relationship and on his presence as a shadow member of our family. I check the phone book and find that Dr. M’s number is still listed. I imagine orchestrating a final interview that would satisfy my father’s curiosity and my own.

Ambivalence paralyzes these good intentions.

If Dr. M is part of my history, then Dr. R, the psychopharmacologist I persuade my ailing father to see, is an important part of the present. At the time of our initial interview, he adds a mood stabilizer to my father’s already extensive mental health diet, which, he hopes, will prevent the sudden angry outbursts. He promises to monitor the results and regulate the dosage in bimonthly meetings with my father.

Six months later, my father is more even-tempered with me but continues cruelly to berate others around him. At a moment when my feelings of responsibility for my father’s care outweigh my desire to allow him as much privacy as possible, I call Dr. R. His tone is one of impatience, and I imagine that he is probably between patients.

He listens to my concerns about my father’s continued outbursts but quickly moves to put them in biographical perspective. He leads me to acknowledge that they are not totally new to my father’s personality. Dr. R chides, “We can’t work miracles, you know.” He makes me feel foolish, not a good clinical move, but then I am not the patient, only an intrusive caregiver. I am being too demanding again, I tell myself, but clearly