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

childhood itself as an unfinished book, one that is open to constant revision as circumstances change and time erodes the certainties that we attempt to build our adult lives on.

At the start I imagined a book that would tell the story of the difficult transitional years when my parents moved from being elderly and self-sufficient to being elderly and totally reliant on others. A book about a late-life transition seemed challenging but not impossi-145

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ble, an opportunity to explore a critical turning point that so many of my peers were helping their own parents to navigate. As an early childhood educator, I knew that transitions are frequently stressful times when people do the double work of mourning the loss of familiar places and people and of anxiously anticipating the unknowns that lie ahead. I wanted to use these insights to describe my parents’ life and my role in it.

I even convinced myself that I could tell a story of decline and disintegration while avoiding a final deathbed scene. My parents had reached a plateau, and surely the end itself would not be as difficult as the preceding years. Unconsciously, I assumed they would go on forever.

As a primary caregiver, I live for many years in dread of the late night phone call—the hospital nurse alerting me to a precipitous drop in vital signs, one parent calling because the other has collapsed and refuses to go to the hospital, a home attendant reporting that she cannot come to work the next day. On the night of July 16, 2002, I go to bed with an additional, if unnamable, anxiety. Bob is traveling on assignment, photographing women who have received small grants from a private foundation that supports a wide range of projects to benefit other women. Earlier in the afternoon Deborah Light, the head of the foundation, calls to say that one of the grantees in Green Bay, Wisconsin, has notified her about canceling an appointment for the following day. Deborah has tried unsuccessfully to contact Bob.

Have I spoken with him? When Bob travels we talk almost daily, but we hadn’t that morning. When I phone the Green Bay hotel myself I learn that he has neither checked in nor canceled his reservation.

Bob is conscientious to a fault, so this is unusual behavior for him, but I decide to put it out of my mind. What else can I do? Surely he will call first thing in the morning. The vicissitudes of travel have undoubtedly sent him to another hotel or straight on to Chicago.

The call comes at 12:45 am. Police detectives bring the news of Bob’s sudden and completely unexpected death. At first they don’t m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 147

want to say anything unless they can speak with Bob’s wife or parents.

Increasingly frightened by the suspicions of foul play that gay men of a certain age so immediately accede to, I demand directness: “If you have anything to say, say it to me, and say it now. I am Bob’s life partner.” Confronted with my assertion of emotional authority, their legal defenses give way. Bob is dead. A “cardiovascular event” has killed him while he was traveling between Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Chicago. No one on the public bus notices anything strange but the driver is unable to rouse him once they reach the terminal. He has died without a sound, without a motion, and without anyone’s knowledge.

Despite the authority I summon up that night, there are many conversations over the succeeding weeks in which I feel powerless and vulnerable. My right to make decisions is questioned at every turn. After all, there had been no wedding, no commitment ceremony, and no public celebration of any kind to commemorate our relationship. We can’t even remember the exact date we met, sometime in the fall of 1971 we reckon when asked.

It’s true that over time we amassed the kind of documents that have become increasingly possible—a shared mortgage, bank account, wills, health insurance, domestic partnership agreement. Ultimately none of these will prove sufficient to allow me to sign for the cremation that Bob wanted, nor to sign for what I learn to call the

“cremains,” an unbearably graceless, dare I say, ugly word that is part of the funeral business in America.

A ’60s activist, I don’t give in easily. I rally a lawyer in New York, an Illinois Department of Health official, and the funeral homes in two cities to a conference call. Ultimately I am left with the decision to spend weeks in court or allow Bob’s sister, Cynthia, to sign the papers that will finally allow for the cremation and the ashes to come home. Over the last several years Cynthia has had her hands full.

Sharing a house with Bob’s parents, she has become the primary caregiver as they begin to experience multiple health problems. In addition, Bob’s younger brother had only recently died after a long and 148 n jonathan g. silin

difficult set of illnesses. Now within a year, his parents will have lost two adult children. When I reach her, Cynthia is thoughtful, accommodating, and fast to act as we arrange for her to sign and return the necessary papers. Three years later, however, my outrage is unabated.

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