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

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.

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