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

went on sternly, “Because I don’t need that.” My mother was clearly telling me what she needed, and I tried to provide the strength she was asking for. Later, when my father tried to tease her about getting better so that she could look after him, the expression on her face told me that she wasn’t amused. She wanted only to be cared for, intoler-ant at the moment of anyone else’s weaknesses.

Sometimes my parents’ instructions were less direct and more subtle, as on the day we were squeezed into the booth of a coffee shop not far from the apartment that my father’s eldest sister had lived in for many years. Nearly ninety, she had moved into a nearby nursing home. It was an unusual event for us to be eating lunch together, but then so was the occasion, a respite from sorting through the contents of her soon-to-be-relinquished apartment. My father cleaned his hands with a Wash’n Dri towelette, one of the great modern conveniences for someone phobic about germs and eating in unfamiliar places. After some talk about the remaining tasks—securing a reputable antiques appraiser, the difficulties of arranging the Salvation Army pickup, the appropriate order in which various family members might stake their claims on cherished objects—I cleared a space for my own impatient query. Why had it taken two years to let go of the apartment? I wanted to know. How could they rationalize paying so much rent for so long on an unoccupied apartment? By then my father was eating his tuna fish directly from the single-serving-size can so as to avoid the unsanitary procedure of picking up a sandwich.

My mother pecked, birdlike, at her food. They were both clearly uncomfortable with my line of questioning. My father frowned and remained silent. “Far too much to eat,” my mother evasively exclaimed, as if overwhelmed by the untidy aesthetics of the egg salad that oozed from between the slices of rye bread. Finally, my father ventured that he had been waiting for the right moment. I pressed forward. How did he know that she was ready now? A man who usually enjoyed a large vocabulary and the hunt for the perfect words to describe a person or event, my father was suddenly and surprisingly inarticulate. He resisted my probes, as if I had asked an embarrassingly personal ques-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 9

tion. He acknowledged that although he knew that giving up the apartment was inevitable, he had had no idea when that moment would come. In the last several months, however, my aunt had made no references to her former home or possessions. It was not that she had forgotten the apartment so much as that it had disappeared from her immediate view. She was ensconced in the nursing home routines and knew no other life.

Although everything that my father said made sense, I found myself dissatisfied with his explanation and the reluctant way in which it was proffered. I knew my father was a kind and thoughtful person; after all, he had even arranged for my aunt to make one last visit to the apartment before it was dismantled. And several weeks later, I was impressed by the controlled and generous way my aunt talked about the furniture that I had taken from her apartment—the dining room table that now sits neatly against the wall in the small house in which Bob and I have lived for so long and that miraculously expands to accommodate twelve for our frequent holiday dinners, the two darkly lacquered and vaguely oriental side chairs that provide our otherwise ordinary living room with a touch of elegance, the little black chest of drawers that so conveniently contains our wills and other important papers. Yet it took several years for me to appreciate the wisdom of my father’s judgment. I came to understand how important the passage of time could be in helping my parents themselves adjust to previously unacceptable conditions, to the loss of control over their bodies and of the independence they cherished. I saw how being consumed with getting through the present could trump nostalgia for the past, and how a preoccupation with what has been lost can be cur-tailed by an attentive gesture in the moment.

As an educator, I should not have been surprised that the instruction my parents offered in the coffee shop required several years to take hold. I am supposed to know about the complex ways that teaching and learning occurs, about the difficulties of separation from loved ones and the comforting, transitional objects that contain our sadness and our memories. After all, beginnings and endings aren’t so very dif-10 n jonathan g. silin

ferent. They are times in our lives when autonomy and dependency, desire and self-sufficiency, affiliation and separation are experienced in heightened forms.

Despite these many parallels, my knowledge of early childhood is far more complete than my knowledge of old age, my educator voice far more certain than my eldercare skills. I have only to recall my increasingly frequent and anxious visits with my parents when I was still overwhelmed by their problems and my own desire to fix them. I fret-ted uselessly about their apartment that suffered from decades of neglect. I saw carpets worn black with dirt, chairs lumpy with broken springs, lamps covered with torn shades. I desperately wanted these things to matter to my parents—but they didn’t. I tried to organize the kitchen counters littered with dozens of pillboxes, bottles of cough syrup, and warnings about the dangers of the very drugs keeping them alive. As we talked of symptoms and treatment options, I feverishly sorted through piles of unopened mail, stacks of unread magazines, accumulations of unused coupons. I wanted to create order out of the confusion brought on by so much illness.

When I