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

in Dan’s words, a shadow that always underestimates children’s cognitive and emotional lives. For me, despite the absence of direct expressions of sympathy, the children’s counter-stories are best interpreted as attempts to identify and empathize with Steven.

Again, there is another long pause in our own conversation. The silence is palpable. Taking what feels like a further risk, I speak about the many losses endured by my colleagues in recent years. My instinct is to listen when someone wants to talk and, now that I am ready, to answer with my own experience. I am unable to imagine what it is like for Jeannie to lose her husband, Katherine her life partner, or Ken his father. Perhaps, not unlike Dan’s students, I reach out by sharing my own life.

As our conversation winds down that night, I wonder what my students understand about my own stories of managing loss. I remember that earlier in the semester, Deanna said she would not read a children’s book about a homeless family because she did not want to cry in front of her class. Like others in our group, she felt that children could not tolerate seeing adult expressions of vulnerability. Do my students need the same kind of protection? Have I gone too far?

Considering Suzanne’s concerns and my own, I ask the group if my stories have made me vulnerable in their eyes. Have I lost authority when talking about Bob’s death?

As a teacher educator, I feel responsible for making my pedagogy visible and legible, no matter how discomforting that might be. If I want my students to take risks in their classrooms, don’t I have to do the same? That night we leave thoughtfully and quietly. Something has changed for all of us. Our class of eighteen individuals is definitely becoming a group. We are working hard to understand how authentic learning occurs in the classroom.

Distracted by Bob’s death, my ability to care for my parents is severely compromised. That first December my brother and I decide to move m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 157

my mother from the large apartment where we grew up and which she has lived in for nearly fifty years into her sister’s even larger apartment. There is no other choice but a nursing home. Neither alternative is acceptable to my mother. Unfortunately, my parents have long ago run out of money and there are limits to my brother’s resources, which have sustained them for several years. My mother is in a state of despair. Life as she knows it is coming to end. Her grief is deep and all too real.

Although I try to encourage my mother’s participation in select-ing the furniture and few small objects she will take with her, she is paralyzed. I insist that the apartment remain completely intact until she walks out the front door. The chaos on the inside is not to be mirrored by disorder on the outside. Here I am undoubtedly speaking for myself as well. I cannot tolerate yet another disruption in the world I have known. I am ready to reconstruct a new home for my mother but not to dismantle the old. I leave that task to other family members.

Having heard endless accounts from friends of ugly family squab-bles about the division of property, I arrange to go through my parents’

apartment with my niece on an afternoon when my mother is at the nursing home. Anne and I have always worked well together and she is empowered to speak for her parents. I understand that the vase that stood for so long on the entryway table and filled weekly with fresh flowers, the set of china handed down from a favorite grandmother and only used on special occasions, and even the jewelry that made my mother appear so elegant on rare nights out, will soon end up out of sight, stored away in boxes. With this knowledge in mind, dividing up the furniture and other objects of monetary or sentimental value proceeds easily. We alternate choices, make concessions, note our sometimes different, sometimes similar sense of aesthetics, all while sharing stories elicited by the task at hand.

Fortunately, when my mother sees her familiar possessions assembled in her new room she is genuinely pleased. It is an auspicious beginning for what turns out to be the best possible compromise for all concerned. My aunt, at ninety-two, two years older than my mother, 158 n jonathan g. silin

is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Her initial worries about the loss of privacy that could happen with the new living arrangements do not materialize. Her own life is becoming increasingly circumscribed and self-absorbed. The sisters, each with her own caregiver, seem to genuinely enjoy each other’s company, and benefit from the distractions provided by the other’s visitors. My aunt, more outgoing, more able to confront life’s vicissitudes, more willing to see the positive, shares with my mother not only a ninety-year history but also a propensity for critique of the caregivers to whom they are both in reality closely attached. It is as if this dinnertime ritual of criticism draws them together for a few minutes each night, an act of resistance to their dependency as well as an evocation of an era gone by.

While not her choice, my mother’s move was fortunate in other ways that could not have been predicted at the time. In March, after several bouts of pneumonia, my father suddenly dies. Already ensconced in her sister’s apartment, my mother has ready-made company and cannot sink into complete despair. I do not think she would have tolerated the death of my father and the loss of familiar surroundings had one followed immediately upon the other.

I am not with my father when he dies. I visit him several days before, prompted by a call from the nursing home. Going through the giant blue binder that contains his most recent medical history, the floor nurse