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

There is never enough time. When I arrive, I focus on my mother, whose first question is about the length of my stay and the bus that I will take home. Although she continues to glance anxiously at her watch throughout the visit, the conversation shifts to the events of my week. Always the great escape artist, eager to pretend that everything is okay and to find relief from her own difficulties in other people’s lives, she does not want to talk about herself and the endless round of doctors’ appointments that mark her days. From a distance, I understand that for my mother, denial has been an effective survival strategy. Up close, I experience impatience, sometimes anger. It is often impossible to determine problems in need of attention and hard to always fill the void left by her lack of self-representation with di-verting stories from my own life.

After attending to my mother, I turn to my father, knowing that m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 11

neither he nor I will be satisfied with the evening’s accomplishments.

It’s not for lack of planning, but in his late eighties he tires easily and has difficulty staying focused. I try to set out a short agenda. I wait till we have settled in a bit. When he is especially fatigued or withdrawn, this entails a silent sitting together. If he is outgoing and energetic, he reports the latest crisis precipitated by a misplaced bill or a govern-ment form in need of completion. Experience teaches me that any one of these tales of loss and recovery can take over the entire evening. I listen with care but don’t ask too many questions.

Given my father’s desire to take an active part in managing his own affairs and my commitment to a collaborative effort, I soon venture my own list of concerns, the product of a week’s deliberation.

While my father is often caught up in the most immediate events—

making sure that the rent is paid no later than the tenth of the month or that his taxes are posted by April 15—my interests might best be classified as midrange—bringing some order to the Byzantine banking arrangements that make it impossible to keep accurate records or setting up a visit to a psychiatrist to adjust the antidepressant drugs that no longer seem effective. Our concerns are different. Although my father has demonstrated every determination to live through several medical catastrophes, he grows impatient and angry with discussions about the future. I, on the other hand, who did not know a treasury note from a junk bond just a few years ago, now wake up at night obsessed with the latest interest rates and best forms of investment.

Thinking that one or both of my parents may live into their nineties, I want us to be prepared as best we can.

By the end of the visit, we have negotiated a program that includes one issue from his list and one from mine. We are both exhausted and cranky. Perhaps he is right anyway; better to stay in the moment than worry about an unpredictable future. Needing to catch my bus, I know I haven’t stayed long enough. How could it ever be enough?

Part of me leaves my parents as an adult leaves a young child on the first day of school, wondering if she can really make it on her own.

Will the home health aide be up to the task of caring for my parents?

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Will they behave or will some sudden outburst cause her to quit? Another part of me leaves as a child leaves a parent, ambivalent about my ability to survive without them. Infirmities aside, my parents still provide a slim barrier against my mortality. At the same time, I imagine the relief I will feel when they are dead. These guilty thoughts are only tempered by sadness at their severely diminished capacities.

2

Out of Control

To tolerate life remains, after all,

the first duty of all living beings.

s i g m u n d f r e u d , “Thoughts for

the Times on War and Death”

The clock on the newly installed electronic signboard looks official, almost believable. It reads 3:04, the precise moment my train is supposed to arrive. I am outside, on platform number one of Newark’s Penn Station, avoiding the damp waiting area with its musty smells and crowded benches. Leaning over the track, peering ahead, seeing no movement of any kind, I calculate the chances—fifty-fifty—of completing a phone call before the train pulls in. It is a courtesy call to my parents—“Okay if I stop by?” I will ask politely—knowing full well there is nothing they can say that will stop me.

It’s been a better than usual day. The Jefferson Avenue School has a large cluster of teachers working with the major urban school-reform project for which a colleague and I serve as the researchers/

evaluators. The principal has even provided us with a small office, and I don’t have to ask for the key to the men’s room, as I do at our ten other sites. The office is crammed with old metal filing cabinets, 13

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desks, and storage boxes belonging to a previous reform effort that has long since been disbanded. But it’s a good place to hang a coat, store a backpack, and seek a few minutes respite from a round of classroom observations.

Inevitably I come away from these visits impressed by the struggle of the teachers to meet the many needs of their students who are growing up in severely decaying neighborhoods. The teachers must also circumvent the multiple obstacles placed in their paths by the district bureaucracy. Everywhere I see reams of meaningless paperwork, including elaborate lesson plans without relevance to the children’s lives and individual education plans for learning disabled students without resources to implement them. The