My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (22 page)

We are two generations of men, my father and I, who share not only an abiding interest in children but also therapists with similar commitments. And my grandfather? While he was of Freud’s generation, with no therapeutic canon or army of therapists to consult quite yet, I have increasingly wondered about the legacy that he be-queathed to my father and through him to me. Nathan, who died in 1940, four years before my birth, has always been portrayed as a distant if benevolent patriarch whose behavior was beyond reproach. He was the man of learning who earned his passage to America by traveling across Russia taking inventory of the Catholic churches in the four different languages that he spoke and wrote. Once here, he was the itinerant peddler turned successful merchant who fathered six children, all of whom attended college. Active in the local Jewish community, Nathan was an ideal citizen, husband, and father, someone who took the time to write regularly to each of his children while they were away at school. Little wonder that my own father has difficulty living up to these images and that he cannot permit himself to be a success. Tyrannized by his ideals, he keeps a hypervigilant watch on his own behavior and on that of the ones he loves. This pat-rimony, which excludes all reference to pleasure and desire, is one that I resist but that I all too easily succumb to. It is the narrow patri-mony of work and self-sacrifice that Bob understands so well when he alerts me to the decisions that will narrow my social landscape and only reinforce my risk-averse nature.

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I have not seen Dr. M since 1978. Occasionally I hear his name mentioned in professional circles, and from time to time my father wistfully wonders if he is still alive and seeing patients. As in my childhood, my father refers to Dr. M by his first name, Theodore, be-stowing a kind of respectful intimacy on their relationship and on his presence as a shadow member of our family. I check the phone book and find that Dr. M’s number is still listed. I imagine orchestrating a final interview that would satisfy my father’s curiosity and my own.

Ambivalence paralyzes these good intentions.

If Dr. M is part of my history, then Dr. R, the psychopharmacologist I persuade my ailing father to see, is an important part of the present. At the time of our initial interview, he adds a mood stabilizer to my father’s already extensive mental health diet, which, he hopes, will prevent the sudden angry outbursts. He promises to monitor the results and regulate the dosage in bimonthly meetings with my father.

Six months later, my father is more even-tempered with me but continues cruelly to berate others around him. At a moment when my feelings of responsibility for my father’s care outweigh my desire to allow him as much privacy as possible, I call Dr. R. His tone is one of impatience, and I imagine that he is probably between patients.

He listens to my concerns about my father’s continued outbursts but quickly moves to put them in biographical perspective. He leads me to acknowledge that they are not totally new to my father’s personality. Dr. R chides, “We can’t work miracles, you know.” He makes me feel foolish, not a good clinical move, but then I am not the patient, only an intrusive caregiver. I am being too demanding again, I tell myself, but clearly my father’s son.

My father is demanding of others but no less critical of himself.

While he can forgive others, he has never learned to forgive himself.

I wonder if he has himself ever been forgiven? He says he went to see Dr. M because he was not living up to his potential. His disappointments are legion, and I can’t help but wonder if I am counted among them.

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Several weeks after the initial visit to Dr. R, my father’s eldest sister dies at the age of ninety-two. Notified by the nursing home that she is in her last hours, he manages, with the help of Marlene, his health aide, to arrive at her beside seconds before she expires. Later that same day he insists on going to the funeral home to make arrangements for the burial. Exhausted, he has done everything that he possibly can.

For the rest, it is up to me to shoulder a full load of filial responsibilities. As a favorite nephew, I am also a stand-in child of my aunt, who might best be described, in the language of her time, as childless rather than with the more positive, contemporary phrase “child-free.”

Her husband had been dead for many years.

The day of the funeral is long and trying for everyone. At the cemetery it is cold and blustery, and Marlene can’t push my father’s wheelchair over the astroturf mats that hide the irregular mounds of freshly shoveled earth. Bob and I must lift the wheelchair with my father in it and carry him close to the graveside. The dozen family members and friends, almost all well over eighty themselves, are huddled together for warmth. Just as the rabbi is about to start the services, my father announces that he wants to look in the coffin.

Seeking more than confirmation of his sister’s death or an emotional farewell, my father wishes to assure himself that it is indeed her body and not someone else’s being placed in the grave. He trusts no one, especially the undertaker.

My father’s request unnerves the cemetery employees. They confide in hushed tones that it might upset other family members to see the body. My father is insistent, and my attempts to dissuade him useless. Finally, realizing the passion and compulsion behind my father’s demand, I tell the cemetery people that there will be no funeral unless they do his bidding. Reluctantly, they lift the cover, and my father strains forward to satisfy his desire. Suddenly I see that, if he leans farther forward, he will fall out of his chair and into the grave. I quickly step in front of the two people next to me and place my hands on his shoulders to restrain him. Fortunately, he needs only a brief m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 143

look before making his pronouncement, “Yup, that’s her.” Against my will I too look at the waxy, masklike face and catch a glimpse of the body wrapped in its white linen shroud. At first I do not recognize my aunt, but, when I find the familiar shape of her jaw, the other features begin to make more sense.

Later that afternoon, when everyone has left, my father is lying on his bed, fully clothed and covered with a blanket. The room is dark, but he is not asleep. I sit by his side as we review the events of the day.

My father, no longer tense and on edge, is philosophical. I am surprised to realize that he wants to talk about his own life, not my aunt’s.

Once again, he reviews his sense of failure as a businessman and family provider. I remind him that my brother and I had excellent educa-tions, traveled extensively, and never lacked for anything. I remind him too that he has always acted ethically and lovingly, shouldering much of the emotional and physical burden of caring for three of his own siblings. My reminders seem to go unheeded. Then, wistfully and nostalgically, as if out of nowhere, I hear him say, “I had such high hopes for myself, for you boys . . .”

Now I am lying by my father’s side in the darkened room. I am moved to picture him as a young father, dreaming and planning for his

“boys.” I wonder if Dr. M heard the same innocence and sadness in his voice during the very years that these hopes first came to life. I am also moved to wonder how my father can see my brother and me as disappointments. I recall his injunction weeks before not to be afraid and to ask anything I need to know. I summon all my courage to ask the riskiest question of my life: “And did we, Dad? Did we at least fulfill some of your expectations?” He pauses momentarily, then murmurs softly and sweetly, “Oh yes, oh yes.”

For the moment, my father has forgotten, if not forgiven, himself, and he is ready to rest, if not sleep. I slip away from his side, grateful for his ultimate words of approval.

Coda

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

If I am not for others, what am I?

If not now, when?

h i l l e l

I first began to write the bits and pieces of narrative that were to become this book as a way to keep my head above water. I was swamped by the needs of my two fiercely independent parents who were no longer able to manage on their own. Frustrated and impatient, I often felt myself hurled back to a past that I had worked so diligently to escape from. There were also moments when, with a cooler eye, I was intrigued by this new stage in my parents’ lives and my own. I started asking unsettling and ultimately unanswerable questions about how well I knew my parents and understood my childhood. Seeing them from the vantage point of fifty, now sixty, I learned to read 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.