My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (20 page)

way to pay for his fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-month drug bills and to secure partial reimbursement for the around-the-clock health aides that keep him out of a nursing home.

My mother’s performance is more mixed. She overstates some aspects of her physical condition and underestimates others. She can recite the days of the week but does not know the date, can subtract seven from one hundred continuing back to fifty-one but cannot repeat a simple series of numbers. My mother is skillful at hiding her cognitive deficits, the result of many small strokes, and I am relieved when the nurse recognizes them. Because we have started so late and the interview moves so slowly I cannot stay until the end. As I prepare to leave I catch a final glimpse of my father lying on his bed, waiting for the nurse to examine the feeding tube that he now needs to assure that sufficient liquids and nourishment reach his system.

On the bus ride to work, I am unexpectedly swamped with emotions, proud of how well my parents have told their story and weighed down by how much time and energy is required to keep their household afloat. The nurse makes good, practical suggestions: My father should be on liquid medications, which will be easier to swallow. But who will contact three different doctors to arrange such a change? My mother should go out for twenty minutes every day. But who will fight that battle? Certainly not the single caregiver who must supervise my father and remain on good terms with my mother.

On the day of the nurse’s visit the storytelling seems to have been cathartic, if exhausting, for everyone. But on so many other occasions my father disregards my well-intentioned, if misguided, invitations to revisit the past. From his perspective, he knows only that something has gone terribly wrong. He will not settle until it is fixed. Like an infant’s primary caregiver, I am the recipient of powerfully ambivalent emotions evoked by his new dependence. He does not offer any philosophic renderings of a life well spent. I am loved and feared, respected and hated, seduced and abandoned when I don’t do his bidding. As the chosen target of his resentments, I am also the one who enables him to keep his story alive. For as long as my father insists and refuses, 128 n jonathan g. silin

plots against me and strategizes to undermine my new powers, his drama continues. I understand the many small crises, the excitements, as self-induced incitements to stay the final curtain from falling.

Unfortunately, all this understanding cannot quell my sense of inadequacy, of not being up to providing the care that my father needs.

As he rages over a misplaced doctor’s bill, bank statement, or phone number, I envision him gasping for one last breath before succumbing to a heart attack provoked by my clumsy and inept response to his diatribe. Aspirations of revenge punctuate my thoughts. I imagine his funeral, the few remaining friends and family, and the kind things that others will say. I am silent and experience only a tremendous sense of relief.

No matter what the origins of his anger, or how it functions to insure his survival, I cannot tolerate the situation any longer. In the hope that some modern pharmaceutical miracle might ease his discomfort and enable me to care for him and my mother, I persuade my father to consult with a psychopharmacologist. We no longer have the luxury of the time required for the more traditional talking cures.

My determination to make things better for all of us, however, is quickly deflated as I approach the building where we are to meet with the doctor that autumn afternoon. From across Madison Avenue I see my father, assisted by Marlene, his health aide, just emerging from a taxi. My mother, impelled forward by her own anxiety, is already at the entrance of the building. My father, who refuses to use a wheelchair in public, leans into his walker. Marlene shadows him from behind to prevent a backward fall. His heavy winter overcoat, buttoned high around the neck against the cold November day, conceals his shrunken frame and emaciated body. He moves slowly and distractedly toward the sidewalk. I watch from a safe distance as he tackles the curb. I imagine Marlene telling him, in her kindly yet authoritative Jamaican accent, “Lift your foot, Mr. Silin. Lift your foot now.” It is as if she must coordinate his physical movements by sending to vari-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 129

ous parts of the body messages that are usually sent from the inside, by the brain.

In contrast to his body, which works in slow motion, every movement an effort of extreme will, my father’s mind functions at high speed. Often it seems that too many communications are being sent at once, causing them to become confused and misrouted, content and emotion thrown together pell-mell. After all, isn’t that why we are about to assemble in the doctor’s office? Yet, seeing my father from a distance, as others must see him, a weak and fragile old man, I have second thoughts. Who is really to benefit from this visit? Wouldn’t a more stoic attitude on my part be less taxing on all of us?

As the light changes for a second time, I take a deep breath and hurry across the street. Leaving aside hesitations, I join my father, careful to announce myself in a voice loud enough so that he can hear me but not so intrusively as to startle him. He stops, looks up, and smiles at me warmly.

Although the building is old and probably once contained spacious office suites and apartments, it has been modernized in a hap-hazard way. Everything is cramped and small. The doctor’s waiting room is no more than a hallway with chairs strung out in a line against one wall, and there is no receptionist to greet us. A far cry from the expansive and well-staffed waiting rooms of my youth, here it is hard for the four of us to maneuver in these close quarters—to hang up coats and hats and to find space for the walker, my overstuffed backpack, and the all-important brown paper bag filled with my father’s pills.

The office itself, dominated by a cluttered desk piled high with manila folders and drug samples, requires that I bring in additional seats from the waiting room to accommodate us. Once we are settled inside and after my opening explanation of our visit, Dr. R turns to my father. In a controlled voice, the anger seething just beneath the surface, my father delivers a ten-minute indictment of all those involved in his care. Everyone—family, friends, and professionals—has failed 130 n jonathan g. silin

to respond adequately to his physical needs and to appreciate the depths of his suffering. His words are direct, his thoughts well organized, and his focus clear.

My mother and I are each allotted a brief time to recount our recent experiences with my father. But Dr. R is no family therapist and takes little interest in our stories. He attends only to the identified patient. As we talk, Dr. R dumps out the contents of the brown bag on to the desk and copies down the names and dosages of my father’s medications. Noting the antidepressant drugs, he asks my father if he has been to a psychiatrist before. My father answers by talking about Dr. M, a well-known psychoanalyst whom he saw regularly during the 1950s. Dr. R pursues a line of questioning—did my father sit or lie down during the sessions? Did he go three or five times a week?—designed to reveal if my father was in a classical analysis. No, my father insists, he always sat up and could not possibly afford five sessions a week. He chuckles to himself as he reports that Dr. M found his case so interesting that he often allowed him to pay whatever he could.

From time to time, he even asked my father’s advice about the stock market. My father reserves for himself a special place in Dr. M’s practice and refuses standard categories. When Dr. R makes explicit his own assumption that my father was in therapy for depression, my father reacts quickly and sharply. “No,” he asserts, “I was not depressed, although I didn’t feel great. I went to Dr. M because I was dissatisfied with my life. Because I thought I could do better.”

I am stunned by this carefully considered formulation. During the years of my own psychotherapy, I had developed an understanding of my father as a deeply depressed person, which I had never questioned before. Nor can I reconstruct exactly how this understanding came about. Perhaps it was more a reflection of my own situation than my lived experience of his frequent moodiness, occasional tears, and demanding ways. In contrast to my therapeutic attempts to stave off existential despair and emotional paralysis, my father suggests something quite different about himself—a drive to improve his situation.

m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 131

My father was ambitious as well as dissatisfied, determined as well as unhappy.

At this moment in Dr. R’s office, just a few streets north but many decades removed from Dr. M’s practice, my father displays his continuing ability to rise to the occasion, to show himself to best advantage.

He still has resources to draw on, accounts that have not been completely emptied. Despite all his infirmities, my father does not present himself as a victim but rather as someone who wants to live up to his potential. He is ready to accept professional help in a way that preserves his pride and emphasizes his sense of agency. His story of Dr. M

is as much about the present as about the past.

I will never know the truth of my father’s clinical diagnosis, although I did come to know Dr. M, who acted as a kind of family therapist long before that discipline was invented. He is part of my history as well as my father’s, and I remember our first encounter vividly.

I am a shy, anxious child, a bed wetter who, according to my mother’s oft-repeated words, lacks self-confidence. My first visit to Dr.

M is the emotional equivalent of a general checkup. His office, located on the ground floor of narrow brownstone, consists of a waiting room in the front and a large office in the rear of the building. These rooms do not open directly onto each other but are connected by a narrow passageway with doors at either end, so that privacy is assured.

In these days before white noise machines and Muzak, it is the archi-tecture itself that assures privacy. I don’t recall the content of our conversations or of any play that I might have engaged in. But I do remember that near the end of this session, I admire a tiny balsa wood model, no more than two or three inches long, of an old sailing ship replete with linen sails and painted designs on the side. I am fascinated by this model and, before I leave, Dr. M asks me if I would like to have it. I hold the boat carefully in my hands as I rejoin my mother in the waiting room. Deeply satisfied with my gift and our visit, I do not mind at all when she leaves me alone in the waiting room to 132 n jonathan g. silin

have a private conversation with Dr. M. Later, on the street, she pronounces me perfectly healthy and happy. Shortly after, the bed-wetting stops.

My second meeting with Dr. M is as deeply unsettling as the first is satisfying. I have just dropped out of college, am living at home again, and have become ensconced in an affair with a married man more than twice my age. I know I am homosexual by age thirteen but begin to live out my gayness only when I start college. There I em-brace my homosexuality with such fervor that there is little energy left for anything else. My erotic and affective life are all that matter. Despite the best efforts of a well-meaning college psychiatrist, academic pursuits quickly fall by the wayside. Paralyzed by two unsuccessful relationships, I eventually leave school, but not before the psychiatrist can make one final pronouncement about my prospects. “On aver-age,” he cautions in his most concerned tone of voice, “homosexual liaisons don’t last more than a few weeks or, at best, several months.

Only in the rarest cases do they last two years, the outer limit of same-sex relationships.” After summarizing these latest research findings on homosexuality, he telegraphs two seemingly contradictory messages in the Morse code of therapeutic jargon: I have willfully chosen this road to ongoing suffering and disappointment; I am only going through a difficult stage, a developmentally appropriate adolescent identity crisis. Whether I am simply the victim of development gone awry or a free agent who is making a perverse choice, however, the doctor reassures me that the course on which I have set out can be reversed with proper professional help. “Help,” fortunately, that I do not find.

At the same moment that I am learning my fate in one office of the new 1960s modern health services building that we affectionately refer to as the “Magic Mountain,” a fellow classmate, the writer An-drew Holleran, is receiving similar instruction just next door. In a 1993 interview he describes seeking help because he suspects that he might be homosexual. Although Holleran finds a sympathetic ear at his initial interview, the psychiatrist to whom he is referred, and to m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 133

whom he guiltily reports his failure to make sexual overtures to the woman he is dating at a nearby woman’s college, resorts to more cur-mudgeonly if direct advice, “Well, next time, go kiss her!” No need to cite the latest research, to become entangled in needless self-doubt, or to return for future sessions.

Recently, I learned that after years of marriage, children, and the heterosexual life, my own Magic Mountain doctor has finally come out. He is living happily with a man who is considerably younger than he is. Perhaps he spent too long seeking proper help, as did Dr. Ralph Roughton, the prominent psychoanalyst profiled in the
New York
Times
who came out at age sixty-three after two long analyses in which he tried to become straight. While I recognize that most people may go through some struggle in coming to terms with their sexuality, I cannot help but feel bitter irony when Dr. Roughton’s 1998 act is described by his peers as courageous. My own admiration is reserved for the gay activists of 1973 who successfully lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders and for the first openly gay doctors who entered psychoanalytic training in the early 1990s.

But back in 1963, despite my determined efforts to find romantic happiness, I am not feeling very courageous or admirable myself. Upset by my extreme mood swings that alternated with long periods of inertia, my parents send me to see Dr. M again. I agree to go because of my favorable memories. Notwithstanding the college psychiatrist’s assessment of my prospects for future happiness, I had become very attached to him and do not want to begin therapy with someone totally unknown. Dr. M is already part of my world and seems an obvious choice.