My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents - Hardcover

Silin, Jonathan G.

3.55

20 ratings by Goodreads

9780807079645: My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807079642 ISBN 13: 9780807079645

Publisher: Beacon Press, 2006

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My Father's Keeper is the moving story of Jonathan Silin, a gay man in midlife who learned to care for his elderly parents as a series of life-threatening illnesses forced them to make the difficult transition from being independent to being reliant on their son. Their new needs and unrelenting demands brought parents and child into intimate daily contact and radically transformed what had been a distant and emotionally fraught relationship.

My Father's Keeper chronicles the ways in which the ideas and skills Silin acquired as an early childhood educator, a specialist in life span development, and a compassionate witness to the devastation of the HIV/AIDS crisis came together with his interest in human psychology to deeply inform his thinking about the dramatic changes in his family's life and increasingly influence his role as his father's (and mother's) keeper.

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About the Author:

Jonathan G. Silin, a member of the graduate faculty at Bank Street College of Education in New York, has published articles in Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record, and Educational Theory, as well as in more popular periodicals such as Newsday, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Education Week. He is the author of Sex, Death, and the Education of Children, coeditor of Putting the Children First, and coproducer of Children Talk About AIDS.

From Publishers Weekly:

When his elderly parents begin failing in health, the author, a Bank Street College educator, must come to terms with a drastic shift in caretaking roles. His account recognizes a lifetime of transformative relations with his parents, Depression-era New York Jews, especially his father, for whom the author's declaration of gayness decades earlier struck like a "personal injury." The father's sense of betrayal by the son, begun when the author started writing on gay issues and signing them with his name (which is also the father's name), is compounded as the father undergoes successive, debilitating operations for cancer of the larynx. Losing control of his body, the father reasserts his authority by taking care of finances while lashing out at his son, leaving him feeling "ambushed," intimidated and reluctant to visit the nursing home where his father lives. Despite past efforts to distance himself from his disapproving parents, Silin, well into his 50s, must take responsibility for their care, preferring a caring approach, rather than treating them like dependent children. Forgiveness occasionally graces these encounters, as when the author's partner of 30 years dies, and Silin's father offers a tender acknowledgment. Silin's work is at once thoughtful and erudite. (May)
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