N a p
a l
m H e
a l t
h S p
a : R
e p o
r t 2
0 0 9
Song at 4pm
Each day brings new
loss, each loss
new resignation,
& a flinty resolve
carries the day. How long
before accumulated
absence tips
the scale? Gradually
I am more aware
of what is not
there anymore
than what
is. What is
this dreadful
sense of purpose
that seems so
sensible, as if it
had its own
weight, the only
way to go
about things?
Orphans
On
the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It
was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her
missing
children, only found another orphan. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 1851
On April 1, 1957,
my father took my mother to see a film called The Barretts of
student studying American literature at Cornell and my mom, Leslie, was an
English major at Hood. They were still unmarried, and stayed at the Hotel Ithaca
that night to avoid the prying eyes of roommates and dorm mothers. Before
returning to the hotel, they visited a drugstore to buy condoms, but it was closed.
My mother assured my father that it was the wrong time of the month for her to
get pregnant. They got married in June. I was born in December.
*
I was named after
Stephen Dedalus, the hero of James Joyce's Portrait
of the Artist
as a Young
voice. He taught me to love the sounds of language before I could speak by
carrying me on his shoulders while reading Ulysses aloud.
*
My father became a political activist in the era of civil rights protests, "Ban the
Bomb," and the blacklisting of suspected Communists. I have a photograph of my
family
taken at a demonstration in
born. My parents are wheeling me and my sister in strollers, looking like the hero
and heroine of a movie about a young Jewish couple who devote their lives to
saving the world. I'm holding up a sign that says PEACE.
*
We moved to
neighborhood
in
and I would have to march in single-file down to the basement of our school past
dusty drums of water marked with Civil Defense symbols. (I remembered a sign at
one of my parents' demonstrations that said FALLOUT SHELTERS ARE
OVENS.)
On Sunday afternoons, my family would drive into
we
would stroll through Greenwich Village and then have lunch in
When black lights, incense, and Day-Glo posters began appearing in Bleecker
Street shops,
long-haired naked people started swimming in
*
My parents were not hippies, they were New Leftists. My dad would put on a
navy blue blazer and tie to go on a march. He believed that the hippies were
undermining the serious mission of fomenting a workers' revolution with their free
love, psychedelics, Eastern religions, and other decadent nonsense. This long-
awaited uprising of the proletariat was expected to break out any day, spreading
like prairie fire from radicalized college campuses, to factories, to the streets. My
father
kept a copy of Mao's little red book on his night table, beside The
Godfather and Portnoy's Complaint. At a demonstration against the Vietnam War
in
steps of the Department of Justice in blue helmets. Back home, FBI agents came
around to interrogate the superintendent of our apartment building and my
parents' friends from the PTA. When I was 12, my father was fired from a
teaching job because of his statements against the war. His students took over the
administration building for two weeks in protest. I saw my parents led away in handcuffs, and my father served 11 days in the Queens House of Detention.
*
At the same time, he was still my dad, the English professor. Whenever I stayed
home
from school with a cold, he would give me the same advice: "Read Moby-
Dick." As I got older, the title of Melville's 800-page epic became shorthand in my
mind for everything that was overbearingly pedantic and tedious about my father.
In 7th grade, I figured out that I was gay, but I couldn't talk about it with him for
years. He deflected those conversations by saying in his most rabbinical voice,
"When you meet the right girl "
*
My family rented a
beach house in
convinced my dad to smoke a joint. At first, the drug didn't seem to have much of
an effect on him. But as we were walking down the stairs he blurted out, "My
sneakers feel like marshmallows." Marijuana did wonders for my father, or rather,
he had become open to wonder by the time he started smoking it. He seemed to
relax in general, becoming less uptight and dogmatic. He told me that smoking pot
had reinvigorated his sex life with my mother, which was a little too much
information.
*
By then, the revolution that my parents had fought so hard for seemed even
further away. My father was fired from several jobs because of his politics, ending
up
at a state college in
own struggles in the travails of Dickens' textile workers. My parents put their
passion for political organizing into their union, the American Federation of
Teachers, and my father was elected president of the state council. At the same
time that he seemed to capitulate to the notion of having to work inside the
system, he secretly joined the Communist Party for the first time, stashing his red
party card in an edition of King Lear.
*
Every summer, my father and I would take a walk on the sand bars in
was my nemesis for years, I began to appreciate how similar we were in many
ways. He became much more affectionate and emotionally expressive. By the late
'80s, his own mother and father were dead, and sometimes he would burst into
tears, crying that he had become an orphan. He began talking about mortality, and
predicted that he would die at the same age as his father, 69. But his worst fear
was
becoming an invalid. If I'm ever a
vegetable, he would say over and over, just
pull the plug. He told me that he didn't believe in an afterlife and would be
"annihilated" after his death, which seemed like an oddly vivid choice of words, as
if he was describing the obliteration of atomic particles or an entire city.
*
In August of 2001, I proposed to my boyfriend, a soft-spoken science teacher
from
the
in
celebrate our love and commitment in the company of our friends and families
anyway.
My parents loved Keith, who I'd lived with in
years. My father had become a vocal critic of discrimination against gay people in
his union. He resigned from the Communist Party because his comrades refused to
support gay rights.
*
My dad made the only political speech at our wedding, a rousing toast to marriage
equality
that made even Keith's church-going Republican relatives from
cheer. I felt like by my finding a life-partner and getting married, my father and I
had finally become peers.
*
A few months later, three weeks before my father's 70th birthday, my parents
attended a union meeting. My mother poured them both glasses of apple juice.
My dad took a sip and said to one of his colleagues, "I think I drank that too fast."
Suddenly he jerked back and slumped toward the floor. The EMTs arrived 20
minutes later and restarted his heart with a defibrillator. With shouts and sirens
wailing in the background, my mother called me on her cell phone and told me to
get
on a plane to
*
My sister Hillary
and brother-in-law Andrew flew in from
all
met up in
been
taken to
working elevator and a sign on the wall that said RESPECT THE PRIVACY OF
THE
PATIENTS. THIS IS
to the intensive-care unit beside trays of green and orange mush and cups of Jell-
O. My father was in a private room, hooked up to a rack of bleeping and
squawking machines, because his situation was more precarious than patients in
merely critical condition. He looked like he was sleeping, but didn't react to our
presence even when my mother suddenly cried out "Please don't leave me!" It was
as if he had been turned to stone.
*
We visited him a couple of times a day, groping our way through an underground
cavern that only people whose loved ones are dying know about. We would eat
our meals in a diner nearby feeling like aliens who had been abruptly transported
to a planet with an atmosphere barely capable of sustaining life. I marveled at all
the people still moving around purposefully in the Day World, lining up for the
salad bar, oblivious to what is never far away. My sister was five months
pregnant, so at night, she and my brother-in-law shared the only guest bed in my
parents' apartment, while I slept in my mother's bed. Taking my father's place like
that was so psychologically fraught that I couldn't even begin to feel my own
feelings, but my mother's need to talk into the night trumped my need for
boundaries. After playing Catherine to my father's Heathcliff for 51 years, she
looked like she had been struck by lightning. She could barely navigate across the
room.
*
Waves of shit smell would periodically wash over the ICU, as if the ward was
barely keeping itself afloat in a sea of decay. One day a nurse handed me a plastic
baggie containing my father's wedding ring. "Your father's finger was so swollen,
we almost had to call in a plumber to cut it off," she explained. I quickly slipped
the ring out of the bag, which was marked with BIOHAZARD warnings, and
warmed it in my palm before giving it to my mother, who was sitting desolate in
the hallway.
*
In the valley of the shadow of death, I decided to meditate at my father's bedside
as I'd been trained to do as a young Zen student. I sat down in a chair and started
counting my breaths: one, two, three Right at that moment, my father's arms
shot out to the sides of his bed, his lower lip curled up in an uncharacteristic
sneer, and his feet began thrashing under the sheets. The rawest expression of fear
and terror I have ever seen in any creature, human or animal, took possession of
his face. He arched his back and rose from the mattress, shaking and convulsing, as
if he was trying to climb out of his body. I ran to the nurses' station and called
out, "My father is having a seizure!" After poking her head in, one of the nurses
said "Yes, he does that sometimes," as if she was discussing his bowel habits or
meal preferences.
*
I stroked my father's forehead and tried to soothe him. His eyes were open, but
when I put my face inches from his and called his name, there was no flicker of
recognition. He ground his teeth like a barnyard animal as his beautiful brown eyes
rolled in divergent directions. I was terrified of the possibility that he was fighting
to reconstitute his soul in a broken vessel so he wouldn't leave his beloved Leslie
alone on Earth. I pledged that I would take care of her, and told him that it would
be
all right to leave his body if it was time. It's
OK Dad. Let go. I promise to take
care of mom. Thank you for everything. We love you. You lived a beautiful
life. Let
go. I felt that if my mother saw him in this condition she might drop dead of grief
on the spot. But I needed someone else in my family to know what was going on,
so we could make informed decisions. I asked my sister to go into our father's
room and tell me what she saw. After a few minutes she came out pale and
shaking and said, "Dad is in agony. We're betraying him. If I could have killed him
right then, I would have. We've got to get him out of there."
*
The head of my father's medical team was Dr. Faltes and the neurologist was Dr.
Ahad. When I told Dr. Faltes that I was certain that my father didn't want any
heroic measures to save his life that would leave him significantly impaired, he
snapped back, "Do you have power of attorney? How do I know you don't have
some axe to grind against your father? This happens." We renamed the doctors
Faustus and Ahab after the alchemist in a German tale who sells his soul to the
devil and the captain of the Pequod in Moby-Dick to weave the ragged thread of
my father's fate back into the narrative of his life as a teacher. My sister and I
begged Dr. Faustus to give him morphine, and he assured us that he would. But
the next morning, our dad was in the same tormented state. A nurse told us that
the staff would not give him drugs because "he does not have enough brain tissue
to
feel pain." I felt like we were fighting a revolution in
my father from the ultimate oppression the tyranny of being trapped in his
body.
*
Then we found out that my father's kidneys, deprived of oxygen during his heart
attack, were failing. When Dr. Faustus asked me to sign a paper authorizing
dialysis, I declined, effectively sentencing my father to death. The next day, Dr.
Ahab's EEG confirmed that he had no hope of recovery. The two halves of what
was left of the brilliant brain of Donald Silberman were firing asynchronously,
with only minimal and sporadic activity. After I conveyed this news to my mom,
a young doctor burst out of the ICU and ran over to a family praying on the other
side of the hallway. "I have great news!" he said. "Your grandmother is going to be
absolutely fine. It's like a miracle." I asked Dr. Faustus to take my dad off his
respirator.
*
He survived for four more days. Though it seems terrible to say so, this was
awkward, because we had already scheduled a celebration of my father's life at his
college for the following Monday. But my dad was also a punctual man. On
Sunday night, I was falling asleep beside my mother when I had a strange dream: a
crystal lattice, glittering in the dark, geometrical and inhuman. Then the phone rang
on my mother's night table. A nurse's voice said, "Mr. Silberman has expired."
*
My father's body was still warm when we got to the hospital at 1:30 am, but he
looked utterly dead, with a slack expression that he never wore in life. My mother
said goodbye to her prince and protector for the last time. When we got back to
the apartment, she gave letters to me and my sister that he'd written and sealed
years earlier, before an operation, to be opened by us in case he didn't survive. "I
lived the life I chose. (Sometimes, these days I think that it might have chosen
me.) I have been very happy," he wrote to me. "I did the right thing. I dedicated
my life to human progress to bringing about changes that would improve the
conditions of life and the quality of life of the common people. My belief as I
depart this world is that I have been an instrument of historical change -- that the
forces of change worked through me. For this reason, I led a life of meaning and
purpose."
*
I expected a small group of tweed-jacketed socialist professors to attend the
tribute to my father, but instead, the auditorium was packed with his colleagues
and former students, standing room only. Hearing them praise his work in the
classroom and on the front lines of his union was like discovering that my dad had
lived a double life as a superhero. The man I talked about, on the other hand, was a
guy
who adored salt bagels,
the poems of Walt Whitman; insisted on not being disturbed as he read the Times;
and enjoyed nothing more than drifting in an inflatable raft with my mother every
August, reading a novel while curling his hair with his index finger. When the
speeches were over, a student in a wheelchair told me that while he never really
knew my father, he had been crossing the campus a few weeks earlier when he
dropped all his books on the sidewalk. My dad, who happened to be passing by,
got down on his hands and knees to pick them up.
*
A year later, my
mother, my husband, and I returned to
sister
stayed home in
uncanny symmetry of loss, our beloved house had been torn down the previous
winter by the guys who owned it. With my mother leaning on Keith's arm, I read
aloud from Moby-Dick before scattering my father's ashes in the water.