This book appears in the following booklists

• Gay Lives & Histories
• Health and Wellbeing - Memoirs
• Caring for Elderly / Infirm People

in categories:History & Biography, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexuality & Transgender, Men & Masculinity, Health & Wellbeing,

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

by Jonathan G. Silin
£11.99   paperback  Beacon Press (2007)

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.

"Jonathan Silin offers a series of valuable reports from what might be called the country of farewells, using his raw experience to explore important questions about childhood, education, parenting, privacy, control, mental health, old age, death, and forgiveness. This is a rich, careful, honest book, both nakedly personal and coolly philosophical. I've never read anything quite like it."
(Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters)

ISBN 13: 9780807079652 | ISBN 10: 0807079650