Babies are dying in Baghdad hospitals every day because medicine and medical supplies, lying in abundance in government warehouses only miles away, are not getting where they are needed. It is hard to believe, especially because the young resident doctors who are talking about the problem in the small, shabby common room at the Alwiya Children’s Hospital are smiling and chuckling.
For a moment their laughter stuns us into silence. A small TV flashes in the corner with a music video that zooms in and out on some big-haired Egyptian singer. A half-broken fan whirls drowsily above. The faint wailings of infants from the wards down the hall echo as if they are coming from a deep well. Finally someone speaks.
“There are so many disasters,” says Manaf Yassen, a doctor whose lab coat looks a size or two too large. “We must laugh, because it is better than crying.”
During Yassen’s shift the day before yesterday at Alwiya, two newborns died because he lacked the right supplies to treat them. One had septicemia; the other died of respiratory failure. Yassen had no luminal to treat the septicemia patient — its seizures worsened and it died. He had no ventilator machine for the child whose lungs had given out. Nor did he have any surfactant to help get oxygen into the child’s arteries. Yassen and the other doctors gathered around say at least one baby dies in the hospital every day, but they can’t estimate how many of those die because of the lack of drugs. “Many,” is all they can say, shaking their heads, smiles lingering on their lips.
Basic medicines are missing, the doctors tell us. In the case of newborns, whose immune systems are still weak, these medicines can mean life or death: Phenobarbital or luminal for seizures; immune globulin and surfactant for respiratory distress; and calcium supplements for premature infants, which the hospital has not had in stock for the last six months.
Last week was the height of diarrhea season, a common ailment during summer because of the blistering heat and lack of clean water in Iraq. It was the worst possible time to run out of ringer lactate, a fluid to revitalize severely dehydrated babies, but that’s what happened at Alwiya. Yassen and the other doctors gave the children a much less effective saline solution as a substitute, but one doctor called it “show business” to fool parents into thinking they were doing something. They’ve watched at least 100 children die of diarrhea since the war.
Children who have diarrhea are not supposed to die in hospitals, but here they do. “I have seen 20 die with my own eyes,” says another doctor, Ihsan Jassim al Douri, his eyes widening. “You ask another doctor, you get a different number.” He smiles.
Children in Baghdad hospitals are dying of highly curable ailments such as diarrhea because of Iraq’s corrupt, bureaucracy-plagued, crime-ridden healthcare system — and the failure of U.S. administrators to come up with a workable alternative more than four months after the fall of Saddam. Certainly, babies died under Saddam’s rule, though the dictator blamed U.S. sanctions for medical supply shortages, and treated scenes of dead children as photo opportunities to try to shame Americans. In post-Saddam Iraq, though, the delivery system, at least, is far worse. And just as the U.S. is being blamed for failing to plan adequately for postwar chaos on other fronts — from restoring power to keeping order — a growing chorus is outraged about the medical crisis in Baghdad.
But doctors, government agencies and relief organizations point fingers in different directions when laying blame for the troubles. Iraqi doctors say not enough medical supplies are reaching their pharmacies. American and Iraqi officials in charge of distributing those supplies insist Baghdad warehouses are full and supplies are available to those who ask, but the Saddam-era health bureaucracy, combined with a history of passivity on the part of health officials, mean hospitals aren’t getting what they need. American soldiers trying to guard the medical warehouses say that Iraqis have been pilfering the medicines to sell on the black market — and that the U.S. military can’t or won’t crack down and make sure the medicines are secure. “It’s layer after layer of bullshit that you have to get through to solve the problem,” says Army Reserve officer John Padgett, a doctor who’s helping do a needs assessment of the healthcare system. “But the public hospitals should have some recourse other than going to the black markets for their medicines — which is what they’re doing now.”
Whatever the reason, the results are disturbingly clear: Children are dying needlessly every day, and not only at Alwiya.
The Central Children’s Hospital in Baghdad is also out of luminal, the anti-seizure drug. Dr. Muhammad Hassan, the chief resident doctor, says he received boxes of it from an aid organization but the solution was tainted — yellow and cloudy instead of white. At least one baby dies here every day. Many die because there is no medicine or equipment. Premature newborns die, he says, because the electricity will go out in the city and cut off power to their incubators. Some children get renal failure and die because there are no dialysis machines. “This is the life,” he says.
At the Ibn al Hatib Hospital for infectious diseases in the town of Tuwaytha some 20 kilometers south of Baghdad, there is no anti-rabies medicine. Three months ago, says pediatrician Sa’ad Jamil, a wild dog rushed into a family’s house and bit all the children, five sisters. The doctors sent the family to Jordan to buy the drug, but it was too late to save them. One daughter died 10 days ago. “The others are at home,” Dr. Jamil says. “One by one, they are waiting for death.”
Although hospitals get some supplies from government warehouses, more come from international aid agencies such as the Red Cross and the World Health Organization. But often doctors are forced to swap drugs from other hospitals or pharmacies. Dr. Hassan at Central Hospital says he had to send families out to the black market — where prices can be 300 times more than those at public pharmacies — to find drugs. “There is no one in the Ministry of Health to get this job done so it maybe is also our problem. This is the problem of our children, so we can’t wait,” Hassan says. “If I had an empty ambulance, I would look for the drug.”
Even when medical supplies do arrive from government warehouses, they often do not work, says Yassen, the doctor at Alwiya. He leads us downstairs to the pharmacy in the next building and rips open a box containing a blood transfusion set. “This valve is the heart of the set,” he says, shaking the small, clear, plastic piece in his hand. “The valve should be closed, but it has many air leaks. It is expired.”
Because of the defective valve, air bubbles can easily get into a child’s bloodstream during the transfusion, to create fatal embolisms. Yassen says this nearly happened the night before — a child developed apnea during the transfusion and had to be resuscitated. Now the small girl is recovering under a phototherapy lamp that is barely functioning. It will happen again and again with these sets, he says.
We look the sets over. They have an expiration date of 2005. “No matter,” he says, tossing the pieces back into the box. “They are Iranian. Believe me, they are expired. They are useless. We use them even though they are useless,” he says, laughing at his own joke.
In a newly refurbished wing of the Ministry of Health building in mid-August, a U.S. advisor, Lt. Col. Charles Fisher, is giving a PowerPoint presentation at the first postwar conference of the Kimadia, the large public agency responsible for distributing medical supplies and medicine to hospitals. Facing him are 200 or so Iraqi pharmacists, Health Ministry officials and Kimadia chiefs as well as a cluster of U.S. Army officers looking for answers. In late May, Fisher took over as the coalition’s overseer for the Kimadia, which, he explains, operated as a top-down “controlled system of allocation” under Saddam Hussein, and was, by all counts, totally and utterly corrupt. Fisher is trying to make clear that he wants to create a new system, one that is “customer-driven” — where the customers, i.e. the hospitals, are “empowered” to request the drugs and supplies they need themselves.
The military leader is speaking the language of American corporate reform, and his translator has trouble finding the right words in Arabic. After a minute of awkward silence, she steps away from the podium, befuddled. A man replaces her and Fisher continues.
He scrolls through three pages worth of instructions on the large projector screen behind him, introducing his employees to customer service, American-style. He spends a while detailing how to deal with complaints. When a Kimadia official hears a complaint from a hospital or clinic that they lack a certain drug, Fisher says, he should ask the “customers” if they’ve been to the local Kimadia to request the medication. Then the official should ask the “customers” if they have a letter signed from the regional Kimadia director stating there’s a shortage.
“That’s the first step in owning where the problem is if there’s no drugs,” says Fisher. The letter from the local Kimadia, Fisher says, continuing down the long, Byzantine chain of command, will then be sent to the national Kimadia, and that will trigger a response from the import department to address the shortage of the drug in question, which will then be sent back to the local Kimadia, and so on.
But Fisher insists there is no shortage of drugs. He says even though most of the Kimadia warehouses were bombed, ransacked and burned during and after the war, he has enough supplies and medicine for the Iraqi people. After the presentation, we catch Fisher as he is leaving the podium and tell him of the things we have seen at Alwiya, which seem to contradict his claim. He says that in his experience, if hospitals don’t have sufficient drugs or supplies, the problem is that they haven’t asked for them.
“My grain of salt to your story is: There is not a shortage,” Fisher tells us. He blames the paucity of medical supplies on a “lack of empowerment” on the part of hospital workers and administrators, who he says simply don’t ask for what they need. “I’ll give them whatever they want. My job is to get that warehouse empty.” But nine out of 10 directors never ask, he says, and that’s why he wrote out the long list of instructions. Most of them never went to the Kimadia for drugs because they didn’t receive orders from the Ministry of Health to do so.
“As best as I can tell, it was such a strong command-and-control system [under Saddam Hussein] that unless I’m empowered or I have a written piece of paper, I can’t do anything,” Fisher tells us.
This could be part of the problem at Alwiya. When we try to ask the hospital director why he thinks there’s a medicine shortage, he blanches and says we need to get permission from the Ministry of Health even to speak to him. We say we have been to the Ministry of Health and no one mentioned our needing permission. “I’m sorry, you do not have an appointment scheduled with me and I have another meeting,” he says, rushing past us and out the door. “You’re going to make me late.”
But Dr. Yassen, one of the doctors at Alwiya, says the director has made requests for medicine and equipment but has received none. He says his director has given up. “He simply closes his door and sits in his room, completely isolated from the hospital,” he says.
We ask Fisher if he’s been to Alwiya. He says no, but he’ll go anywhere to get the job done. He says he is “the No. 1 answer guy in Iraq,” having personally overseen the delivery of 6,500 tons of medical supplies to local Kimadias and hospitals in 80 days. He is changing the Kimadia leadership from the national level on down, and while he may not be able to get to every single place, he is “in power to say who stays and who goes,” Fisher says. “If there is some bad actor playing a game on the supply side,” Fisher says he hasn’t seen it yet. “But if I found there was a withholding [of supplies] I tell you on the spot that person would be fired and I might even bring criminal charges. Period. Full stop.”
Col. John Black, a bald, stocky soldier in the audience at Fisher’s presentation, stands up during the question and answer session to say he has heard persistent complaints about drugs not arriving at the hospitals from the government warehouses. “I think it needs to be clearly articulated who is responsible for delivering the drugs and medical materials to the clinics and hospitals,” he insists.
“These are excellent, focused and pointed questions,” responds Fisher. “I agree with you there needs to be sound responsibility so it’s clear who will be responsible for transporting … each of you in conjunction with people in your region need to develop a solution for every clinic for every hospital where both parties are in agreement.”
Then it is break time. The conference goers spill out into the lobby, where a huge spread of catered food awaits them. When they run out of plates, some men lean over the large serving trays of rice and chicken and scoop heaps of food into their mouths with their hands. That’s where we met John Padgett, the doctor and reserve Army officer who has been visiting hospitals in Baghdad with his special ops team and doing a needs assessment. He agrees children are dying because supplies are not reaching hospitals. The irony, he says, is that the warehouses — one after the other, Home Depot-sized warehouses — are full, overflowing with medicine and supplies trucked in by the international community, and yet the hospitals don’t have what they need. Sometimes the problem is bureaucracy and sometimes it’s that the drugs are disappearing, being sold on the black market. Children with cancer are dying needlessly, he says, because cancer medicine can draw the biggest profit.
“You go looking for cancer medicine on the shelf you know has come in, where the hell is it? It’s not in the hospitals, it’s not in the warehouses, it’s in the street,” he says. Padgett’s own son had leukemia but now is in remission. The corruption makes him furious. And he says it’s more than just the end-user sitting in his office not feeling empowered. The whole system, from the warehouses on down, is a mess, Padgett says.
Walking out of the conference auditorium, we are still confused about how the Kimadia works, even after Fisher’s presentation. With its national and local branches and warehouses, the distribution system seems like a self-tangling octopus. We can only imagine how the Iraqis feel.
We thought we’d understand the system better if we visited a local warehouse, so we sought out Kimadia 13, the largest medical supply warehouse facility in all of Baghdad. The man in charge, Matt Golsteyn, a 23-year-old Army lieutenant from Orlando, Fla., gives us a tour of the warehouses. There are boxes of syringes stacked six or seven boxes high between the buildings. Parts for ambulances and elevators lie in broken crates, collecting dust. Inside we pass a row of free-standing air conditioners. “We had about 200 of those a couple of days ago,” Golsteyn says. “But they all went out. Now we have about 50. I hope they went to the hospitals, but you never know.”
He says drivers hired by hospitals come in daily with lists of requested items but they try to leave with much more. “I mean they try to run every kind of racket possible,” he says. His platoon, which has been at the complex a month, only took full control a week ago. Now they check all the outgoing items against the requisition list.
“The first three days we were on the gate, we let out three vehicles that had the proper amount of stuff. We sent back about 15. It was a common occurrence for the wrong things to leave this site.”
Many of these items — latex gloves, hearing aids, IV bags and catheters — which are normally given free to hospitals that need them, ended up in the black market.
But drivers skimming off the top was not the biggest problem at Kimadia 13, Goldsteyn says. It was the local Shiite groups who took control after the war and continued to use and exploit the medical supply complex even after the troops arrived. “The neighborhood was able to exert pressure on the managers by, pretty much, if they don’t let them have their way, they’d kill them. So the management is corrupt in the sense that they got the knife to their throat all the time. The reason why things are going out the gate all the time is because the store managers have to look the other way.”
Although Goldsteyn has fired some of the management and kicked out some workers who were extorting money from the drivers, corruption is still rife. “The administration that is running these warehouses now is the same one that was running it under Saddam. So this was and is his organization. This is going to change, but for now this is how they do it. Everyone here has dealt with some kind of corruption at one time or another. You just have to find the people you can work with.”
We hear from a soldier who requested anonymity that the large warehouse for drugs and medicines, Kimadia 1, is in a similar but worse state as Kimadia 13, the supplies and equipment facility.
“The local Shiite militia are in charge of security there and they are running it like their own little fiefdom,” says the soldier. They sell medicine that comes in the front — U.N. supplies, Red Cross supplies — to people out the back, he adds. “It’s a case of the rats guarding the cheese factory.”
What about security? we ask. Isn’t the Army protecting the warehouse? “The United States military hasn’t seen fit to do anything yet,” says the disgusted soldier. “That’s a decision that needs to come from some level above mine.”
Even when medicine makes its way from the Kimadia, there is a problem with hospital staff taking it for themselves. Dr. Mahumuad Jassihm, the director of Habibia Children’s Hospital in Sadr City, says his facility was lucky and got three months’ worth of supplies directly from the Kimadia. But the well-groomed, care-worn man says it doesn’t always mean his patients get the medicine. During a tour of the wards, we pass several mothers clutching vials of medicine, their hands resting in the folds of their black hijab. “We give the drug to the parents, and when the time comes for the injection, they call in the nurse, because we don’t trust our nurses,” Jassihm says. “What can we do?” Nurses have been known to keep the medicine and sell it on the black market, he explains. “We have a bad habit here,” the doctor says sadly.
Nada Doumani, a Red Cross spokeswoman, sits in an upstairs room of the villa compound the relief agency uses as its headquarters, in the Park al Sadoon district in Baghdad, and confirms that there is a huge problem with the system of distribution of medicine and medical supplies — but it’s one the Red Cross can’t solve.
“Kimadia went on strike for a long time. People are not getting salaries, are not feeling motivated. They have no referees, no directors appointed, no empowerment,” Doumani says, to some extent confirming Fisher’s take on the problem. Many hospitals, she says, “were so used to receiving allocations automatically that they don’t think to ask, even if there’s a shortage. It’s a structural problem.” The Red Cross, Doumani insists, is powerless to address the issue. “It has to be done by the Iraqis or by the occupying power,” she says, and suggests we talk to someone in the Ministry of Health.
So we track down Saed Ishmail Hakki, an Iraqi-American professor from Tampa, Fla., who is rumored to be on the verge of appointment as the new minister of health. We find him sitting in a Health Ministry conference room full of smiling middle-aged Iraqi men holding résumés and letters of introduction. Hakki tells them there is an employment seminar on the lower floor and they file out. Once alone, Hakki explains his grand plan: He wants to create a healthcare system on par with the United States’ within five years. That includes privatizing institutions like the Kimadia to make them more efficient. He calls the Kimadia a “billion-dollar white elephant.”
Then we tell Hakki about the problems at Alwiya and Central Hospital, and he immediately switches modes. No longer is he an anti-Kimadia, pro-capitalist visionary, but a system apparatchik denying responsibility. “I would like to see a piece of paper that requested the medicine and was turned down and I’ll give you a trip from here to wherever you want to go out of my own pocket.”
What do we tell the doctors who say their patients are dying because they can’t get needed drugs? we ask.
Hakki smiles. “Patience,” he says, hanging on the last syllable so that it sounds like air slowly leaking from a balloon. “In the Quran it says Ini allahe ma’a al sa’abareen, ‘God is with those who are patient.’ We need patience here. The Iraqis are tolerant. They are patient now because they know — otherwise you would have revolution.”
But in fact, Iraqis are losing patience. Back at Alwiya, we meet Um Aisha Senan, an angular-faced woman in a blue hijab, who holds her sick 3-month-old daughter Aisha in her arms, because the cot is too filthy. She asks Dr. Al Douri why everything is dirty. There are puddles of fetid water under the cots and the smell of feces is overpowering. “There’s no disinfectant! There’s no janitor here!” she says. The other parents in the ward crowd around her and murmur in agreement.
“The janitor should clean it but perhaps if you cleaned your area and we all did our part …” starts Al Douri.
“I am a school teacher,” Senan yells, interrupting him. “And I do my job fine, that’s why you and the cleaning staff should do yours! Look at this child!” Senan points to a boy on the cot next to hers. “It’s a simple case of diarrhea and throwing up and there isn’t any treatment and there are no drugs and he’s getting worse!”
Al Douri tries to explain that the child has a fungal infection and has been here for a week. Even though they finally have ringer lactate, the child doesn’t need it since too much fluid would cause heart failure. Senan and the others gathered around will have none of it.
After he hastily retreats from the ward, all the humor has drained from Al Douri’s round, wide-eyed face. He says parents often take it out on him when things happen beyond his control, like a lack of medicine. He’s been punched in the face before. But that’s nothing, he says, compared to what parents would do if they found what’s in his pocket. We ask him what he means, and he produces a folded-up paper. It’s a copy of last week’s Hawza, a Shiite paper that mentions him by name: “Dr. Al Douri, a Ba’ath party loyalist, doesn’t do his work at Alwiya Hospital — he shows up in his track clothes and upbraids the patients for betraying Saddam Hussein.” Al Douri says he’s no fan of the Ba’ath party — he only shares a last name with an important, well-connected family. “This article is like a death sentence,” he says. “Anyone will read this and try to kill me on the spot.” He says he is leaving the hospital tomorrow and heading north to live with his family.
The last time we visit Alwiya, we go looking for Dr. Yassen. From an open door down a hall from us, we hear ungodly screams. Yassen is inside the room, his gloved fingers covered with blood. Below him, a newborn baby — totally yellow in color — writhes naked on a desk. Rammed into the baby’s navel is a plastic tube, part of the defective transfusion set Yassen showed us on our earlier visit. The doctor is carefully watching the valve for bubbles as he releases blood into the tube. The baby has neonatal jaundice, Yassen says, and needs another transfusion after this one. Because of the shoddy Iranian sets, it takes him three hours to do what normally takes only one. He has another four hours of this maddening work and he already looks weary.
The infant arches its tiny body in pain. With little fists clenched, it rolls its eyes back and screams again, a gurgling, animal scream. Yassen’s assistant finally puts a free finger in the baby’s mouth to calm him.
After a long while, Yassen, sweating profusely, asks if we are finished with photographs. He has been sweltering in his lab coat, which he donned when we entered the stuffy room. We ask him who is responsible for the delivery of the medical supplies and drugs. Is it the medical staff, the director, the Ministry of Health staff, the government? He shrugs.
“I don’t know where — in which joint — is the defect,” Yassen says. “But you see and I see what is the end result,” he says, waving his hands around the drab office and taking in the suffering infant. “We depend on the final result, and this is the final result.”
The call came early in the morning. The 3-month-old granddaughter of my neighbor had finally succumbed to the illness she was born with. I am a midwife, but this call wasn’t about a birth. This time the call was from the mortuary.
I have spent the last 30 years taking care of women in pregnancy, birth and beyond. I use my hands to help bring life into this world. Over the past few years, however, I found myself using those very same hands in the performance of a Taharah, a Jewish ritual that prepares a dead woman for burial. Birth, life, joy, beginnings vs. death, decay, finality. Such a contrast! What could be more different? And yet, somewhere in my consciousness, there was a commonality. Caring for a woman in her life, preparing a woman for birth had a parallel in preparing a woman for burial. The act of helping a woman and her baby through their many transitions seemed analogous to helping the soul transition from this plane of existence to the next.
“Taharah” means “to purify.” Particular prayers are said and simple hand-sewn white linen garments dress the body. All this is identical for everyone, no matter how old, how young, how rich, how poor. During a Taharah, all are treated the same.
I performed my first Taharah, and it was more than I expected – more silence, more depth, more sensitivity. The concern of being with and touching a dead body left as soon as I entered the room. The midwife in me took over. The four members of our team worked quietly, with tenderness. The peace in the room was tangible and present, and our lady seemed to reflect that. Her entire body, as well as her face, seemed to relax as we completed the ritual, intoning the prayers. And the energy, amazingly, felt the same as at a birth — a feeling of completion, a palpable sense of the soul transitioning and a humble appreciation of the privilege of being there.
To perform the Taharah when a woman has lived out her life, has seen her children grow and have their own children, seems part of the natural logic of life. The first Taharahs I took part in were just that. This next Taharah, however, involved someone who had not lived a long life, had not lived to see her children grow, and this time, I was to be alone.
The call stunned me. I knew she was sick, but this wasn’t expected. Now the mortuary was asking, could I be the one to take care of her? I had never before performed a Taharah on a baby. My experiences with babies were of life, not of death. There was always joy, a new beginning. Here was unimaginable sadness, an ending.
As I looked at the tiny garments, it became real, and I worried about how I would react. My mind remembered my nursing training, when we were doing a rotation in the NICU and how I just couldn’t bear to be with sick babies. All I could think about were my own babies and I had cried to my instructor, “Just get me out of here!” Now I was going to be with this fragile body, with this baby who was no longer sick, but was actually gone.
I entered the room alone. I washed my hands in the correct ritual way, pouring water first over my right hand, then my left, right, left, right, left. I retrieved her body. She was so small, so light, wrapped in a clean sheet. It was time for the first prayer. “Master of the world! Take pity upon the present deceased for she is the daughter of Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel and Leah. May her soul rest among the righteous women.” I didn’t know what to expect as I began the unwrapping. She had been so sick, she had had so many invasive procedures and devices. What would she look like? I uncovered her slight form, and she simply looked as if she was sleeping. Did I detect the barest hint of a smile on her face?
I removed the IVs, the bandages and washed her carefully, talking softly to her and caressing her the whole time. I worried about her delicate, almost transparent skin. And then it was time for the ritual immersion. I would submerge her in the pool of water known as the mikvah, a symbolic act of purification, representing the body’s return to the womb, to the bath of the amniotic fluid, and the soul’s return to the original waters of Creation. I cradled her body, continuing my dialogue and immersed her in the ritual bath. Tears streamed down my face, falling into the water, as I repeated the prescribed words, “Tahorah he, tahorah he, tahorah he” … “She is pure, she is pure, she is pure.” The silence was piercing; time seemed irrelevant.
Finally the dressing. These garments, though they were the smallest ones, overwhelmed her tininess. I continued the ritual, placing her in the casket, then covering it. I ended with the ceremonial asking of forgiveness from her, just in the event that anything done was humiliating or disrespectful to her or had deviated from the tradition. I left the room and her.
Driving home in silence, my mind spun with the images of this Taharah. At the same moment I parked in front of my home, her grandfather pulled up across the street. Most of the time, the mourners don’t know who performed the Taharah and unless they ask, nothing is said. But as I looked at him, at the visible unspeakable grief on his face, I knew that I had to tell him. “I took care of her,” I said. His face and body seemed to dissolve. Recovering, he asked me to come across the street to his home, to talk with his wife and daughter. They needed my reassurance, he said.
The baby’s mother, his daughter, only wanted to know if her baby looked frightened. I told her how peaceful she looked, with that almost-smile I thought I had seen. That seemed to comfort her. Then there were a few more questions, many tears, and expressions of gratitude. It was clear that it was time for me to leave. They needed to do their mourning without me.
So why had I been drawn to participate in this ritual? Death carries with it such pain, and whether the death is that of a young person or an elderly one, there is great sadness. However, having watched women in birth, it’s so clear that pain is transitory. There is so much more than just the pain. And with death I believe that there is more than sadness. The process of the Taharah is perhaps a metaphor for what is left — the dignity and integrity of the person, the love that she experienced during her life and leaves as an inheritance to the ones close to her.
I find myself grateful to be part of a tradition that recognizes this and expresses our connection to the Creator, which treats everyone, even in death, with respect and caring. I feel privileged that I am able to participate in this final act for a woman, that I can be midwife to her spirit.
Children can ask a lot of very annoying questions. Starting at about 2 years of age, they begin barraging their parents with endless queries, from “Are we there yet?” to “Why is the moon round?” — questions that often seem more like desperate ploys for parental attention than anything else. And, to make things worse, cooperative parents are often treated to a relentless barrage of follow-up questions, many of which involve one word: “Why?” Is this process infuriating? Yes. But is it crucial to their development? Far more than most of us think. And furthermore, the frequency and form of those questions can tell us a lot, not only about how children learn but also about cultural and class differences in America.
In his new book, “Trusting What You’re Told,” Paul L. Harris, a Victor S. Thomas Professor of Education at Harvard, argues that much of what we’ve assumed about our kids’ early learning may be misguided. Although many parents and teachers think of children as primarily independent “scientific” learners who best absorb knowledge by physically interacting with the world — an idea that informs everything from Montessori education to museum planning — Harris believes it woefully underestimates the importance of dialogue in young kids’ lives. Conversation — and question asking — allows young children to grasp highly abstract concepts, from religion to history, at an earlier age. However, as Harris points out, the way young children learn can vary surprisingly between working-class and middle-class children, and people from different ethnic backgrounds.
Salon spoke to Harris over the phone about Montessori’s mistakes, Asian-American kids’ deference levels, and why working-class kids ask fewer questions.
Why is it so important to determine where young children actually get their information?
A lot of research on cognitive development has argued that children do best when they’re exploring the world for themselves in a scientific fashion. That idea has a long pedigree. If you read someone like Rousseau, that’s what he’s basically advocating — along with more recent researchers or educators like Paget or Montessori. Even in the last decade or so there have been a lot of titles within the popular science mode that have focused on the “scientist in the crib” or the “child as a scientist.” But I think it dramatically underestimates children.
Where is this, as you argue, misguided approach to early education reflected?
If you go into a Montessori classroom, which is the archetype of this, the child is given materials to play with — be they rods or cones or things to assemble — and the assumption is that the child learns best about numbers and space from interacting with those concrete materials. I’m not quarreling with this as an educational device; I just don’t think it’s the whole story. You also see this philosophy in progressive science museums for children that pride themselves on being hands-on experiences: The child is not necessarily told very much, and he or she is encouraged to try things out for themselves.
You argue that, rather than allowing children simply to figure things out for themselves, it’s incredibly important that children learn things by interacting with adults from a young age. When does that form of learning start?
Probably before the child learns how to talk. There was a nice set of experiments where toddlers who were barely able to walk were given a slope to go down. The slope was made a little bit too steep for them to be confident on, and they’d often turn toward a parent of caregiver looking for advice. The evidence showed that if the parent looked anxious and apprehensive, the toddler would probably hesitate to tackle the slope, and if the caregiver looked encouraging and optimistic, the toddler would go ahead and try to negotiate it.
But this process of learning from others really comes into its own when the child is starting to talk, from 18 to 24 months upward. If, for example, the child puts a toy in a box in a room, and the child comes back into the room, and you tell the child that you’ve moved the toy to a different box, by around two and a half, children are very good at listening to you and will go search in the new place. This is a very early illustration of the way human children realize that the world may not be as they saw it, or as they see it, and that their best bet is to listen and trust other people for guidance.
At a certain point in their childhood, kids start asking lots and lots of inane question where they don’t even seem to be interested in the answer. It can be insanely annoying, and a lot of parents dismiss this as a way to get attention, but you argue that it’s actually incredibly important.
It’s true that children ask a lot of questions, but if you look more closely at the kinds of questions they ask, about 70 percent of them are seeking information as opposed to things like, for example, asking permission. And then when you look at those questions, 20 to 25 percent of them go beyond asking for bare facts like “Where are my socks?” Children ask for explanations, like “Why is my brother crying?” If a child spends one hour a day between the ages of 2 and 5 with a caregiver who is talking to them and interacting with them, they will ask 40,000 questions in which they are asking for some kind of explanation. That’s an enormous number of questions.
And it’s not just attention seeking. When children ask questions and you answer them, that is actually a setting for a sustained dialogue, and they’re trying to get clear in their minds about a particular issue that’s confusing to them or bothering them.
One disturbing finding you highlight in the book is that children in less wealthy families are far less likely to ask these kinds of inquisitive questions.
The most critical variable is the education of the mother. The more educated the mother, the greater the richness of the vocabulary and sentences they use with their children, and to some extent the greater the amount of time they talk to their children. One study was done in the U.K. with a group of working-class 4-year-olds and middle-class 4-year-olds, and the middle-class 4-year-olds were more likely to ask questions than the working-class 4-year-olds. This was also true not just of the single one-off questions but more persistent series of questions. That study also showed that children asked many more questions at home than at preschool, so when we send kids to preschool we’re giving them opportunities to play with other children and pretend play or whatever, but in terms of one-to-one dialogue where these kinds of sustained explorations can take place, we may be limiting the opportunities.
Children also seem to trust answers that come from parents more than other people they don’t know as well.
We’ve done a variety of experiments, and children seem to have a variety of biases that steer them more toward some informants than others. One of the most basic is that they’ll often turn to familiar people rather than strangers. Though by the time the child is 5, if a familiar person starts saying things that from the child’s point of view are incorrect or implausible, the child will become less receptive to that person.
There’s a surprising finding in the book that Asian-American children are more deferential in their early learning than others. What does that mean?
There is data comparing American children who are European-American and children from Asian-American families, and to cut a long story short, it looks as if the first-generation Asian-Americans children are more likely to scan the social horizon, more likely to listen to other people. I don’t think we should automatically jump to the conclusion that’s an intellectually inferior strategy; it’s actually an intellectually sophisticated strategy. We don’t know exactly what brings this cultural difference about, but our best guess is that it goes back to the dialogue between caregiver and children — that mothers differ in the extent to which they encourage children to voice their own opinions or record a child’s opinion as worthy of attention.
But the willingness to provide and act on what you’re told is not something that’s peculiar to any particular culture. Deference has been an important tool for the transmission of culture. Human technology becomes more elaborate, more complicated, from one generation to the next, and deference allows information to be picked up and acted upon. Chimpanzees, for example, deprive themselves of the ability to learn culturally inherited wisdom passed on from generation to generation. If we look at chimpanzee tool use, it tends to be unsophisticated; it doesn’t accumulate over generations.
You draw parallels and contrasts between childhood beliefs in religion, in the sense of the existence of God, and in more scientific things, like germs. What are the conclusions you can draw from that?
This is another illustration of how the traditional portrait of the child as a little scientist doesn’t work. A 4- or 5-year-old child isn’t in a position to observe germs, but talk to one, and they are pretty convinced they exist. It’s perfectly routine for children to believe in things that they can’t observe, and they do that presumably by listening to what other people say and looking at the presuppositions in what people say. This is as much true of germs and oxygen as it is of special beings such as God or Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. From the perspective of the child the primary evidence they have is what other people tell them about these entities.
The making of that distinction between scientifically established and more religious or supernatural entities is far from straightforward. There’s a sense that children are a little bit like psephologists: They look at what people say around them, and they do a head count, and they see that there’s nobody who’s a skeptic about germs. But on the other hand there are very subtle signs that God has a different status. Then of course when it comes to Santa Claus and the tooth fairy — and eventually in the schoolyard — they’re going to meet a skeptic if not several, so their belief in those entities is going to suffer a heavy blow at some point.
What do findings tell us about how children first learn about death and understand it?
They start by understanding that the body has a life cycle, and that people have these internal organs that have to be working for them to live — and that at a certain point in time the life cycle comes to an end. These internal organs cease to function. The biological account of death implies that once you’re dead, that’s it. Life has ceased. By contrast the religious conception of death typically carries with it the implication of some sort of afterlife. But it takes them a longer time to start accepting the claims that a particular community will make about the afterlife. The other interesting finding is that it’s not as if those two accounts are in competition with one another. So when children subscribe in the end to a Christian notion of the afterlife, it doesn’t lead them to abandon the biological conception. Both coexist in the child’s mind — and get recruited in different contexts.
Given your findings, how should we be changing the way we educate and parent our children?
One thing that it calls attention to is how much children can learn just by talking to people and engaging in dialogue with someone they’re familiar with. Even at a fairly young age, children can be guided to think about episodes, places, periods in history which are fairly remote from their own immediate experience. Part of the human experience is the capacity to leave behind the here and now and to think about very different times and times and places. I suppose the other aspect of the book that I didn’t dwell on, though it’s increasingly on our mind, is the fact that thanks to technology, children’s access to information is now amplified. At an early age children have these spontaneous filters. They’re trusting some people more than others; navigating the Internet, which is tricky; and many of them are left to their own devices in figuring out how to do that. It’s not as if we have educational programs which encourage children to think more carefully about where they gather information from. What we tend to do is try to guarantee that children’s access to certain misleading sources or difficult sources is blocked rather than giving them the tools to make assessments for themselves. In the future we’ll have to address that question more systematically than we do and at an earlier age.
I must’ve been eight or nine the one time my dad took me along to meet Bart. This was somewhere near Tompkins Square Park. What I recalled was a shaggy shock of blue hair, and feelings of both elation and terror: On the one hand thrilled to be old enough to be taken along one night to the city to meet a guy with blue hair, and on the other frightened of the jagged dark in the Alphabet City of the late ’80s. In my memory Bart looked like Warhol, but maybe that was just part of the dream pedigree I had for my dad, the one that looked to White and Genet and not “Will & Grace.” But I did think that my dad once said he’d gone with Bart to sell drugs to Allen Ginsberg, so maybe in this case my retrospective fantasy — that if he’d had a secret life, it could at least have been an exciting one, something worth escaping his surface life for — was accurate. I remembered hearing for the first time about AIDS, and I remembered my dad walking around for some months, maybe years, as though accompanied by ghosts. It was selfish and obscene for me to look back and want his secrets, the secrets I’d come here to try to clear up, to have hidden amazing things: It meant I have at best ignored and at worst aestheticized the fact of what must have been unimaginable pain. Like any gay man of his age, he’d watched a great number of his close friends die of AIDS, but unlike many of those men, he was not able to talk about it to the people closest to him, the people he lived with. Maybe the reason he liked “Will & Grace” and not so much White and Genet — though, now that I think of it, I did give him “The Married Man” once and he told me it was the best novel he’d ever read — was that all he wants now is to be normal and happy. He wanted to marry Brett and drink boxed wine and take Yoshi out for walks and watch “Mamma Mia!” until their DVD player caught fire. I myself had never been less than loathsome on the subject of “Mamma Mia!” and I felt terrible about it, but I didn’t want to digress into overemphatic apology, and I would stand by my derision of “Mamma Mia!”
It was around the time that Bart died of AIDS that things began to get really bad. That was when my dad had dyed his bangs platinum, which didn’t go over so well with the congregation he then served and would not serve much longer. This was around the time that in a fifth- or sixth grade art class I made a painting of a male seraph sealed in a black box in the center of an otherwise Edenic scene and wrote, in black block letters across the top, Who are you forcing into the closet? A nasty debate ensued over whether it could go up on the middle-school wall. I can only imagine that my dad had gone to see “Angels in America,” talked about it at home. It is, however, also possible that this episode lends credence to his idea that I knew all along. He talked about theater a lot back then and gave me John Simon’s reviews to read when he thought they were particularly savage. They were confusing for a 10-year-old. But I liked waking up in the morning to clippings he’d left under my door. Sometimes he said he’d wished he’d been an actor, had become a rabbi less for the liturgical than for the performative aspects of the job, and because he’d so much liked spending time in Israel and speaking Hebrew. This was also around the time my dad started to seem arbitrary and punitive, when he would come home late and throw all my CDs down the stairs because there was unfolded laundry on the dining room table. I began then to understand there were sealed-off swaths of my dad’s time, and that the patterns of his emotional climate could neither be predicted nor accounted for.
“Bart was the first person I ever told I was gay. That was in 1986. I was taking social-work classes one night a week in New York. It was raining and I was headed downtown in a cab. The cabbie asked if I minded if we picked up a guy standing in the rain. He got in the cab and looked at me and knew right away, and we went out for coffee. He was the first person I could talk to openly.” Again, it’s hard to get his stories straight (again: so to speak). When he told me, at nineteen, that he knew I already knew he might prefer men, the backstory went like this: In the early to mid-’90s he discovered he was bisexual but chose to live with this knowledge and remain in his marriage. In 1997 or 1998, after meeting Brett, he began to envision a different sort of life. It was time for him to do something for himself for a change, put himself first. This meant the license to make up for lost time. There was a lifetime of Palm Springs poolside drag parties to catch up on.
After five or six years he was telling a new version, or hinting at one. There were salacious allusions to the loss of his virginity, wistful ones to his first love. But these comments felt more like boasts than invitations to further inquiry. Under the pretense of closeness it expanded the distance between us. His unexplored asides reminded me of how much I didn’t know, how much had happened that had nothing to do with me. “I had a boyfriend who sold drugs to John Lennon. Someday I’ll tell you about that,” he’d say, and then smile and trail off. These conversations made me angry. No, more than that, they made me feel stupid, gullible, excluded. He’d deceived me, deceived us, and then everything he ever said could only appear in that light. His clumsy attempts to clue us in only ever deepened my sense of deception. The implication of this second story was that he’d been with men before and then decided—in a way that somehow suggested a proleptic sacrifice — to martyr himself with a straight life. Twenty years later he found the strength to live once more for himself. His stories always ended with this new resolve, a moment in which he at last was able to swear off his burdensome obligations.
I told people, when they asked me about my expectations for Rosh Hashanah in Uman, that what I thought was going to happen — what I wanted to best-case-scenario happen — was to hear the third version of his story, the one where Micah and I found out he’d been with men all along. I wanted to hear this in part because I wanted to feel undeceived. Of course, though, there’s no such thing as making yourself undeceived; I suppose I wanted the deception confirmed. Contained. Laid bare. There had always been rumors. My freshman year in high school I heard third-hand from a classmate that my father had told someone he was gay, or maybe had been seen at a gay fundraiser. What was worse than not knowing was that other people did somehow.
“I told Max in 1988. I went to Philadelphia on business and I stopped into his office at the thermocouple plant when I knew I only had 10 minutes to talk. I told him and I walked right out before he could really respond. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t say he knew all along. I think he was stunned.”
“Did Max seem accepting?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t give him a chance to say anything. I told my mother a few months later. By then Bart was taking me out and introducing me to people, showing me around, taking me to the Roxy.”
“So you and Bart were involved, then?” I tried to keep my voice even.
“No! Never. That first time I met him, over coffee, I made a pass, but he looked at me and said I was craaaazy, that he’d have to be crazy, that I had a wife and two little kids at home. He didn’t want to get involved with that. So we were only ever friends, which was better anyway, because what I needed then was a friend I could talk to about things I’d never talked to anybody about.”
“I want to know how you were feeling then. Did you wake up in the morning at home and look around you and think, This is not really my life?” I thought of David Byrne, This is not my beautiful house . . . this is not my beautiful wife.
“No. I wanted that life too. I wanted to be married. I loved you guys, and I loved your mother, and I know you don’t believe me but I still love your mother. I never thought about doing anything differently.”
“But didn’t you feel regrets? Don’t you feel regrets now? Wasn’t it hard to live this double life?” I was baiting him a little. It seemed important to me, had seemed important to me for a long time, to know he regretted everything, he was sorry for everything, he wished it had been otherwise. I do not know how to account for this but there was some part of me that wanted to hear he regretted we’d been born.
“Gay guys compartmentalize. It’s just what you have to do. No, it wasn’t that hard, mostly, and I really have no regrets at all. At that point in my life I had no way to imagine anything else. In 1974 there was simply no openly gay role model in my life that might have shown me a way to live differently. And I never didn’t want to be married. I never didn’t want to have my family. I’d always wanted a family.”
“So, what made you finally stop? What made you decide it was time to come out. Also, wait a second, what’s 1974?”
“I wanted to give your mother her life back.” Micah and I exchanged our long-practiced well-that’s-bullshit look. The one thing we knew we were absolutely not going to talk about was our mom, because whatever he was possibly going to say was going to make us angry. “And I wanted to do something for myself. I wanted to put myself first.”
“But weren’t you already putting yourself first, at least half the time? In your New York life? In whatever was going on in the other compartment? Weren’t you number one there?”
“I guess I wanted to put myself first successfully.”
“And you couldn’t have done that before? And you never regretted not having done that before?”
“No, really, Gideon. I am not lying to you. I couldn’t and didn’t.”
We stood over fragments of Jewish gravestones strewn amid the clumps of dead grass. This was all a little much, the broken gravestones, the pogrom detritus. I was surprised. I’d always imagined this was going to be a conversation about his regrets, about the psychic strain of having committed to a life that didn’t feel like yours, that didn’t feel like what you’d wanted or chosen for yourself. I was prepared to be sympathetic to him — the volatility, the punitive tendencies, the absences — if I could hear from him that he’d been driven out of his mind by the suspicion that his real life was happening elsewhere. If he’d had two lives, I could have been at the very center of one and at the very periphery of the other, and I would have known to take only the first one personally.
But my dad was making it clear that he did not feel as though his real life had been elsewhere. I had suggested it must have been hard to have two lives, and he’d agreed, but he didn’t actually have two lives. Nobody has two lives, just like nobody lives an imitation life. He had one life, a real life, and in that one life he’d told a lot of lies and kept a lot of secrets, and it was never clear if I was — if we were — at the center or on the margin. I’d never wanted to think of him as a liar. I’d never wanted to feel like someone who could be so easily lied to. I’d wanted him to have regretted a lot of things because that might also have meant he hadn’t lied about a lot of things, and if he regretted them, it meant he was acknowledging he hadn’t made the best decisions — even if he continued to think of the consequences of those decisions in terms of his own life, not in terms of ours.
But I could hardly deal with his regret, either. If he was a liar, I was an idiot; but if he was regretful, Micah and I had been burdens. It would be better to admit I’d been deceived, deceived by the person in the world I most wanted to be like — the navigator who knew all the long-cut (mileage-saving, time-adding) hypotenuses on local back roads; the only parent who was willing to drive around on empty unplowed streets after a blizzard to pick up all of our friends on the way to the secret sledding hill he’d found; the former college radio DJ who’d always been so endearingly baffled by the part in “MacArthur Park” (the Donna Summer version, of course) where someone leaves a cake out in the rain; the news junkie who came to dinner with labeled manila folders for each of us, full of relevant and absurd clippings from the five daily newspapers and three weekly magazines he read; the theatergoer who loved the savagery of this John Simon guy and took me to off -off -Broadway productions in dingy Greenwich Village basements when the other suburban parents made the thirty-minute trip into New York once a year to go skating at Rockefeller Center; the rabbi who seemed so proud and calm and authoritative giving demanding High Holiday sermons in which he alluded to the lyrics of Queen and Procol Harum, who made me so proud to be the rabbi’s son, progeny of moral authority, near to a moral center, even if I had so little practical knowledge of Judaism — than to continue to feel as though my existence as the rabbi’s son had thwarted his chance at having the life he deserved. I did not want to have to imagine my childhood and adolescence as an obstacle. I wanted to be able to think of his happy gay life now in terms other than contrastive freedom.
We paused under a lone shade tree and looked at a few sheared-off gravestones with Hebrew names. We picked our way over the uneven ground. Micah had grown completely quiet. He’s got other issues, or maybe he doesn’t have any issues at all. He doesn’t remember as much as I do. He’s much quicker to let go of things.
“But, Dad, wait a second.” I felt as though we’d skipped something here, that whatever had actually been going on — this other life we’d started to talk about — was being acknowledged without being admitted. If he wasn’t going to talk about regret, then we were going to talk about lies.
“You said that Bart was the first person you ever told you were gay. But didn’t you have relationships with men before that?”
“Well, there were always physical things. Bart would take me out and I’d find gratification. After a certain point you just get tired of masturbation, you know? But there was nothing emotional, nothing serious. It was all just physical. After all, don’t forget, I was married.”
I hadn’t forgotten. This felt so unfair. If your dad casually admits to having serially cheated on your mom for your entire childhood with other women, you have the right to be furious. If your dad casually admits to having serially cheated on your mom for your entire childhood with men, you’re supposed to be sympathetic. Or I felt as though I had to be sympathetic. He was such a convincing martyr. I hadn’t been allowed — hadn’t allowed myself — to be furious for so long, because I’d believed the story of sacrifice my dad told. I wanted to feel furious now, but all I could feel was a surprising sense of gratitude. I felt as though these casual admissions had fixed something for me, both in the sense of repair and in the sense of the record I’d come to get, and I was somehow finally understanding where I stood in relation to him.
“No, I mean, that’s interesting,” I said, eager to keep this going, “but that wasn’t quite what I meant. I thought once when you were visiting me in Berlin you made some comment about your first boyfriend, your first love. And a minute ago I thought you said something about 1974.”
“Oh, well, that was before my marriage. That was Rocky.”
My dad stopped and smiled his least melodramatic smile. The imminent unveiling of these memories made the moment seem staged, as if he’d been given a script and asked to play the part of a father overcome with nostalgia. He looked engulfed, totally convincing. I didn’t know if I wanted to hear what was coming. When so much has been kept secret, it’s impossible to know what you do and what you don’t want to know, what ought to be shared and what might best be kept to oneself.
“I was twenty-one and in Jerusalem alone. I’d wanted to go abroad to Russia but it was hard to do that in 1974, and my plans fell through at the last minute. So I scrambled and went to Israel instead. If I’d gone to Russia, I probably would’ve ended up in the CIA or the State Department or something, but as it was I went to Israel and I met Rocky, and I loved Hebrew and I loved Israel and I thought, I’ll just stay here and become a rabbi. Rocky was in his forties. He was an ophthalmologist. He once fitted Golda Meir for contact lenses.” My dad laughed.
“Where did you guys meet?”
“At the Turkish bathhouse, which was the only thing like a gay scene in Jerusalem in the seventies. You could go and, you know, have sex with young Arab boys.” I hadn’t known that. Micah, I am willing to guess, hadn’t known that.
“Rocky had money, and he had this great apartment, an entire floor on the fourth floor of a building on King David Street, right near the YMCA and HUC,” the reform rabbinical seminary where my dad met my mom a year or two later. “He had such nice things, such beautiful furniture, wonderful rugs. Exquisite taste. I was a kid and away from home and he took care of me.” My dad looked so sweet and serene as he remembered this other place, this thing it’s tempting to call a previous life. We all kept stumbling on the shards of pogrom gravestones underfoot.
“When did it end?”
“I started rabbinical school the next year and met your mother and that’s what I wanted then, so I broke it off with Rocky.”
“And there was really no way for you to imagine living a gay life then? No role model?”
“It was unimaginable to me.” I wondered why Rocky himself didn’t count.
“How did he take it when you broke up with him?”
“To be honest with you, I can’t remember. I hadn’t made any promises to him. I was really just a kid. But then” — he paused — “I went and saw him once, years later, maybe 15 years later, I looked him up when I was back in Jerusalem.” We’d gone to Israel as a family in 1988, when I was eight and Micah was five. Micah had been run over in the street by a kid on a bike. “I can’t remember what we said to each other, though.”
“I’m sad that you were never able to tell us these stories. I’m sorry you weren’t able to tell them to us growing up.” I was a little shaky, but it was a lot easier to hear stories that predated my mom than the other ones he’d been telling. We’d gone back past the mikveh and were walking by a low-slung trailer soliciting donations for a “Fond Rising for the Monuments to Victims of Holohost.” I wanted to hear these stories, didn’t want to hear these stories, felt bad about needing to hear them, felt bad about not wanting to hear them, doubted that even this third version of his life was totally honest, angry to have to feel doubt, very sorry for my mom — sorry for my mom both because of what she went through and because it felt like a kind of betrayal to feel so good that talking to him about all this stuff made him feel so good.
It is nothing special that my dad had a life separate from me, or that he kept secrets; this is something all parents do — straight ones, scrupulous ones — and it’s what we grapple with, to varying degrees of success, our whole lives. What’s unusual about my relationship to my dad’s life is not that there were things about it I didn’t know because he was gay. It’s that I was able to indulge the fantasy that he kept secrets only because he was gay, that if he had been able to be openly gay he would’ve shared his entire life with me and I always would have known exactly where I stood. At a certain point other people have to understand that parents keep secrets, that parents close parts of themselves off to their children, because that is what parents do.
What was I getting out of learning this now? In part, I wanted to hear him tell a story about his life in which he claimed some responsibility for the way things had turned out, rather than a story in which he was first in thrall to social mores and later in thrall to biological urges, in which the pretexts had shifted but the irresponsibility had remained. In which he’d never simply said, “I did it because I felt like it.” I wanted him to be a father who provided an example of how to live a life that he could describe as more than just a series of obligations to others, a life in which he did more than just hurt others under the cover of conflicting obligations. We follow St. James to the end of the world, and follow Kōbō Daishi in his path around that horrible island, because we want to associate ourselves with their absurd decisiveness. We want to inherit from them the ability to make our own absurd decisions, even when that means taking the damn train to the karaoke party. But we also want to know that when people get hurt it’s because they had to be hurt. We also want to be reassured that the eight innocent sons of Emon Saburō had to die in order for justice to reign. That the promises he made had to be broken, that he could not possibly have done what he said he was going to do.
This longing for his decisiveness helped explain my preoccupation with the history of his sexuality. There are very few examples in modern adult life of the successful instantaneous transformation, the switch that is flicked to make everything new — the fantasy of the transformative arrival in Santiago — but the example of coming out is one of them. Which I think is why I’d for so long kept such careful tabs on what story he was telling whom when: I wanted to nail down the moment of his coming out, with the hope that if I could pinpoint that transformation I could . . . I don’t know what I could do, I would just feel better, would be able to look to him as a model of resolve. I wanted to identify the moment that he decided to live for himself despite the costs involved. I wanted to know where he stood.
I wanted him to have been able to say, “I did this because I felt like it.” I wanted that example. But I didn’t want him to stop saying, “I did it because I had to.” I wanted that example too. It is an intolerable conflict to want your father to have been resolute and unapologetic and also need him to have not hurt you, to want to take nothing personally and everything personally.
What I was finally coming to understand here was that there was no such moment, no grand gesture of repudiation, no final grace, no scene of coming through the Wall, nothing you can do now that makes all future cost considerations fall away, no way to know what you might regret. There was just a long muddle in which he’d had terribly conflicting desires and had been doing his best to resolve them. I still do not believe he’s ever reckoned with the costs — or perhaps he’s reckoned with the costs he paid, but not the costs borne by others. But in Uman I accepted, in a way that felt new, that he had been in a crisis, and that he had also been doing what he wanted.
I’d drawn exactly the wrong lesson from his surfeit of contradictory stories. I thought it was just his standard obfuscation. But it was just his ongoing and incomplete attempt to tell a story about his life that made everything make sense.
There is no such thing as knowing, once and for all, where you stand with someone. Life has no fixed points. But pilgrimage does; that is the point. And the fixed points of a pilgrimage allow people to exist for each other in motion. There is no such thing as coming out.
In Tokyo, three months later, we’ll be having a great time — a really remarkable time — at Thanksgiving dinner and I’ll ask Brett what he thinks about the idea of coming out.
“I’m 48,” he’ll say, “and I’ve been in the process of coming out for 30 years.”
From “A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, to be published on May 12, 2012, by Riverhead Books. Reprinted by arrangement with the author.
(Credit: Clara via Shutterstock) 
(Credit: Bonita R. Cheshier via Shutterstock) 
Chloë Moretz in "Hick" 
Gideon Lewis-Kraus (Credit: Rose Lichter Marck) 
