Why the Gay Son Gets the Caretaking Burden
My father's last words to me, in the airport, were about someone else's care.
He was in a wheelchair on his way to Portugal with my mother. He could barely breathe. The cancer had caught up with emphysema, one failing system on top of another.
I pushed him through the terminal doors.
And the last real words he said to me, just before they went through security, were "Look after your mom."
I've thought about those words for eighteen years now. He was the one leaving in a wheelchair. Even then it seemed likely he would not be coming home the way he was traveling out.
And his last message to me was still to do something for someone else.
Between his diagnosis and his death he never once asked me to do anything for him, or even asked me what it had been like to be his son.
We barely knew each other before his diagnosis. I would call the house and ask for my mother; he would answer, get through maybe two sentences with me, and hand the phone over. For years this was the entire arc of the relationship.
He would pay for everything and show up for the major holidays.
On paper, he was present at everything I experienced. What we lacked was any shared history of having known each other, any intimacy at all. Our arrangement was quiet, and neither of us ever identified it as one.
When he got sick, the shape of the arrangement morphed without either of us discussing it. I saw him more. I was home more.
We were present in the same rooms more often.
The talking stayed just as sparse. And yet to everyone witnessing it, this proximity seemed to indicate closeness.
I discuss this issue in sessions because the pattern happens with striking regularity among gay men who seem otherwise to have little to do with one another.
One client, leaving home at nineteen with vague excuses of a better job somewhere else, receives a phone call from his sister years later in his late forties. "Diagnosis," she says and then is silent, and he knows what the silence means. "I'll come this weekend," he responds.
And that's it. Logistics speaking for what neither person wants to say out loud.
Another, on a different continent for the better part of a decade, sends cash but never visits. Visiting had never been very welcome at home, and financial assistance has a less complicated status.
Another waits two hours in a hospital corridor before anyone comes to tell him he can go in, because his mother and his sister have quietly settled between themselves who counts as close enough to be let through first.
The underlying assumption in all of these cases, an assumption no one names and everyone acts on, is that if a man does not have a wife or children, he has nothing else he needs to be doing. His weekends are open and his work is flexible. His relationship, if he has one, will absorb the sudden absence without faltering.
None of these propositions has ever been stated as a request. They are treated as inherent truths about that man that simply had not been needed until now.
For gay men there is often a longer narrative running underneath that assumption. He was always the son at family dinners that barely appeared on the collective radar, the partner the family inquired about (or not) with an insincere, neutral tone. It was too convenient not to have him be an accessible figure in the family photo, a son who took up minimal space within the collective narrative.
Peripheral figures are always easy to relocate, and a son who has been on the fringes for thirty years often proves to be the most readily available individual to ferry someone to physical therapy.
In my experience, and I think the experience of a number of my peers, the financial impact of this arrangement, an arrangement often imposed on sons whose families may assume they have too much free time to accommodate familial duties, is never discussed, and it really should be.
An individual entering his fifties may suddenly have his financial life upended, having unexpected expenses such as medical travel to appointments, taking unpaid leave from work, and reassigning his freelance responsibilities to free up time for visits.
All of these actions go unquestioned because the family narrative has already decided what the son (the individual that his parents neither knew intimately nor was ever close with) does not have to do.
It’s not difficult to hand full-time caregiving of an infirm parent to a son his parents only ever saw on holidays.
There’s no need to be outright hostile about it. The assumption handles all the emotional heft of the situation. For me it accumulated as weekends that already belonged to me before I had said yes to anything.
Not all gay men have the luxury of never experiencing this. Some were cut off from their family in their early twenties and hear about their illness from a distant cousin.
When parental caregiving has been a shared responsibility, the labor gets divided more evenly, though the quietly assigned son typically ends up doing more than his more vocal sibling.
If that hits home at all, you also likely know the part that’s hardest to admit.
Attending to an ill parent you were never close to moves the distance elsewhere, leaving it intact. You are both in the room giving medication to the man lying in the bed, but you are still a stranger to him.
You can take him to all of his appointments and still not know his true feelings about you. He may express something at the most inopportune moment as you are trying to park the car, or more commonly, there is nothing he will say, which you learn later was never likely to happen.
What will never be said between son and parent is that the burden of this care was willingly granted, not requested, at the same point in the relationship that a deeper relationship never materialized.
It is bestowed upon you.
In the case of my father’s instruction, he gave it to me without any previous mention of it, on his way out the door for what seemed like the last time. He was right in telling me to look after my mother. I do so now, and will continue to do so.
However, I still think it’s poignant that while he was likely struggling with oxygen, his final words to me concerned the care of another person, and I doubt he was even aware of the irony.
Perhaps it’ll stay with you too.
Until next week,
Gino
Gino Cosme is a gay therapist writing for gay men who are done performing. New essays are always free. Paid subscriptions hold the archive open and keep the work independent.
All examples in this piece are composites drawn from patterns observed across therapeutic work with gay men. Details have been altered to protect confidentiality. No single story represents an individual person.
This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not replace therapy, diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition.
Wow Gino, this is powerful. I know you write to gay men, but that is the power of your writing (and thinking and caring), it speaks beyond your audience. Thank you for making me a little more tuned in to someone else's experience, even when I can find a little of my own inside of it too.
My parents are alive, and I‘m trying to mend our relationship—which has always been strained, especially after I was outed—one tiny step at a time. But the one main thing we have in common is our fathers‘ line, "Look after your mother."
It must have been hell to feel like a stranger with your own father, and for every other gay man who had to care for their family despite feeling like that. I‘m so very sorry, Gino. 🩷