On Growing Deaf
Photo by Sharon Waldron on Unsplash
I
In my mother’s final years,
deafness crept up on her,
inch by insistent inch.
I did what any daughter would do,
took her to be fitted for hearing aids,
repeated,
repeated,
and repeated again,
pretended away exasperation.
Now that my voice
can no longer reach her,
however loudly I call,
I remember . . .
friends and family gathered
around my dining room table.
Conversation sparking.
Stories
bouncing
from one
to another
to another.
And my mother,
grown small in her chair,
emerging suddenly to ask,
“What did you say?”
She peered at us,
expectant,
hopeful.
All conversation stops.
Everyone turns to examine
this quiet old woman as though
discovering her
for the first time.
She gazes back at us,
still waiting.
So we try to explain.
Of course we try.
It’s not easy, though,
to make sense
out of the middle
of a story,
a story that has wound
and wound
its way
around
the table.
Finally, someone says,
kindly, of course,
“It’s not important, Grandma.”
And she nods, agreeing.
It is not,
indeed,
important.
Today I know what I did not then.
It is the unimportant words,
the ones not,
indeed,
worth repeating,
that keep us tethered to the Earth . . .
and to one another.
II
My small dog,
always responsive,
obedient,
begins to ignore us.
At first, we ask one another,
“Doesn’t Dawn hear?”
And then, one sudden day, we know.
This young, vibrant dog,
deaf as a stone,
deaf as a doorknob,
deaf as any old deaf dog.
I can slam a door,
call her name,
walk up behind her on a hardwood floor
and she jumps when I touch her.
She grows bewildered,
follows me around the house,
watches my face for signals,
sleeps more deeply.
She has long been accustomed
to lying beneath my desk
while I work,
waking to follow me
when I leave.
Now, unless I remember to lean down
to flap a silken ear,
she wakes to find herself
in an empty room,
then comes running
down the stairs,
peering this way and that,
licking her nose,
panic
in her
round
brown
eyes.
Remembering to wake her, though,
is a bit of a nuisance—
exactly the way deaf old women
are a bit of a nuisance—
and so again and again,
I find my little dog
scurrying down the stairs,
panicked
and
searching.
Until, at last,
she finds her own solution.
When she wakes beneath my desk
to find me gone,
she makes her way across the hall
to my bedroom,
jumps up onto the bed,
faces the far wall,
and says,
in the deepest voice
a small dog can command,
“Woof!”
Then she waits.
If nothing happens,
she says it again.
“Woof!”
And again.
Each time I hear her call,
I climb the stairs,
reach across the bed,
stroke her into awareness.
Then lead her back
to the inhabited world.
“She’s training you, you know,”
my partner reminds me.
“I know,” I say.
And once more,
I climb the stairs
to retrieve
my dear
deaf
dog.
III
A walk with my tiny granddaughter
on a boardwalk
through a park wetland.
“Oh!” she cries,
stopping, smiling, tipping her head.
“Crickets!”
I pause to listen, too.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
She’s so young, I say to myself.
Does she even know what crickets are?
Later we stop, stand,
surrounded by thickly growing plants,
by dark water,
and
to my surprise,
a chorus of crickets!
They sing of loss.
IV
A trip with my daughter
to visit a long-ago exchange student.
These two daughters hover
lovingly.
“Here, Mom,” they say,
as we set out on an excursion by car,
“you sit in front.”
But knowing they have
much to say to
one another,
I settle into the back instead.
“It’s better this way,”
I assure them.
And it is,
except that
from my self-imposed exile
their voices float back to me
like burbling water.
“Where are we?”
I find myself asking.
“What are we doing now?”
“What did you say?”
And these two loved women,
these two women who love me,
answer slowly,
distinctly,
and with utter,
utter
patience.
“I HEAR YOU! I HEAR YOU!”
I want to shout.
Except,
of course,
I know
I don’t
hear
at
all.
MDB
