Several weeks ago, I got a nice little gift from Mother Nature. I went to bed hearing everything and woke up stone, cold deaf. I have had fairly bad hearing, most of my life. I remember some audiologist telling me as a young man that I had lost 45% of the hearing in my left ear. He blamed it on loud farm equipment, but other doctors since have told me he was nuts. Over the years, it has become clear that the plight of bad hearing does not improve with age, so I have felt myself slipping into the depressing, inevitable ranks of the elderly hard-of-hearing, for a while. All that being said, I promise there is nothing quite so shocking as going to bed hearing normally and waking up in total silence.
After initial panic subsided and a semblance of cogent thought returned, I considered the possibility that the cold I was fighting might be at fault and I should give it a day or two. Within a couple of days, a bit of the hearing actually did return, which gave me hope, but it quickly leveled off at a point significantly lower than it had been. I finally went to my general practitioner and he seemed sure it was a common problem with misbehaving Eustachian tubes. A month of medication would return me to the world of hearing. After a month with no change, the doctor decided it would make more sense if he changed, so he dropped the Eustachian tube idea and referred me to a specialist, who performed her medical magic and pronounced me partially, permanently, progressively deaf, due to nerve damage and poorer to the tune of $150, as she handed me a bill. At some future point, she said, the only hope of hearing anything would be a cochlear implant. Charming. She ended our meeting by smilingly counseling me that if I decided to get roaring drunk that night, it would be best if I didn’t drive. I suppose that advice could be said to be worth $150.
I have been trying to be logical and realistic with this new event in my life, but I’m running head to head into some troubling realizations. Like this one. People feel sorry for folks who can’t see and they make fun of folks who can’t hear. Who the hell decided that would be a good idea? If people saw someone with dark glasses and a white cane step off a curb in front of a speeding police car, the natural tendency would be to put out an arm and stop him. If those same people saw someone wearing hearing aids step off a curb and narrowly miss a police car with wailing siren, approaching from the rear, the tendency would be to laugh. Where is the logic?
I have tried several times to navigate a party or dinner with friends, as they mingle throughout the room, entering or leaving an ongoing conversation, at will. The problem is, the background noise in the room makes it impossible for me to understand anything that is being said to me. I can’t spend the evening saying “what?” nine thousand times, so I fake it with careful, uninterrupted eye contact and noncommittal comments like, “Uh-huh, yeah, really?” You get pretty good at making people think you actually know what they are saying, even though you don’t have a clue. At a recent dinner, I had a ten minute conversation with a good friend and he seemed really pleased with the things we discussed. All I took away from the conversation was that it had something to do with the state of business in America today. I also find that these events with a lot of social din make my mind race at hyper speed with the task of mentally completing a sentence that seemed to me to be nine or ten mumbled syllables with one clearly stated word, like “shrimp”. I have a max of 3-4 seconds to run the sentence in my mind to decide if the person said, “That tyke is a shrimp.” Or did he say, “He hikes like a shrimp.” Or maybe it was, “Do you like shrimp?” I can take a stab at it and either keep the conversation going or end up making a fool of myself. The chances are 50/50 that I will end up getting laughed at. Most of this, I can handle with a degree of maturity, but I get frustrated to the point of smoldering anger when people begin to imply that I’m just not trying. I have actually had people get irritated with me because they had to go through the inconvenience of repeating something. On occasion, they have actually said, “Oh, never mind” and walked away. Nobody would ever consider treating a blind person with such a glaring lack of regard. Interesting.
And as long as I’m whining about the whole thing, there is something else. As if it isn’t enough to be volume challenged, it turns out that a hearing loss actually distorts some sounds, which can be a huge problem. I have enjoyed playing the piano since I was a child. (Well, that’s actually a lie. I hated it, when I was a child, but I enjoyed it later). Recently, I spent a ton of time and effort learning to play Rhapsodie No. 2 (G minor) Op.79 by Brahms, which is a total show-off piece and really difficult. I pretty much had it nailed and I thought I sounded close to the recording, when all this happened. Now, when I play it, I hear musical non sequitur. It makes no sense in my brain and the joy of playing something like that is gone. I may sell the instrument. I can’t even listen to music anymore. Last week, I won two expensive tickets to see Jimmy Buffett in person, an artist I have wanted to see for years. The energy of the concert was amazing and I knew almost all his music by heart, but it sounded all distorted and wrong. It was just a mishmash of sound in my head and it was a depressing event. My iPod is now a paper weight on my desk.
So the tendency for people who have lost hearing is to shrink socially. It is inevitable. I can’t go to parties because I can’t converse with other guests. I can’t go to concerts because they end up all scrambled in my brain. So I don’t. Damn shame, really, but there you are. People who are losing their hearing are inevitably forced to withdraw from some societal venues and activities.
I guess the case could be made that there are notable people in history, as well as contemporary society, who have not agreed to “shrink socially” and have done just fine, even with deafness. Lance Allred couldn’t hear when he played in the NBA and Louise Fletcher was partially deaf, when she won an Academy Award for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Lou Ferrigno says he used to be teased by his peers for not being able to hear – evidently the only part of his body that doesn’t function perfectly and Rob Lowe is deaf in his right ear. Halle Berry is beautiful to look at, including her ears, but one of them doesn’t really work – purely ornamental. Francisco Goya was deaf, but nobody cared, because he could paint really, really well. And of course, there is the story of Ludwig van Beethoven.
He was a giant among history’s composers, creating among many other works, a total of nine symphonies that have all grown in stature, with the passage of time. These great works were introduced to mankind between 1799 and 1824. This accomplishment becomes even more astounding when we consider that he wrote to a friend in 1801, complaining of his loss of hearing. Seven of his symphonies were creations enjoyed by uncountable millions but creations that he never got to hear. On October 6, 1802, during a period of self-isolation in his childhood home at Heiligenstadt, he wrote a letter to his brothers Carl and Johan, explaining his loss of hearing and lamenting the fact that he was so isolated by it. He said, “I must live almost alone, like one who has been banished. I can mix with society only as much as true necessity demands. If I approach near to people a hot terror seizes upon me, and I fear being exposed to the danger that my condition might be noticed.” You see? I have good role models, who have taught me to “fake it” at parties. He went on in the letter to tell his brothers that he would consider ending his existence, but he was driven on by his art, feeling that he still had many musical things to say. The letter was found after his death and has become known to historians as The Heiligenstadt Testament. It is a beautiful, poignant, compelling piece of writing.
Great art has treated the concept of loss of sight lovingly, throughout history. Great plays, enduring books, poetry and even movies have dealt sympathetically and dramatically with sightless heroes and heroines. Yet, even with the loss of inherent connection to others in society, the lack of beautiful music in your daily life, even the sound of a bird in a nearby tree or a bleating spring lamb in a field, deafness is only a thing for laughter. Deafness is not poetic.