Valerie Schultz: I'm all ears, but age is a powerful sound barrier
| Thursday, Mar 12 2009 05:13 PM
Last Updated Wednesday, Mar 25 2009 06:16 PM
My grandmother, God rest her, was hard-of-hearing, which is the adjective we use when we want to convey politely that someone can’t hear a blessed thing.
To her credit, she was proactive in combating her hearing loss. She wore a hearing aid and was known on occasion to ask us grandkids to shout into her ear. She used a plug-in earpiece to pipe the TV volume directly into her head, her favorite shows being “Jeopardy!” (the old one) and live broadcasts of the New York Yankees. She used to say with admiration that my mother, her daughter, could “hear the grass grow,” which is not a quality an adolescent necessarily wants in a mother.
I’m afraid that as I age, I am taking after my grandmother more than my mother, because I find there are more and more times when I don’t quite catch what another person says. More and more times when I have to say, “Sorry?” or “What’s that?” More and more times when I don’t realize I am being spoken to at all. All of the things that old people complain about are things that bother me: background noise. Lost high notes. Two sounds at once that I used to be able to distinguish.
Thoughtless people who mumble.
Owning up to the gradual hearing loss that accompanies middle age made me remember playing the “What would you rather?” game when I was a kid. It was like playing only the ‘Truth’ part of “Truth or Dare.” If you had to choose, we would ask each other, would you rather live with your mom or your dad? What would you rather be, a person with no arms or no legs? A rich, unhappy person or a poor, happy person? Blind or deaf? In the game, you had to pick. You could not plead the Fifth or construct an elaborate way out of either choice.
But the last question seemed easy to me, with “deaf” being my preference. Blindness frightened me; deafness seemed a friendlier fate. I thought I would rather see where I was going than hear where I was going. I also thought it would be lovely to speak sign language with dancing hands.
Now that I am older, I know that the choice is not simple. I try to imagine a world in which I do not hear the sounds of my daughters’ voices, rain on the roof, Beethoven’s 7th (ironically, music by a deaf composer). Although I am nearsighted and sometimes oblivious, I know I don’t want either sense, sight or hearing, ever to fail. So I wear my glasses, and I slowly, subtly, take up amateur lip reading. Really: I find myself focusing on people’s mouths so I don’t have to ask them to repeat themselves. But I am also acquiring the unfortunate habit of guessing at what people are saying. This is a bad tactic, as I can sometimes sense by the reaction to my reply that I have guessed wrong, and have responded inappropriately, or at least not in the anticipated way.
In his novel “Deaf Sentence,” in which the main character is a retired professor going deaf, David Lodge argues the case that if blindness is tragedy, then deafness is comedy. The eyes, he points out, are “windows to the soul,” while the ears are merely “funny-looking.” If your eyesight goes, your disability is obvious, and people feel compassion for you. If your hearing goes, people don’t realize your situation until they are irritated with you.
I can see why people who lose their hearing might get depressed, because the sense of isolation brought on by living in a muffled, indecipherable, or soundless world must be daunting. I remember my grandmother’s eyes glazing over at family events because she couldn’t filter and follow the many threads of conversations going on around her. I am grateful that I am nowhere near there yet. My hearing loss is in its infancy: I’m just afraid that it will grow up quickly. I add it to the list of various gravitational pulls, quiet deterioration, and other indignities of aging. Mortality, I am learning, is not for the faint-hearted. Maybe it’s easier if you don’t hear it coming.
— These are Valerie Schultz's opinions and not necessarily the Californian's.
