Life After Deaf

by Noel Holston

  Once again, you may be wondering how it is that I haven’t drowned myself yet. Well, as I said, I’m a glass half-full kind of guy. I’m hopeful. If, according to the laws of probability, a monkey might hunt-and-peck Hamlet given enough time and typing paper, then one of these days all the sounds in my head might come together and I will have composed something akin to Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.”

  * * *

  I include the piece here in the hope that it illustrates a crucial point that I was learning about coping with the various and sundry manifestations and ramifications of severe hearing loss: if you can’t maintain a sense of humor, you are in deep trouble.

  Chapter 6

  I’d Rather Go Blind

  Being seriously hearing impaired means you have to be on guard constantly not to allow yourself to become isolated, choosing a solitary existence simply because socializing is so much work. It’s okay to grieve your loss, but you can’t allow grieving to sour and settle into depression and retreat.

  Still, with my social circle steadily shrinking and the sounds in my head going cuckoo, I was moving up the Kubler-Ross scale to anger, the whole “Why me?” thing. I felt as though I had trod pretty lightly on this Earth, not causing a lot of harm that I was aware of. I drive an economy car. I compost. I recycle. I send checks regularly to PBS, the Salvation Army, and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. So why was I losing my auditory function while Osama bin Laden could still hear the call to daily prayers? And why, of all senses, my hearing, when music and lively conversation were like air to me?

  I wanted to make a swap-and-trade of my deafness for blindness. If I never saw another sunset, I told myself, I would deal with it. Better that than never again hearing music that moved my feet and touched my soul. Tom Petty once told an interviewer that music was “probably the only real magic” he had ever experienced in life. “It’s pure and it’s real,” he said. “And it moves and it heals and it communicates and does all these incredible things.”1

  Its power had buoyed me, doctored me, transported me, and saved me more times than I could count.

  What if I never again heard Louis Armstrong raise glorious ruckuses with his Hot Fives or Lucinda Williams describe a suicide’s sad funeral in “Pineola”? What if I never again heard my wife?

  I met Marty in March of 1993, when I was starting to dabble in songwriting and decided I needed a collaborator. I thought my lyrics were pretty clever, but my tunes were about as imaginative as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” I made a list of musicians, male and female, whom I had encountered professionally as a journalist in Minneapolis covering arts and entertainment. One after another, I treated them to lunch or brunch, talked tunesmithery with them, and showed them some of my lyrics. Marty was the sixth or seventh musician I dined with. She was the founder of an all-female a cappella group, The Collective, and she’d sent me a shmooze note after I mentioned the band laudably in a Star Tribune feature story I had done the year before about the local cabaret scene.

  I had filed her note away. I wasn’t sure which one of the group members she was. Turned out, she was the little one with the short, short hair. When I arrived at The Egg and I, a popular south Minneapolis breakfast joint, I scanned the room and spotted a woman I was pretty sure was she. Her outfit that frigid Minnesota morning was a silver-gray, one-piece snow suit that made her look as rotund as the Michelin Man. When she saw me standing by the door, she recognized me from my Star Tribune mugshot. She flashed a sunburst smile that could melt a glacier. We ate the “kamikaze pancakes”—lumberjack-worthy buckwheat slabs bulked up with fruit and nuts—and yakked about music and life. She was juggling being a single mom with her band gigs and a day job as house mother at a group home for mentally handicapped/mentally ill adults. I gave her a short stack of my lyrics when we headed for our respective cars.

  “You talk . . . good,” I stammered as we said good-bye.

  “I talk ‘good’?” she laughed. “You call yourself a professional writer?” she jibed in response to my grammatical error.

  I was intrigued. I was also married. Not happily, but married nonetheless. Three years earlier, my wife had told me she wanted out of our marriage of seventeen years. She said she was deeply unhappy and needed to find herself. We had married right after I finished college. She had dropped out of school and was working at Disney World. All our friends were getting hitched. Why not us? It seemed like the normal, proper thing to do. We were young and dumb. We didn’t know our own selves, much less each other. The biggest surprise about our breakup was that it didn’t come sooner.

  Clair and I had the big sit-down with our sons, Damon, sixteen, and Alexander, thirteen, and told them what was coming. Clair planned to get an apartment, finish getting her second college degree, in chemistry, and make a new life. I would take over primary parenting. We found a buyer for the big, money-pit house we’d naively picked out when we moved to Minneapolis in 1986. We purchased a smaller, cheaper house in the same school district so as not to disrupt the boys’ lives any more than we already were.

  As moving day drew near, Clair got cold feet about striking out on her own. She asked if she could move into the new house with me and the boys. Our estrangement didn’t end, however, and the tension between us grew steadily unbearable. I wrote a song about how I was meeting women who interested me, women I would notice but not try for. The opening lyrics:

  I’m my own worst enemy

  I’m gonna be the death of me

  I’m falling in love and I’m not free

  I’ve gotta stop breakin’ my own heart

  That’s the state I was in when I brunched with Marty that morning.

  We began creating music together. We discovered our voices blended nicely (although, in truth, with her three-and-a-half octave range and her flawless ear for harmony, she could make Tom Waits or Mr. Ed sound mellifluous). Our first gig—I had never in my life played a “gig”—was an AIDS-research fundraiser in Minneapolis’s Minnehaha Park. We worked up a short set with some of her musician buddies: the Beatles’ “I’ve Just Seen A Face,” the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love,” a couple of my songs, and one of hers. Clair and our son Xan attended. Marty and I were still in denial.

  One morning soon thereafter, I drove by her house on the way to work and pushed a note and a lyric sheet under her front door. The lyrics were to the aforementioned “I’ve Gotta Stop Breakin’ My Own Heart.” I’d finally polished up the verses but still had only a clunky melody. A day later, when I got to work at the Star Tribune and checked my messages, I heard Marty’s voice, singing the song. The beautiful, wistful melody she’d heard in my words made me gasp.

  Three months later, I moved out of my house. Too uncertain (and broke) to rent an apartment, I became a serial house sitter, moving from colleague’s apartment to vacationing friend’s home. Eventually, Clair told me our original split-up plan was the right idea: she would find an apartment, and I would move back into our house and take care of the boys. Meanwhile, Marty and I were becoming an item, romantically as well as musically.

  I had sung for as long as I could remember—in church choirs, at parties, in a folk group in Minneapolis, and in community theater productions of The Music Man, Working, and other musicals. But this was different. A new world opened up to me, and music became an essential element of my partnership with Marty. I joined her onstage to sing songs of hers, mine, and ours at bars, coffee houses, and clubs all over the Twin Cities—Ball’s, The Fine Line, The Dakota—and later, when I went to work for Newsday, at venues on Long Island. I sang backup on her albums, and one of our songs became a favorite of Great American Songbook expert Jonathan Schwartz, who played Marty regularly on his WNYC radio broadcasts in New York. One Saturday, as I was driving on the LI Expressway, he played an album cut of hers on which she and I traded verses. I was so joyously thunderstruck hearing myself singing on the radio that I almost had a wreck.

  After we moved to Georgia, Marty eventually succeed
ed in getting me to take my abilities more seriously. I started recording a CD of my own using her producer. I had three finished tracks in the can when my hearing collapsed. Singing ceased to be an option. I could still kind of carry a tune if I knew it well and sang all by my lonesome, but pair me with any instrument or another singer, and what came out of my mouth was fit only for empty halls, shower stalls, and dog pounds. Marty and I had often sung “Happy Birthday” duets on the phone to faraway relatives and friends. Now, when I would attempt to join her, she would give me a sad, sympathetic smile and mouth, “No.”

  I wanted sound, musical sound, back in my life. A chorus, a chorus, my kingdom for a chorus!

  How I missed harmony. Much as I enjoyed singing by myself—singing in the shower, singing along with records—there was nothing like joining voices with another person or persons. With Marty and with the old-time music ensemble that I was part of in Minneapolis, I was blessed to occasionally produce blends, chords, that were at once physical and metaphysical, that unleashed swells of positive feelings in my chest, that had a euphoric effect, buoyant, therapeutic, invigorating, holy. Would I ever be so lucky again?

  In the chapter about hearing in her book A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman wrote that “Sounds thicken the sensory stew of our lives, and we depend on them to help us interpret, communicate with and express the world around us.”2

  In Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, cochlear implantee Michael Chorost contends that hearing “constitutes your sense of being of the world, in the thick of it. To see is to observe, but to hear is to be enveloped.”3

  While reading up on famous people who’ve suffered hearing loss—Ludwig von Beethoven, Pete Townsend, Huey Lewis, Rush Limbaugh—I ran across a quote from Helen Keller, the subject of the play and movie The Miracle Worker and the poster woman for triumphing over adversity. She contended that deafness was “a much worse misfortune” than blindness because “it means the loss of the most vital stimulus—the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man.”

  I mentioned this to Marty. Her initial response was to remind me that Ms. Keller “didn’t have the benefit of emails or texting or chat rooms.”

  Then she set me straight with uncharacteristic harshness.

  “Don’t you let me ever hear you say that again,” she said.

  She reminded me that she had been a volunteer reader for the blind back at the time we first met. “You have no idea how completely blindness would transform your life, how much it would limit you,” she said. “Deafness is a frustration. It’s an inconvenience. But you can still drive a car. You can still shop at the grocery store. You have no clue how difficult your life would be. Don’t ever say that.”

  I got her point. And after I thought it through, I really got her point.

  Besides, there are no trades to be had. You deal with the disability you’re dealt or you don’t.

  You have to find the absurdity in your situation, laugh about the hated, crazy-making song that’s playing on your cochlear stereo, and snicker over the misheard phrases. Did you say we should go to “golf shoes”? No, it was Gulf Shores. Do I want to “grind the faraway beads”? No, rye with caraway seeds.

  And you have to not only learn the basics of minimizing your disadvantage, but you also have to put them into practice.

  1 Neil McCormick, “Tom Petty: A rock star for the ages,”

  The Telegraph, June 16, 2012, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/9334051/Tom-Petty-a-rock-star-for-the-ages.html.

  2 Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Random House, 1990), 175.

  3 Michael Chorost, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), 9.

  Chapter 7

  Sitting Here in Limbo

  The longer I struggled with hearing that veered from poor to almost nonexistent, the more I appreciated that deafness is a disability of degree. People who are fully without hearing function, and people who were born deaf or have suffered some sort of catastrophic loss early in life, have a community. Indeed, they are a community. They’re the Deaf with a capital D, a societal subset united by their common disability and the coping mechanisms, notably sign language, that they have developed over decades to address and minimize it.

  Some profoundly deaf people interact regularly with the hearing world. Perhaps the most famous modern example is Marlee Matlin. Not only hasn’t she allowed deafness to deter her from pursuing an acting career, but she has put her lip-reading ability, fluency in sign language, and arduously acquired speaking ability to effective use in film roles that include Children of a Lesser God, for which she won an Academy Award. Other profoundly deaf people, for various reasons, gravitate to other deaf people.

  At the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, where I was a columnist and feature writer from 1986 to 2001, there was a group of typesetters who were profoundly deaf. Encouraging hiring of the deaf was a printer’s union tradition at newspapers in larger cities. The deaf workers maintained their own tables in a back corner of the Star Tribune’s cafeteria. I would often notice a group of them signing animatedly and laughing loudly and wonder what the joke was.

  The significant but not complete hearing loss that I was experiencing—and that is the most common—is not like that. It offers no community. You’re neither here nor there. You’re in no-man’s-land, limbo.

  It’s often like being at a dinner gathering in a foreign country with whose native tongue you are just minimally familiar—only a smattering of words and phrases. You listen with all the concentration you can muster, hoping to catch a complete word you recognize, all the while looking for clues in the speaker’s inflection and body language. You shift your gaze from side to side as if you were watching a tennis match, hoping everyone won’t talk at once and create a conversational sonic boom, hoping the table won’t erupt in laughter.

  It encourages withdrawal, isolation, and that’s a gravitational pull I knew I must resist. It’s exhausting, with most every social occasion a marathon, a gauntlet. But it has to be run. The only option is drop out, retire. If I hadn’t had a wife who has refused to let me go AWOL, I might well have become an auditory hermit.

  One of the insights hearing impairment has given me is how uncomfortable most American men are with physical closeness. I realize now that I was one of them before my hearing loss. I hugged women friends hello and good-bye but shook men friends’ hands—or embraced them so lightly we barely felt the contact and slapped them on the back robustly to prove I was just a hale and hearty fellow. I snickered at Frenchmen and Italians in movies kissing each other’s cheeks and rolled my eyes when World Cup soccer players piled upon one another in orgies of congratulation after a goal.

  Once I understood the importance of getting up close and personal with whoever was speaking to me (the better to minimize words evaporating into the ether), and looking them squarely in the mouth (the better to read their lips), I began to put these revelations into practice. I noticed that many people became uneasy and pulled back if I got closer than two feet from them. The two male colleagues at work that I most needed to interact with invariably took a step back if I leaned in in hopes of understanding their words better. It quickly became routine for us to converse by email, even though we had adjoining offices.

  Friends, even well-meaning, sympathetic ones, drifted away. One of the best guy pals I had made since moving to Athens, a fellow with whom I shared passions for politics, the NBA, and music, initially made a concerted effort to proceed as if nothing had happened. We would get together for coffee or lunch, and he would write out his side of our conversation on a legal pad or text me his answers even though we were three feet apart. As the months wore on, however, our coffee dates got farther and farther apart. Then there were none. I understood. I had become a lot of work, slower on the uptake, and less fun. I couldn’t really blame him.

>   My own sons, especially the older, Damon, already impatient by nature, struggled with the tediousness of communicating with me. At times it must have felt to him as if he were out on the highway and stuck behind an old coot who was driving thirty miles per hour in a fifty-five zone. My younger son, Alexander, handled it somewhat better. I asked Xan why he was more patient. He wrote tellingly on a pad, “Because I’m the father of a three-year old.”

  Photo courtesy of Alice Kirchhoff

  In the other extreme, there were people like my friend Kathleen Ryan. A massage therapist, she’s accustomed to close physical contact. Touch is second nature to her, so much so that she occasionally startles new acquaintances with spontaneous shoulder rubs. She also has hearing issues herself, wearing aids in both ears. She understands that when she’s conversing with me, she needs to speak up, not LOUDLY but clearly, and to use good diction and not put her hand in front of her mouth.

  More Kathleens in my life would have been a great boon, but they weren’t easy to find. Deafness is not only a disability of degree, but it’s also largely an invisible disability. The deaf and hearing impaired don’t bob their heads like Stevie Wonder or wear impenetrably dark sunglasses or tap-test their paths with white canes. Other than looking lost at times or glancing around feverishly trying to compensate for the absence of sound cues with vision, they—we, I should say—look pretty normal. It’s estimated that nearly forty million Americans, kids and teens as well as seniors, have some level of hearing loss. I personally know only a handful of them.

  It’s a disability that can be hidden, at least in the short term, and most hearing-impaired people don’t hesitate to try. To acknowledge deafness can be risky. You may be perceived as older, slower, or dumber. Katherine Bouton, author of Shouting Won’t Help: Why I—and 50 Million Other Americans—Can’t Hear You, actually gave up her job as an editor at the New York Times because she couldn’t bring herself to explain to management that she had not become incompetent or antisocial, just seriously hearing impaired.4