The Sounds of Silence

When the kids are gone, and you've lost your hearing, what remains?

Orland, ME, 2019 ©Deborah Copaken

Editor’s note: I am working on a much longer story about osteoporosis and its various treatment options, both for this publication and on assignment for a newspaper. But I’m still doing more research and speaking to more doctors, as this is personal: I have to decide for myself which drugs to take (or not.) And if I, as someone who writes about women’s health, find this decision totally confusing, and my treatment options less-than-optimal/lacking in clarity, I imagine those of you dealing with osteoporosis might be confused, too. Anyway, stay tuned. In the meantime, here are some recent thoughts on the loss of sound.

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The tap-tap of these words is the only noise piercing the silence on my first official morning of empty nesting after a week of three college drop-offs: my youngest last Monday; my partner’s oldest on Wednesday; his younger son’s on Friday. Plus a Little Feat show on Tuesday and several hours at the US Open on Thursday thrown in for good measure because why not stuff an already packed week with more mirth and mayhem?

What strikes me most about this morning, more than anything else after all the pre-cried tears, the cheering welcome squads, the endless honk-honk of traffic, the bluesy bum-ditty-bum-ditty-bum of Bill Payne’s chords, and the thwack of tennis ball striking court, is the deafening sound of this silence. My son’s constant guitar playing? Gone. My partner’s son’s drumming? Gone. His other son’s late-night movie watching and record spinning? Gone gone gone.

Do I feel more prepared for this silence, having spent so many post-marital years on my own before losing my hearing to Covid? Yes. I think so. This may be one of the best advantages of having been both a single parent and a single parent who went deaf: I’m used to managing the emotional costs and cherishing the unexpected benefits of silence.

Some context: it’s been a little over two years since I lost my hearing, and it’s progressively if slowly been getting worse. These days, without hearing aids, I hear, well, not exactly nothing but close to it. Human voices are muffled and unintelligible, like adults speaking in a Charlie Brown cartoon but barely faint enough to register as human sound. Birdsong is completely gone. Alarm clocks? Forget it. I had to find one that wakes me up with bright light instead. The sound of water? Without my hearing aids, brooks don’t babble, waves don’t crash, and I haven’t heard the sprinkle of a shower head spray hitting bathroom tile since the day that absence of sound informed me of my sudden-onset deafness, because you can’t wear hearing aids in the shower. And that little high-pitched melody that the washing machine used to play when it was done with a load of laundry? That has become a faint memory. To me, at least, even with my hearing aids in place. My partner not only still hears it perfectly, he’ll often sing along to its inane melody both to alert me to the load’s completion and to make me laugh. He has become, in essence—among so many other critical things, including a bottomless well of love, my own private comedy show, and a daily empathic witness to my life—my ears.

Before I lost my hearing, whenever anyone asked, “Would you rather be deaf or blind?” I would always answer deaf with caveat: “Deaf, but I’d really miss music”; or “Deaf, but only if everyone else around me could speak sign language, so I could still communicate”; or “Deaf, but, ugh, birds. That would really suck not to hear birds.”

Now that I’ve actually lost the ability to hear music, conversation, or birdsong without hearing aids, all three of those caveats still ring true. Just not in the ways I imagined.

Music, those of us with late onset deafness learn, is not just individual notes strung together. For the listener, it’s a full-body, multi-layered experience I remember with fondness but can no longer access firsthand in the same way. Yes, with hearing aids, I can hear individual notes again, but they become flattened, one-dimensional, and AM-radio tinny when processed through the hearing aids. “Reckoner” by Radiohead, heretofore one of my all time favorite pieces of music, is now unlistenable through my hearing aids, as it has lost all of its gorgeous, contrapuntal layers. Same with many of the songs by the Rolling Stones or any song with lots of cymbals or high frequency notes. But if I remove my hearing aids and crank up the volume on my speakers or, better yet, attend a live concert, I can “listen” to anything: I actually feel the music vibrating and pulsing through me in ways that allow me to experience music in a different way. Not better, not worse, just different.

Last week, for example, when my partner took me to see Little Feat—his gift for my having sent my last kid off to college, after so many years of single parenting—I took out my hearing aids as usual and settled in with the rest of the band’s graying fans to be transported back to what remains, in my mind, rock and roll’s peak era: the mid-70s. No, I could not hear the crisp outlines of the lyrics themselves, but that’s okay, I know most of them by heart. Instead, I could really focus on and feel the emotions of each song. “Willin’,” I realized, hearing it thus, is not just a song about a lonesome trucker just trying to get by as the miles accumulate. (Um, feel ya, dude.) In a theater packed full of grateful-to-still-be-alive-and-willin’ oldsters, on a random Tuesday night in Patchogue, it was full-on religious experience. Whether or not I could actually hear the actual syllables of each word.

As for spoken language, I’m not at the point at which I need to use sign language—yet—but I do wish ASL were a required part of our country’s school curriculum, so that it would simply be second nature to all of us. Imagine all of us, whether deaf or hearing, being able to speak over the din in a noisy restaurant using only our hands. Meanwhile, communicating in a restaurant is so hard for me these days, if I’m forced to do so—because that’s what so many plans with friends entail—I will try to suggest a restaurant with a good outdoor space or smaller indoor ones with lower ceilings. And forget bars. Never mind that I don’t drink. Trying to have a conversation in a bar when you wear hearing aids is an exercise in futility.

Another issue I hadn’t even considered until I went deaf? Whether or not to wear hearing aids while having sex. If I don’t wear them, then I don’t have to worry about the screech of feedback every time my ear touches a pillow or my love cups my face with his hands. But not wearing them also means I can’t hear his sweet nothings or anything else for that matter. Turns out, aural sex—the loving words we exchange and the sounds we make both in the heat of passion and postcoitally—can be just as important as its homonym, enhancing couples’ enjoyment of their physical relations. I know this is true for me. But I didn’t realize how important pillow talk was until I could no longer hear it and had to come up with a solution: I either choose to keep both hearing aids in my ears during sex and try to avoid the inevitable screech of feedback or, if the two of us are chatting afterwards, face-to-face on our pillows, I’ll take out one hearing aid—the one that touches the pillow—and hope the sound out of the other can help me get through.

Again, it’s all a matter of adaptation to a new reality. I used to be able to hear. Now I no longer can. And in the grand scheme of things, while, yes, it’s annoying and frustrating, and I wish wish wish it hadn’t happened, in the end, it’s no big deal. No one died. I’m not in any physical pain. It’s just an absence. And if I reframe that absence as a presence—a hurdle jumped, a hardship overcome, an ability I used to take for granted which I can now cherish when I do have it, even if it’s my own tinny, hearing-aid abetted version thereof—I’m able not only to live with it but to see it as a new strength.

Having a disability, in other words, forces one to be adaptable to change: something all of us must go through, again and again, in various degrees over the course of our lives until that one big change about which we can do nothing: our own demise. Until then, either adaptation seems insurmountable and makes us feel weak (or hopeless or sad or angry or lesser than), or we can use it as our superpower. I’ve witnessed and experienced both versions. So, most likely, have you. But these days, whenever possible, I deliberately choose to reframe any loss as a new gain, hard as it sometimes might feel to adapt not only with acceptance of my new reality but also with some tiny shreds of gratitude for both the challenges and advantages change imposes.

But now let’s talk about birdsong, because it’s apt for everyone missing their adult children these days or preparing them to fly from the nest. Not being woken by birdsong at dawn at first felt tragic when I realized it was gone forever. Then I visited my friend Kyle in Fire Island, a few months after I went deaf. Sunday morning I awoke fresh and restored while everyone else in that house looked exhausted and even haunted, with dark circles under their eyes. “Oh my god,” said Kyle, “I’m so sorry about the noise last night.”

“Noise? What noise?”

Apparently, the next door neighbors’ kids had had a raucous and drunken party until 5 am, blasting loud music and squealing at peak volume all night just yards from the screened in window of the guest room I was sharing with my son. “How could you not hear that party, Mom?” he said. “It was insane.”

But I hadn’t heard any of it. Not one peep.

I think about that morning all the time now, whenever I face some new challenge or transition, like my last child leaving for college. Yes, three decades of day-to-day parenting are now over, just like my hearing and youth are both gone. But there are advantages to a quiet morning. To silence in general. Like having the noise-free space to get my thoughts in order and to write them down. Like having more time to spend with my partner and feel my face cupped in his large hands, which now know to avoid the ear area to keep hearing aid feedback to a minimum. Like appreciating everything I still do have and all the many gifts of life yet to come.

It’s just like the words of “Willin’” that were playing, as my partner and I stood in the back of the theater the day after I dropped off my son. Why were we standing in the back of the theater instead of sitting in our orchestra seats much closer to the stage? Because we were tired, and the concert had run long, and his eldest had to be dropped off at college the next morning, and we’d left our seats to face the two-hour drive home from Patchogue back to Brooklyn. But then, while exploring the wares at the merch table on our way out, we suddenly heard the first notes of the song. And by we, I mean my partner heard the first notes of the song—my hearing aids were still in my purse at that point—and he told me they were playing it, and without any discussion about choosing to stay or not, the two of us both sprinted back into the theater to experience the song firsthand, each in our own way: him as a hearing person, me as a deaf one. And as the band crooned words I couldn’t really hear but have been tattooed in my brain since the mid-seventies, and my partner grabbed me to dance cheek-to-cheek in the back of that theater—something we wouldn’t have been able to do, say, had we stayed in our seats—I finally “heard” those lyrics, too, in a new way: “Well, I've been kicked by the wind, robbed by the sleet/Had my head stoved in, but I'm still on my feet/And I'm still willin'.”