For years, my sister chided me that I was missing half of what she said. But I had been trying to tune out my sister’s chidings for six decades, so I assumed my brain had fallen into the habit of selectively muting her.
Then my boyfriend told me to get my hearing checked. He appreciated that I allowed him to play his music louder than his previous girlfriends. But I didn’t seem to hear what he was saying unless he spoke to me face-to-face.
“That’s right!” I said. “You call me from the other room! Or talk when I have my back turned! If you would speak to me face-to-face, which is the polite thing to do, I would hear everything you said just fine.”
When I drove with my son, I grew so frustrated by my inability to make out what he said that I reached for the radio as if to turn up his volume. But everyone knew my son was a gentle soul who didn’t want to disturb the air with too many sound waves.
In fact, his entire generation spoke too softly! Students these days were so afraid of offending their classmates, they barely whispered. Thank goodness I was able to retire before the pandemic hit; if everyone’s mouths had been muffled by masks, I would have spent the entire semester asking them to repeat their comments.
But my sister kept bugging me to get my hearing checked. And one of my closest friends suggested she might have a point. Finally, I made an appointment with an ENT, who, despite his Harvard diploma, employed equipment that would have been more appropriate to Moe or Groucho.
“Bong!” He struck a tuning fork against his knee, then placed it against my forehead. When he set earphones on my ears and asked me to hold up a hand to indicate if I heard a sound, I felt I had traveled back in time to the early 1960s, when every kid in elementary school was sent to the nurse to be tested with this same technology.
Still, the results of the exam were hard to shrug off. Faking deafness isn’t difficult: you simply pretend you aren’t hearing the beeps and boops. But it is harder to pretend to hear a beep or boop if you haven’t heard one.
My hearing loss was only “moderate.” And audiologists—unlike oncologists or cardiologists—leave the decision as to whether to proceed with treatment up to you. I could go to Costco and pick out some hearing aids. Or I could keep muddling along as I’d been muddling. Even a moderate loss of hearing might increase my likelihood of dementia, the doctor warned. But I told myself that I could keep my mind sharp playing Wordle. I had broken up with that boyfriend who kept talking behind my back, so whom did I need to hear? I could turn up the volume on my TV to 50 or squint to make out the captions. I could use the speaker on my cellphone, stare intently at the lips of whomever I was dating, and continue to badger my son to speak more assertively.
I might have continued to dwell in this LaLa land forever if I hadn’t been asked to return to teach. Reluctantly, I made an appointment with the hearing tech at Costco. (Costco? Had my Ivy League ENT actually recommended that I attend to my medical needs at Costco?) Still, I couldn’t help but be impressed by the young technician, who led me inside her soundproof booth and fitted me with the slimmest, sleekest hearing aids you could imagine.
“So?” she said. “What do you think?”
I asked her to please stop shouting.
Shouting? She was speaking at exactly the same volume she had been speaking at before she slipped in the hearing aids. Nor was I sitting in the soundproof booth I imagined I’d been sitting in. The cubicle didn’t even have a ceiling—how could I have thought it soundproof?
Go ahead, the technician urged. Stroll around the store and try them out.
Stepping outside, I was assaulted by the squeaks and squeals of the shoppers’ carts, the screams of the children begging to be bought sacks of candy, their parents’ excruciatingly loud denials, arguments between husbands and wives in every language known to humankind. The clamor was so overwhelming I covered my ears with my hands, hurried back to the booth, and begged the technician to take out the hearing aids. Then I dashed from the store, grateful to retreat to a world as blissfully silent as if everything had been swathed in bubble wrap.
Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what else I might be missing. Why did the very idea of hearing aids so frighten and repulse me? I had been wearing glasses since second grade and, except for the times they fogged up and blinded me, I was grateful they helped me see. I’d always found sign language to be an elegant way to communicate, so mesmerizing I lost track of what the speaker was saying and became transfixed by the person signing.
True, hearing aids used to be huge and hideous. When my grandmother’s sister, Tante Shaynsha, came to visit, the whistling from her monstrous devices drove us up the wall. My mother needed to return to her audiologist every other day to get her own hearing aids adjusted, not to mention she kept losing the tiny batteries. But the hearing aids the technician fitted in my ears at Costco were far more stylish than the Frankensteinian white stalks that protruded from the heads of nearly every young person I passed on the sidewalk. The receivers connected to my cellphone via Bluetooth, were easily rechargeable, and allowed me to listen to music or books on tape with amazing clarity. So why was I so adamant I didn’t need or want them?
The truth was, I couldn’t accept being old. I had spent a lifetime learning to accept every facet of my appearance, my foibles, my quirks, my strengths and weaknesses. What I could not accept was that I was getting older. Weaker. Slower. More tired. Worse, at any moment, I might, like so many friends and relatives, cease to exist. Never again hear, see, feel, touch, or smell a single thing, ever again, for all eternity.
On the other hand, for however many days or weeks or months I had left, I might as well hear what the people I loved were saying.
Humbly, I returned to Costco. Then I tried to adjust to how noisy my apartment suddenly sounded. How had I never noticed the clomp and clatter of my upstairs neighbors? Or the constant whoosh of the traffic on the street beneath? The heater roared. The dishwasher gushed and gargled. The air conditioner hummed. The “bing” when my toast was toasted reverberated like a gong. On my daily walk along the Charles, the birds shrieked in such a terrifying way that I ducked and spun as if I were being attacked by snipers.
But at least I was hearing those birds—and seeing them. My daily walks now had a soundtrack—the whiffle and swish of water as it rippled amid the rocks, the flutter and buzz of hummingbirds. Chipmunks rustled in the leaves to either side of the path. Gravel crunched beneath my sneakers. When I played tennis, I could hear the ping of the ball against my opponent’s racquet, the whine of the children’s swings in the nearby park. No longer did I need to stare at my companions’ lips when we went out to dinner, or squawk “What? What?” when I missed the most crucial part of our conversation.
Now, I look forward to hearing my students’ comments. In fact, I worry they won’t be able to hear each other. Studies show that more than a billion young people, ages 12 to 34, are at risk of losing their hearing due to listening to music too loudly on their earbuds. One day soon, they might be visiting Costco for their own newly fashionable, high-tech hearing aids.
In the meantime, I console myself that I am in less danger of getting run over by a car or e-bike now that I hear them coming. And who knows but I might make out the footsteps of Death himself as he tries to sneak up on me and so provide myself with the chance to outsmart or outrun him.
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