Sounds of Silence

Something has gone very wrong with my hearing.

This is 40-year-old news, but also the current headline since I met with the audiologist today. I have profound hearing loss of all high tones (that’s the worst level of loss, meaning no ability to hear whatsoever), and moderate-to-severe loss of everything else.  Auditory black holes have sucked up those high tones; they are now gone. Padded earmuffs distort the other sounds until they resemble Charlie Brown’s mother: “Wa-wa, wa-waaaa-wa-wa, wa-wa.”   My ability to hear spoken conversation is very poor.

Today the audiologist understood how intensely I strain in conversation; how I hide behind smiles, nods, and expletives; how I often fake it.  Most people don’t understand the potential for isolation, loneliness, and a sort of desperation to be human, to communicate.  But he did.  He got it.

He understood how it’s easy for me to slip into either of two images: 1.) inanimate, present but in a rock-like sense, 2.) bigger-than-life, relying on laughter and over-accentuated gestures and body language to bring life to the emptiness.  He brought up Helen Keller’s quote, one I embraced years ago: “Blindness separates us from things, deafness separates us from people.”  

On the flip side, he also understood how I struggle to manage my current levels of tinnitus - loud referee whistles going off in my head that press me like inner vise grips.  He understood how so much is going on inside my skull, a raucous cacophony of noise that insists on taking the upper hand. How my brain recognizes this as a trigger for constant fight-or-flight responses.  How I can feel torn apart and chewed up by it.  How saying, “Learn to live with it,” isn’t enough.  How stress is everyday.

I appreciated his coming-alongside, his awareness. We talked about technological advances.  He checked my current hearing aids and introduced me to others with newer techno-features selling for the low-low price of $6,000, without insurance coverage.   They could definitely help me.  This was encouraging news, if also expensive. 

But there’s more: another story behind this one.  

Fortunately it is not imperative to hear well to be a whole, vibrant person. Although I experience the world in sensory bits and pieces as we all do, and want to stitch them together to catch a glimpse of more weighty spiritual realities, there’s something profound about confronting an acutely life-changing void such as deafness. 

Over time I’ve come to believe divine mysteries reside in earthly shadows. While the rigors of hearing loss are challenging, and I am extremely grateful for hearing aids, ultimately the bigger victory resides elsewhere.  It comes down to embracing rather than resisting the disappearance of a bodily function, and expecting it to be redeemed (curiously but surely) by the One who makes no mistakes. Then the lost is found; completeness manifests in qualities like humility, diligence, patience, hope, mercy, and compassion that yield satisfaction and new purpose.