Sometime during the first week of my recovery, my brother and sister came into my room. They sat on the end of my bed and talked with me for a long time. They told me how, during my darkest nights, when things looked very grim, they had come into my room and sat on my bed, just as they were doing now. They both had worried and cried and prayed while I lay in the hospital, overtaken by that mysterious illness.
They spoke of their fear of losing me to death, and how they had made a promise that they would never change a thing in my room if I died. They would leave it exactly the way it was, everything untouched. My little sister said she would dust things everyday, but nothing would move. Even my socks and shoes that lay strewn across the floor would remain just where they were. I had to giggle, but they were dead serious.
Then my sister said with a sigh of relief, “Sissy, I’m glad you’re home, ’cause I don’t think I could’ve kept sleeping in our room if you had died!” We hugged, half laughing and half crying, then held hands quietly for a while.
My siblings continued to tell me how it had been for them. They had not been able to see me much while I was in the hospital. They were often in the waiting rooms or left at home. They would only catch bits and pieces of what was going on. They had strange imaginings about what I looked like after hearing how my eyes had bled and my eyelids had split open from the backed up fluid in my body. They wanted me to know that even if they could not see me as much as they wanted to, that they had been praying often, and that they were so glad God had answered their prayers.
They also described what it was like having our birth father staying under the same roof with our step-dad, Roger. When he came down to see me in the hospital, Daddy had no place to stay and no car to drive himself around. Grammie Lee had brought him from Stockton and he decided to hang around after she had left.
I don’t know how she did it, but Mama talked Roger into letting Daddy stay there. He would sleep in my bed and drive my Volkswagon Bug for a few days. Roger wasn’t too happy about my dad staying under his roof or getting a free ride, and he made sure to let people know with daily criticism and anger, but for some reason, he still let him stay. It was hard for my siblings to hear the harsh words said about my father. We all loved him in spite of his addiction. But they knew he was not always in his right mind when he was drinking. The only way daddy knew how to cope with my life-threatening illness, the only way he could handle sleeping in the same house with his ex-wife and her new husband, the only way he knew how to see his children again after 7 years, the only way to numb the pain of shame and grief — was to do it under the bottle.
It was sad to hear how things were for them, and I began to understand how deeply my illness touched people in many different ways.
My brother and sister patiently repeated themselves endlessly in an effort to make sure I was following their conversation. As I struggled to listen to what they were saying, I noticed I began to listen differently than before. I found myself paying more attention to their bodies, faces and gestures, rather than to their words. Those non-verbal mechanisms gave me more clues to support the context of what they were saying. The oxymoron is that after becoming deaf, I was actually learning to “listen” more deeply. I was listening with the ear of my heart.
There was a transformation happening as my siblings told their tales. It became clear to me that they really needed to tell their story. They were debriefing, tossing away all the anguish and fear that occupied their young hearts and minds over the last few weeks. Now that I was home and on the mend, they needed closure. By telling their stories, they sped through their grieving process and were ready to get on with their normal lives once again.
As the days passed, more and more family members and friends would need to tell me their stories too. Everyone needed closure. Even though I wasn’t always able to understand everything that was said, I listened with my heart. I understood when people had to talk about their experience of my illness. They needed to wrap it up nicely and put it away.
I began to think they were on to something. Perhaps by telling my story, I could help myself speed through my own grief and chaos as well. The problem was, I didn’t know everything about my story yet. While I was the main character, I wasn’t always conscious of what was happening to me.
And so it began. I started asking anyone and everyone who came to visit me during my recovery what their experience was with my illness, and what they remembered had happened to me. I wanted their point of view. I wanted to help them with closure while they helped me open my book. From these stories, combined with my own memories of my hospital experience, I began to put the pieces together and craft my own tale to tell, which, over time, would lead toward my own healing.
My story is my There And Back Again. It is a story about losing my hearing and finding my way. I hope you are enjoying my journey…
… more to come.
