What goes 'round, comes 'round

Rarely (!) do I get a bee in my bonnet, but right now a current bee has been buzzing in my head... and that is my incredible disbelief at the parents out there who refuse to vaccinate their children against severe diseases such as measles. To read that there are increasing outbreaks of the measles stupefies me.

But what really has emerged out of the whole discussion about measles has been the discovery of a whole community out there of people who, having contracted the measles as children, have been living for the past 50 years with some sort of disability, as have I. Someone in the comments on the NYT the other day wrote about her experience of having the measles and ending up deaf in one ear. She described the same nuisances with which I live — always making sure she is at the far end of a table with her 'good' ear facing everyone else, not being able to differentiate noise, not being able to determine noise from behind, which led people to say she was stuck up and so forth.

Even though I probably knew in my head a long time ago that there was a whole population out there who had suffered the same sort of life-changing event, in these recent years to read about this community has woken me up. I have brothers and sisters out there. I want to line us all up and make the parents who don't vaccinate their children look us in the eye, hear our stories and then think twice about not protecting the rest of us (herd protection) from their selfish actions.

The reason this interests me so is because the message I received growing up was basically, 'Deal with it.' Deal with it in silence. Don't acknowledge the problem. (Evidently I thought everyone had a 'good' ear and a 'bad' ear by the time I was five.) Since no one can see it, act as though it doesn't exist. That worked pretty well for my first three decades of life.

My parents ruled out stringing a hearing aid set-up that would have sound from the left ear be transmitted to the right ear. Remember, that back in the early 1960s, hearing aids were cumbersome things, a box the size of a Walkman and then big circular earbuds. My parents already realised I was the class dork with my eye glasses — it wasn't until third grade that finally someone else got glasses. They did not want to make my life any more miserable than it was. I went through school always assuming I was flying under the radar as far as my hearing loss. I figured I was sometimes put up front because of my sight or because alphabetically my name comes close to the beginning of the alphabet. It wasn't until well after I graduated from high school that my high school French teacher informed me that they all knew about my hearing loss — I was flagged as one of the kids who might need extra help. Oh? (Never mind that I have relative perfect pitch and sing quite fine, thank you.)

It was not until CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education, required of seminarians in The Episcopal Church and other denominations), when I went to the morgue with my CPE group that I began to move beyond the live-with-it-in-silence coping mechanism. Seeing the morgue drawer labelled, 'Body Parts,' all of a sudden broke open a wall that I had subconsciously built ever since the age of three, the wall of, 'No, nothing really happened to you; it is no big deal, get over it.' I realised that when someone has an amputation, he or she clearly has a visible loss, a space of air where there once was a limb. She or he has to deal with phantom pain. I know that from my father's experience, when he lost in one minute the sight of his left eye to a stroke, that the eye continued to send signals to the brain for a good year, which resulted in incredible dizziness because he was getting the overlay of the left eye signals on the right eye. He said seeing was like looking at finger prints half the time. But loss of hearing? I don't know, because it happened when I was so little. However, once I saw that drawer for body parts, I realised I had never been allowed to mourn a piece of my être that was taken away from me. I did not dwell on that realisation for too long, a day or two of spacing out, but I was glad that I finally had a chance to acknowledge the loss.

Now, later on in life, I have nothing to lose and everything to gain by speaking out... after all, the older we get, the more company I have in the hearing loss department. Most important, this whole discussion about measles and its lasting effects brought on so needlessly by misguided people, has made me circle back round to something long forgotten... a parallel discussion, but not for now, is those of us who had corrective surgery for strabismus back when and how that just tackled the appearance but not the brain connections for crossed-eyed vision.

P.S.: Whenever someone cannot remember which is my deaf side, I just say, 'Go for the gold.' I figured in college that since it did not work as originally intended, my ear ought to be at least decorative.

I do like my gold earrings.

Full cycle

The last supper at the family homestead

A

A year ago yesterday we gathered for the last semi-full family dinner at my parents' house of 60 years before moving my father to his assisted living place on the 18th. Our last supper was not elegant — pizza and wine, but it was all we could muster as we gathered up my father's belongings. We all knew the change would be momentous, the end of an era, but being good stoic New Englanders, we did not really go into all that.

A year later, my father has survived the full cycle, seen the seasons and how they affect the pond outside his window, a pond that is most likely a blur. A year ago, he would ambulate, dress himself and move with relative ease. A year later, he is a prisoner in his body that is becoming increasingly rigid. He can no longer walk or dress or bathe himself — that all went within two months of his moving to his place — and he can barely feed himself. His mind, however, is as sharp as ever.

My mother is a helium balloon, rising higher and higher above the earth as her mind decreases. That is a whole other reflection.

And the house, the house. I still grieve it. The table, chairs, sideboard, a pair of candlesticks, and painting all now live with me. I don't have the wonderful black and white floor, which my mother loved because it reminded her of the 16th-century Flemish paintings. I am sure that that floor no longer exists any more than the kitchen and bathrooms we left behind. The house remains in my memory, where it is safest. One can never, ever go back.

And in that year, too, my father's cat, Pico, has come to live with me. He has settled in and my father misses him terribly.

As I have said often to others, I do not claim exceptionality in all this. Most adult children go through this same process. That said, I still feel it.