When the opportunity to join a newly forming Toastmasters chapter presented itself at work, I decided to give it a try. I had considered the organization in the past, but didn’t want to travel as far as the nearest chapter. This was perfect, I didn’t even have to go home, the meeting would be right after work. It’s been interesting and entertaining. I’m a little nervous about participating in some of the roles since most involve hearing and listening carefully. Both are items I need to practice!
Last weeks Toastmasters speech was given by a co-worker who happens to be polish. Her speech was about who we are and how we have/learn traits from our ancestors. She spoke about her grandmother who taught her to speak polish and to bake and about happy sharing times. She urged us all to think about who we are and where we came from.
I’m polish on my dad’s side. My earliest memories of my grandmother are nothing like my co-workers memories of hers. My grandmother was profoundly deaf by the time I was a child old enough to remember her. I remember a nice woman with a heavy polish accent who could not hear me when I tried to talk to her. I’d never thought about it before, but now I’m wondering how much I missed as a child, not because I had a hearing loss, but because my grandmother did! How much more fully would my grandmother have participated in my life if she had normal hearing?
To my knowledge she did not ever wear hearing aids. Could she not afford them? Did they amplify too much noise to be comfortable? I feel myself mourning the hidden loss of never really knowing my grandmother. She lived a long life, passing peacefully in her sleep at age ninety-eight. She must have lived the last thirty years or more of her life in near silence. I don’t have any details about when she started losing her hearing. Was it like mine, starting in her early twenties and slowly slipping away from her? Did she spend twenty years mourning her fading hearing and the lost connections to her family?
A quick search on the internet turned up the Deafness in Disguise web site. In the 1950’s and 1960’s it was all about hiding your hearing loss. Not much there to really make a person want to wear a hearing aid or admit to having a hearing loss. She didn’t strike me as a vain woman, but who knows what the impact of popular opinion would have been on her?
My own life will be much different from my grandmothers thanks to the wonderful cochlear implants that I now have. I will be able to stay connected to family and friends. My grand children (God willing that I have some someday!) will get to know their grandmother. There will be no legacy of hidden losses. We will be able to communicate and share in each others lives.
