The Art of Being Deaf: A Memoir

8. But My Eyes Still See

83 8 But My Eyes Still See In the following weeks, I thought often about that sunny morning with Damian on the balcony, and I remembered other things. Things that should have alerted me to the fragility of his feelings for me.I remembered the pulse of other emotions on Damian’s face. I saw, in hindsight, more than his uncertainty about my relationship with music; I also saw his conflict about me. I had underestimated the urgency of his anxiety about continuing his relationship with me. He had much going on in his life. He said it was too much. It was impossible, he said. He was a single parent; he could not do justice to our relationship and honor his family obligations at the same time.“Duty before love,”he said with a lilting effort at humor. I had argued mildly with him. “But Damian, we are only in the early days of getting to know each other. Can’t we just roll along as we’ve been doing?” He had not answered my question. Instead, we found ourselves talking about our friends, our work, and our families. We had hugged our goodbyes, but as for tasting the promise of seeing each other? Perhaps I imagined this as I watched Damian walk backward down the stairs, his eyes on me all the way to the entrance of the apartment building. In my first disbelief at Damian’s withdrawal from my life, the Tremeloes’ song of mute distress felt like an epitaph. 84 Part Two My words here are orderly. The passage of time and the love of friends have allowed me to tidy up my thoughts and to put them down now on this page, steadily and at the rate of one word at a time. Still, I cannot describe the knifing pain that I experienced, along with the whimpering confusion, feverish anger, and hot resentment with life—and with a God whose reliability I was already dubious about—without resorting to the language of melodrama.But it seems that through no fault of either Damian ’s or mine, the collapse of our friendship triggered in me a collapse of confidence in my judgment, not just about love but about life. I had been so full of hope for the possibilities of our friendship, and now I was full of anger. How many more losses and how much more grief was I supposed to endure? Surely there was a quota posted somewhere and just as surely I was double-dipping and someone else was skipping out on their fair share of sorrow? It didn’t help that I was lurching toward the twentieth anniversary of my son’s death; I was in the midst of organizing a commemorative ceremony for Jack with my family at the local Catholic church, St. Agatha’s.It also didn’t help that so much of my reading about deafness was soaked in grief and trauma. As I trawled obsessively over the details of my short friendship with Damian, I caught myself reassessing his every gesture, look, laugh, and conversational gambit. In that game of revising romantic history, so familiar to anyone who has had her heart broken, I drilled for clues and came up with new interpretations of our friendship and his abandonment. See, even now I continue to change my words to describe that event: loss, withdrawal , abandonment. Which was it? How did it really go? My doubts about my judgment spilled over into my investigation of my deaf life.After all, wasn’t everyone—those writers of the trauma of deafness and those friends insistent on challenging my explanations—trying to tell me that my deafness was a loss and that I was denying it? Well, was I denying it? Had I been too glib? Were there other interpretations of my life that I was turning a blind eye to, casting in a Pollyanna-like glow? I wanted to be honest; it was important to be honest. In my mind’s eye, I kept seeing the tear-streaked faces of parents at those support meetings and conferences I attended.One mother,clutching But My Eyes Still See 85 a crumpled white tissue in her hand, had asked me in a voice filled with the effort to be composed,“Is there anything your mother could have done better or differently for you?”before she fell back onto a chair...