About four years ago my older brother Warren got a cochlear implant. He had the surgery done in the spring and the processor was all hooked up by the time my wife and I came home to visit that summer. Mom called and told me the news. While she didn’t come right out and say it in so many words, I could tell she was hoping I’d follow his lead and get one next. For her sake I tried to appear neutral and open-minded.
To be clear: I’m not the type of person who really cares all that much whether a deaf adult gets an implant or not… as far as I’m concerned, once you’re eighteen you call your own shots. I’m also fully aware that parents are having their kids implanted at earlier ages in order to counter language acquisition barriers. But as an educator, what I see is all too often the end result of a parental fantasy. Too many of them are hoping—in some cases desperately—that an implant is going to make everything okay. When it inevitably doesn’t, the disappointment shuts them down all the more. What kid deserves that?
But that wasn’t the case here. Though Warren and I both share the common bond of deafness, our lives didn’t develop around it in the same way. He was mainstreamed his whole life and never learned how to sign. I was mainstreamed until high school, and then went to the Wisconsin School for the Deaf. I’ve since worked mostly in signing environments, and while half of my friends are hearing, most are signers. He, on the other hand, worked in hearing environments his whole life. His friends are hearing, and so is his daughter. In fact he never really showed much of an interest in getting an implant until she was born.
That’s why I decided to keep my opinions about CIs to myself around him. He was getting one because of her. His decision wasn’t about identity issues or making a political statement. We’d never really talked about ASL or Deaf culture. I always got the sense that he didn’t want me to. At the time I thought I understood. If his mainstream experience was anything like mine, he got through it by blending in as much as possible. Keep living your life that way, and sooner or later your entire personality becomes a survival skill. And while ASL can offer you many things, invisibility isn’t one of them. So… live and let live. From that perspective, ASL isn’t much of an option.
But I was curious. Did the implant work or didn’t it? When he was a teenager, his hearing aids (like mine) ended up in a box stuffed in the back of his desk drawer. It wasn’t just because of the “don’t stand out” thing. They honestly didn’t do much for me. A couple of years back I picked up some Widexes, just to see if the Age of Digital Technology really had anything on the older models. I knew it would take a bit of time to get used to wearing them again, but nothing could have prepared me for the raw amount of racket that hammered my skull while riding on the metro. Blaring announcements in foreign gibberish, deafening squeals (yes, deafening all over again) every time the subway braked to a halt… I had a throbbing ache in my neck by the time I got home. Even my eyeballs hurt.
Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a Widex problem. It’s an expectation problem. “Racket” isn’t all we used to hear; either me or Warren. We weren’t born deaf. We went deaf—gradually—and the onset followed pretty much the same time frame: mild losses and hearing aids by the second grade; profoundly deaf by age twenty-five.
But there’s a lot of space in twenty-five years for listening to things that sound like harmonic masterpieces. My hearing faded out with the popularity of Guns N’ Roses. His faded soon after Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits came out. And while I won’t go so far as to say Guns N’ Roses ever produced what you could call a harmonic masterpiece (though they did rock); Billy Joel is right up there with the angels.
Warren loved the whole album, and so did I. Allentown, Piano Man, The Longest Time… all are pitch-perfect. Our hearing sister never even had to write out the lyrics to his stuff (the way she did for other songs) so we could follow along. We could pick out the words easily; his voice is a musical instrument in and of itself. Remember that scene in Children of a Lesser God where William Hurt gets stuck trying to explain Bach to Marlee Matlin? As a person who can appreciate the complexities of the task from both perspectives—his and hers—let me tell you something: if he’d been a Billy Joel fan instead, it wouldn’t have been such a problem.
In fact there was a Billy Joel CD sitting on Warren’s television that day when the two of us stopped by his house to pick up an air conditioner for Mom. Warren walked through the door ahead of me. I called out his name to see if he’d turn around. Call it a test, a propaganda buster. Is the technology really getting better all the time? Put your money where your ears are.
To my surprise he did turn around, though I had to repeat his name a few times.
“What?” he asked.
I tapped the side of my head and pointed at his implant. “Level with me. Does that thing really work?”
“Sure.”
“Better than hearing aids?”
He nodded. “I think so.” I glanced over at the Billy Joel CD, and he caught this. “You thinking about getting one?”
I shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable again.
“What’s the problem?”
In retrospect, I think that was the day I realized there was a lot more to my resistance to implants than just the theory that hearing parents who get them for their deaf children are living in denial. Want to know what new conclusion I came up with? Through a Widex, Billy Joel doesn’t sound like Billy Joel. He sounds like a Mack truck crashing into a church. But take it off, and he sounds like Billy Joel again. Like I said, it’s a question of expectation. No hearing aid or implant is ever going to beat that mental radio in your skull. If you already know what things should sound like, it’s very tough to settle for what they don’t sound like.
“How about music?” I asked.
“It’s not the same, no.”
“The implant screws it up?”
“Yeah.”
His answer pretty much told me all I wanted to know. And in the years since, I’ve never really explored the question further. After all, what place is better than that for giving up? Still, whenever I go home, there he’ll be, talking with his daughter and listening to her tell him how her day went; what she did in school. I’ve taught her a couple of signs, and in our own fashion we do the same thing. But you can tell that she’s starting to notice: he has an implant, and I don’t. I sign, and he doesn’t. Actually most of our family doesn’t. Why is this? My sister’s hearing children have already asked me these questions, and when they did I explained to them as best as I could. There’s no reason to expect that Warren’s daughter won’t ask me, as well.
I wonder what I’m going to say to this time around.
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