Chapter One

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From Sound to Silence 5 AUGUST 1990

On one of those treasured visits to my parents' home on Bainbridge Island, Washington, I use a magic pad to communicate with my eighty-year-old mother, who four years previously took the final step from hearing-impaired to deaf as she gave up wearing her by then useless hearing aids.

"Do you hear anything?" I write.

"No," she answers, her voice still strong although she cannot hear it. "Last night your Dad came in and found the T.V. blasting. Someone had left the volume way up; I didn't hear a thing." (Indeed, my father later explained, he recently tested her by sneaking up while she was reading and giving a loud clap just behind her ear. Her eye never wavered from the page.)

What is it like, I wonder. "A silent world?"

"Yes," she replies, "it's a silent world."

As with Mother, so, I expect, with me. I have known for many years that I am on a trajectory toward the same deafness. When tested as a teenager, my hearing pattern mimicked Mother's-an unusual "reverse slope" pattern of good hearing for high-pitched sounds and poorer hearing for low-pitched sounds (making soft male voices harder to discern than higher female voices). From upstairs, I can hear the high-pitched microwave oven timer, though my wife, Carol, snuggled beside me in bed, cannot. But I cannot recall ever hearing an owl hoot. Carol touches my leg at each hoot: "There, can you hear it?" I hear nothing.

When I was a graduate student, my peculiar hearing loss made me a case for study and discussion in front of twenty doctors and res