The other evening, our building’s doorman announced that someone had dropped off the dehumidifying case for my hearing aids. This post is an attempt to explain why a normally unmemorable act was poignant.
In the 1990s, I resisted an amiable Texan audiologist’s assertion that I needed hearing aids. The day I showed up for the first fitting session, I was left so long in the waiting room that I used the delay as a pretext to escape both the appointment and the unwanted fact.
I’m hardly alone in having resisted hearing aids. It comes, I suspect, from the ways older people have been portrayed as idiots less because their minds are addled than that their hearing has declined. I think of trumpets held to ears and the jabbering of gibberish in answer to their adult children’s questions. Contributing to hearing aids’ bad name is that declining hearing is the first noticeable disability that many people experience.
In 2006, my need for hearing aids became inescapable, and so began a journey involving several audiologists. The one I visited that year and stayed with until his retirement was skilled and professional. We tried more than one brand of hearing aid before deciding which one worked best for me. It feels disloyal to say this, but his office was not well kept, and the audiologist no social magnet. But I respected him and, as happens when you respect someone, I grew to like him.
When he retired, he connected me with an audiologist who, if I remember correctly, had been a student of his. He had high confidence in her. She proved to be absent-minded. She might fix one hearing aid problem, but neglect to restore the volume level, which I’d discover only on returning home. (That wouldn’t be a problem today.) One consequence was that I spent a three-week trip to the UK struggling to hear what people said.
I went in search of a new audiologist and found a sound one at a different office. I saw her once. Then the absent-minded audiologist I’d abandoned moved to that office. The woman I’d seen there completely disappeared. I called the local receptionist who said she had no information. I called another branch, and they couldn’t have sounded more guarded. All references to her on the Internet ceased from the time I saw her.
So, on to another office, where I met the best audiologist I’ve worked with, by chance just before the COVID era began. I’m going to give her a pseudonym, Angelina, the name of a lovely blue flower now flourishing in our terrace garden. She is, first of all, truly expert in her field, but not so secure in her knowledge that she closes her ears to questions. Every session was a pleasant experience where I felt my needs were carefully considered and, when possible, acted on. I never felt patronized. She might acknowledge my difficulties, but never in a way that made me feel we were less than equals. Of course, we weren’t equal with respect to her audiology expertise, but otherwise there wasn’t that attitudinal barrier that can make patients, or my preferred word “clients,” feel diminished. She made it possible to address a difficult health issue free from dread.
Angelina is young, maybe now in her thirties, and torn between referring to herself by her first name or as Dr. —. I stayed with her first name, since that was how I was introduced to her and the habit wouldn’t go away, even as she would lapse into “Mr. Spratt” when addressing me. She talked about her beloved father, as hostile to hearing aids as I had been, then her wedding plans, their vacation to her husband’s ancestral homeland, their brand-new daughter. While balancing work and home, she was always cheerful and welcoming.
Arthritis has made walking increasingly difficult for me, and Angelina’s office is nearly ten blocks away, more than I can comfortably manage. Twice when she couldn’t give me my hearing aids during an office visit, she dropped them off at my building, saying she had to be in this neighborhood anyway. I felt awkward about it, but it was incredibly generous of her.
Once, considering the way audiologists seem to come and go, I wondered aloud when her turn to move on would come. She lived across the street from the office and assured me she had no plans to go anywhere. Then, last Thursday she emailed to say she’d made the difficult decision to return to her childhood hometown, where her family could help care for her daughter.
The last time I’d needed a hearing aid fix, my wife had gone to the office to leave them. Unfortunately, when she retrieved them, their special case was left behind. In her farewell message, Angelina said the container was there to be picked up. I wrote back, and after asking that the box be mailed, expressed my sorrow that she was leaving. I’d miss her expertise and the confidence she gave me, but, yes, one’s children came first.
So it was with both gratitude and chagrin that I found out the next evening that the hearing aids container had been dropped off with the doorman. No note. No name. We were entertaining a guess that evening, but when I later checked my email and voicemail, there were no messages. If I’d known Angelina was there, I would have gone down to say farewell in person. I hope she was visiting our neighborhood for reasons other than to return my container.
In Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, And Tomorrow (2022), which I happen to be reading, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust tells her granddaughter that friendship and charity are irreconcilable. Even in the context of the novel, this claim is questionable. Nevertheless, it points to a truth. Friends assist each other at the peril of their friendship. I’m anxious about the friendship when I ask a friend for help, and equally anxious when they ask for help. Yet my friends and I are eager to help each other when we can.
Angelina’s generosity couldn’t damage a friendship; our professional relationship circumscribed it. Even so, I respected and liked her, just as I would a friend.
Dropping off my hearing aids with our doorman put me in moral debt to her, but it was a debt I could bear the first two times. This third time weighs on me because it was accompanied by silence and came after we’d said farewell to each other, even if by email.
Kindness can make an impression that lasts a lifetime. But it is delicate. Angelina didn’t give me a chance to turn down her plan to deliver the hearing aids or to thank her. Presumably either reaction would have made her feel awkward. But perhaps it’s this silence that makes her last gesture so poignant.
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