I Can Hear Again!

In the past year or so I have slowly been losing my hearing.

My brother Ken is "deafer than a post" as we say in New England but refused to wear the hearing aids the Veteran's Association provided because he said he felt like he was in a wind tunnel. So we've all had to get used to him saying "what?" after everything we said.

Brother Rudy just quietly went to have his hearing testing because his wife was telling he to stop saying "what?" all the time and got hearing aids. I hear his marriage is doing better.

Oldest brother also complains of not hearing well. I decided we all must have the hard-of-hearing gene so I made an appointment with an audiologist and made Jim go with me. Just as I suspected, I too was deafer than a post.

I went back today for them to set me up with a two week demo of these tiny little things call hearing aids. My hair barely covers my ears and if you didn't know they were there there's no way you could tell. They're going to take a little bit to get used to. Noises like the car doors automatically unlocking or the blinker signal in the car are downright loud, and crumpling up a piece of paper is annoying as all get out, and those are just the things I've noticed since I got them an hour ago.

They are going to be so sweet when I'm watching TV at night in my bed! And Jim is going to love not having to repeat everything two or three times. I won't have to try and lip-read!

I think I'm going to go outside and see if there are any birds singing for me.

Death

Last week my neighbor was killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan. Corey Dodge worked as an independent contractor helping to train their police and military for eight years and was coming home in October for good. He had a job lined up with the Maine State Police. Before he went to Afghanistan he had been a police officer and apparently very good at his job. He was 40. He has four children.

His funeral was emotionally charged and very sad. Everyone was crying, even the police officers that lined the walls of the Church. The Chaplain for the State Police gave the message, and one of his former Captains spoke, His mother sang. That blew my mind. I have sung at the funerals of my father, my stepmother and my stepfather and it was not at all difficult because I knew they were in heaven and that I would one day see them again. Corey's mother is a Christian woman and maybe that's how she got through it, but no one said whether Corey was saved or not. Maybe that's why the service was so sad; no one knew.

Maybe it was so sad because he was only 40 and he and his wife were so in love you could see it in their faces in every picture of them. Maybe because their youngest child will most likely have no memories of his father, or that he won't have the honor of walking his daughters down the aisle. Maybe because it is just so senseless. He was making a difference in the lives of many people in Afghanistan, believing it was his calling to serve and protect.

Death is just sad.