Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

My folks are visiting. The soundtrack of their visit turns the volume of all devices, including throats, up to 11. [They’ve never seen This is Spinal Tap and if they did, would likely not find it particularly funny].

They have been watching a Sherlock Holmes episode on Netflix, and it is reverberating throughout the house and beyond; the scuffles and historical pistol shots ring clear to the sidewalk. It’s 70 degrees today and all the windows on our block are wide open – sorry, neighbors, we hope you like Sherlock Holmes (although perhaps a one-time ear-splitting TV day makes up for the leaf blowers, power tools and lawn machines that we’ve listened to every spring and summer weekend day for the last few years). They keep the TV on even when they’re not watching it, as if it were another companion in the house.

They talk loudly, in part because of diminished hearing, in part because they were raised well before this generation of children learned of something called an “indoor voice,” in part because they want to be heard and aren’t sure they will be.

My Mother, in the kitchen, yells to my Father, in the living room, asking if he wanted any chips with the sandwich she was making for him. There are multiple ways in which this communication was destined to fail: they were in separate rooms; she had her back turned to him, pitching her question out toward the back patio, not toward the living room; she wasn’t really interested in his answer, and was already putting the chips on his plate; he wasn’t expecting the question because he was engrossed in Sherlock Holmes; he couldn’t have heard her had she been standing in front of him because the TV was blaring; he couldn’t even pause the episode in an attempt to listen, as the remote control was on a table just inches beyond his reach.

Age-related changes – in their hearing and their mobility – must certainly play a role in this loudness, but I remember raised voices that soared cross-household, downstairs-to-upstairs/basement-to-kitchen/through-bathroom-doors, as if no one could wait until the listener were actually present and available before launching in to what needed to be said.

What needs to be said now? There are no conversations they haven’t already had. There are no new relatives whose psychological profiles or behavioral peculiarities must be plumbed, no new ways for elderly friends and community members to die unexpectedly (or, more usually, experience the prolonged disability creep before death), no new ways adult children can make and destroy their lives causing endless joy or grief to their parents, no political situation that hasn’t been experienced before. No new ways to nag a reticent husband, no new ways to ignore an impinging wife.

Instead, there is the everyday conversation that has been held, every day, for over 50 years. Maybe they have to have things loud, to get through the barrier of bitterness and recrimination that has closed their ears to one another.

Maybe by saying and doing things loudly, with no expectation of being heard, they soften the disappointing silence of misunderstanding, the loneliness of being unseen, unheard, and unknown for over five decades. If they sat across from one another, in a quiet room, with no distractions, only curiosity for what the other thinks or feels or remembers or yearns for, I can’t imagine what they would say.

My parents have been married for 54 years; they’ve accomplished a kind of longevity I will never approximate. They have stood by each other when younger marriages would have collapsed. They have listened to the woes and cries and anguishes of their friends, standing by to help through illness, financial loss, family crises and death. It is only their own personal and marital distress that escapes their notice – their individual pain obliterating the capacity for empathy to the one person for whom they ought to have reserved all their listening, love, compassion and support.

Tonight, it’s Dancing with the Stars. My Mother is flabbergasted I have never seen the program. She has tears in her eyes as she describes, in detail, how one of the top performers sustained a back injury; she is hurt and saddened by this setback, in touch with the dancer’s pain as if she is a close, personal friend. Yet she cannot take in a single sign of my Father’s physical pain, his emotional losses, the setbacks that have haunted him since he was a much younger man. No matter how loudly he conveys his pain, she will not hear. No matter how much she yells, he will not hear.

The TV may be turned up, way up, yet it is the emptiness between them that is deafening.