The Cathedral
by Rodin
(Wikimedia Commons)

Eulogy

Paul Hostovsky

I was a little in love with her. But ask anyone who knew her and they’ll tell you, she was a pain in the ass. So particular about everything. Mulishly meticulous. Such unstinting attention to detail and yet so parsimonious with the details of her own life. Bitingly private. And controlling. She drove a lot of people away. She drove me away, but I always came back because I think I was a little in love with her.

When she died I sort of inherited, sort of appropriated, her braille watch. And her red chair. She was very particular about the red chair. She wouldn’t let anyone sit in it. Not even me. I’m sitting in the red chair now, as I write this. I’m planning on reading it at her memorial service in a couple of weeks, but now I’m thinking maybe I should delete that part about her being a pain in the ass, unless I can think of a more loving way to say it. And also that bit about me being a little in love with her, maybe I should delete that, too.

I spent a lot of time staring at her. Is it rude to stare at the blind? If so, I confess I am very ill-mannered. But she fascinated me. I liked watching her read, her fingers gliding along the refreshable braille display, jumping to the routing buttons or the advance key, then back to the braille cells, skipping up to the QWERTY keyboard to type something, hopping back down to the display to read it, lingering over it briefly, then flitting back up to the QWERTY. It looked a little like she was playing an instrument. Or navigating a starship.

Staring at her was one of the perks of the job. My job–her part-time interpreter–was fingerspelling into her hand while I sat in the blue chair and she sat in the red, our hands meeting in the air above the armrests, fingers touching, while she made phone calls and worked remotely from home.

Tactile fingerspelling. It makes me think of prayer. Maybe because that’s where fingerspelling comes from, at least that’s one of the theories: invented by Spanish monks in the 14th century who used it for talking to each other and to God, in silence. That being said, spelling into her hand was nothing like prayer, really. It was more like writing. In fact, it WAS writing. Spelling everything out, letter by letter, word for word. The Rochester method, they call it, even though Deaf people in Rochester don’t fingerspell nearly as much as Deaf people in D.C., especially Deaf people at Gallaudet. They’re notorious for their fingerspelling at Gallaudet. So maybe they should have called it the Gallaudet Method. But they didn’t, whoever they were.

Fingerspelling isn’t sign language, though that’s what most hearing people think it is when they see it. But it’s not; it’s English. She didn’t know sign language–she was a monolingual speaker of English. Born profoundly deaf, she attended the Lexington School for the Deaf in New York, where somehow, incredibly, against all odds, she learned to speak orally and to read and write as fluently as any hearing person. And to lipread. She was a first-rate lipreader. Until she lost her vision. After that, it was all English on the hands. Not ASL. And her hand, listening to my hand in the air between the red chair and the blue, made me think of a church. It resembled that
sculpture by Rodin, if you’ve ever seen it, the one he called “The Cathedral.” I’ve often wondered if Rodin had a DeafBlind friend he used to talk to, or interpret for, like I did, who inspired that famous sculpture of his. Not likely, but you never know.

She was particular about the red chair because she was particular about everything. That may sound more like a tautology than a reason, but the thing is, she could be very unreasonable. She didn’t see it as being unreasonable, though; she saw it as being reasonable. If you reason everything out, she reasoned, you’re being reasonable. I suppose that’s true, but it could be very annoying. In restaurants, for example, she always wanted more information. Are the scallops bay scallops or sea scallops? she’d want to know, and the waiter would disappear into the kitchen to ask. Bay scallops, he’d say when he returned, ready to take our order. Are they pre-shucked or were they shucked here in the restaurant? Back to the kitchen went the waiter. Pre-shucked, he assured her a few minutes later. Will they be poached, sauteed, or grilled in the pasta dish she was thinking about ordering? Back to the kitchen. Pan-seared, comes the reply. But she’d opt for the salmon in the end, only after another series of difficult and obscure questions about the salmon’s provenance. One time, a technician was doing some work on her computer and he inadvertently sat down on the red chair. When she discovered it she totally freaked out. Threw a fit. I mean a veritable tizzy. Yelled at him to get out of the chair and cautioned him never to sit in it again. Then she yelled at me for letting him sit in it in the first place, and for not telling her.

In all fairness to her, the red chair IS an extraordinary chair. Far superior to any office chair I think I have ever sat in. It’s doing wonders for my back. I especially love the adjustable armrests, which allow the arms to be positioned wherever I want them. It’s made by ErgoGenesis, a company out of Texas. I looked them up online and it seems this particular model sells for $1,685. That’s a lot of money for an office chair. I suppose that helps explain why she was so protective of it. But more than that, it had to do with listening. Her listening. After all, she spent a lot of time in that chair, and those adjustable armrests, the left one in particular, was where she did her listening. She listened with her left hand while I fingerspelled into it with my right. So if someone mistakenly or deliberately moved the armrest or adjusted it, it became difficult and uncomfortable for her to listen. “Like static, for you, I’d imagine,” she said to me after the chastened technician had left and she was still fuming. “Or the sound of a scratchy record. And how would YOU like it if I sat on YOUR record player?”

I stared at her because she was there. And because I was there. And because I could. And because she couldn’t stare back, couldn’t tell me with her eyes: “What the hell are you staring at!” Which is why staring at her felt a little illicit. But it was never prurient or sexual in any way. It was purely platonic staring. Pure admiration, curiosity, spectatorship.

I liked watching her read her braille watch, for example. Which is now my braille watch. It’s a Seiko, a woman’s braille watch, very small, difficult to read–believe me, I’ve been trying to read it with my right index finger for a few weeks now and I can barely find the minute hand, let alone the hour hand. Let alone the numbers. So I cheat: I look. But she read her braille watch easily and often, opening the glass cover with a CLICK, touching the face of the watch for a nanosecond, then closing it again with a SNAP. She always knew what time it was. To the minute. Greenwich Mean Time.

And she always knew the date. She kept the calendar in her head. The calendar is math, really, and she was a whiz at math, so she could tell you what day of the week it would be a month from tomorrow, or two months from Tuesday, or even a year from today. And she always knew the weather forecast: She was my weatherman. But sometimes, when we were working together at her desk, she’d want to confirm the weather report and she’d ask me what it was doing outside. Then I’d be her weatherman. I’d part the blinds and look out the window and tell her what it was doing out there, but she’d always follow up with questions of degree: How hard is it raining exactly? Well, it’s sort of drizzling, sort of spitting. Sort of sleeting. (I’m a sort-of kind of guy, and I’m sure that was challenging for her.) How much snow is left on the ground? Not a lot. But still a pretty good amount. I must have been as much of a pain in the ass to her as she was to me, me with my vague approximations, her with her exactitude. Every October, she’d ask me several times over the course of a few weeks, how much of the foliage has turned? What she wanted was a percentage. But all I ever had for her were adjectives. It’s getting pretty colorful, I’d say. Very red, very orange. But how close is it to peak foliage, would you say? she’d press me. It’s definitely getting there, I’d say, squinting through the blinds at the pyrotechnic maples.

And she remembered the weather–she was practically a historian of the weather. She could tell you how hot it was in May of last year, or in August of the year before, or if there was snow three Novembers ago; if September 2010 was unseasonably cold; if we had a lot of snow the winter of 2005, or 2008. I can barely remember what the weather was like yesterday. But she remembered all of it. And she didn’t think of her ability to remember these things as being somewhat remarkable. I think it puzzled her that other people could NOT remember. And I think she bristled a little whenever anyone commented that she had an extraordinary memory. She didn’t want to be extraordinary. She didn’t want to stand out as being in any way different. More than anything, I think, she wanted to be like other people. But she wasn’t like other people. She was like no one I have ever met.

**

I first met her 35 years ago, when I was hired as executive director of Deaf-Blind Contact Center, a small nonprofit organization serving DeafBlind people in the Boston area. She was on the board of directors. I was in my mid-twenties back then, and I remember telling my mother on the phone that I had just gotten this job as Executive Director, which sounded kind of impressive, though really DBCC was just a tiny operation. “Are you sure you’re ready for that?” was my mother’s response, and I recall being a little miffed at her for doubting me. After all, I’d been studying sign language for a few years, and I was sharing an apartment with a blind friend whom I’d met at the National Braille Press, where I worked as a braille transcriber. So I was comfortable around blind people, and Deaf people, and DeafBlind people. What more qualifications did I need?

Before the board meeting got underway, I went up to her and introduced myself. It was the first time I’d ever spelled my end of an entire conversation into the listening hand of another person. It sort of blew me away, that it actually worked, that she could understand me. We chatted for fifteen or twenty minutes and I think we clicked right then and there. I’d been an English major in college and I loved words. Plus, I knew all the braille contractions. And I was already an enthusiastic fingerspeller. For practice I was in the habit of fingerspelling my thoughts to myself–a kind of self-talk–like: “Gee, it’s a nice day out today I wonder if I should go to the beach and skip work altogether.” The word “altogether” in braille is just the letters A-L-T. So I knew all the shortcuts, could spell fast and accurately, and had good stamina because I was strong (a weightlifter in high school). And here was this person with her hand on my hand, reading my thoughts as fast as I could spell them. And I could spell pretty fast. And I know she appreciated that. And I appreciated her, too. We were a good fit, and a few years later, after I left DBCC, she invited me to come work for her at the software company where she was employed as a programer. I’m pretty sure I was her favorite interpreter, though she never actually said so, and what she’d probably say is, Don’t flatter yourself, Paul.

She lived with her mother back then in the Schoolhouse condos on Forest Street. The two of them were quite the pair, the exact same diminutive height, same short haircut, two petite, fiercely intelligent transplanted New Yorkers, so inseparable, so opinionated, and often finishing each other’s sentences, practically able to read each other’s minds. In fact, as her mother got older and the fingerspelling got more arthritic and elided–and illegible–I think she WAS basically reading her mother’s mind.

Her mother was a staunch oralist who believed that deaf children should learn to speak orally rather than use sign language. Which is why she sent her to the Lexington School for the Deaf in New York, which at that time, like many schools for the deaf, prohibited the use of sign language in the classroom. She was an “oral success,” thanks mostly, she claimed, to her mother’s perseverance. Her mother was a teacher herself and had completely bought into the prevailing attitudes and beliefs of the time concerning deaf education, which were basically that sign language is not a legitimate language, that deaf kids should not be allowed to sign, that they should be taught to speak orally and to lipread and to try to appear as “normal” as possible. Speech equaled success; sign language equaled failure. Unfortunately, that educational philosophy has meant that the vast majority of deaf children–who sign and do not speak orally–are viewed as “failures,” which is a prejudice that she inherited from her mother and the school, and one that would shape the rest of her life and determine all of her relationships.

She was a brilliant student, but she was teased mercilessly by the other deaf kids at school, the ones who DID sign and who viewed her as being a sellout for not signing, for being a kind of oral nerd, exceedingly smart, the teacher’s pet; and also because her peripheral vision had already started to deteriorate, and Deaf kids can be very cruel to their DeafBlind peers. So that’s why she didn’t know sign language, and when ASL became all the rage a few decades later, when linguists began to study and describe the beauty and complexity of it, when it began to be taught to hearing students in high schools and colleges all over the country, she felt left out. And she WAS left out. She had no friends who were Deaf because she was taught (mistakenly, unforgivably) that sign language and Deaf people who sign ought to be avoided. For the rest of her life, the only way she communicated with any Deaf or DeafBlind people was almost always through an interpreter.

But sometime in the late 1990s, she told me she regretted never having learned to sign, and she asked me to teach her. So for about a year I tutored her in ASL, and she picked it up beautifully. She had a capacious memory and was able to retain many of the signs even though she didn’t have much of an opportunity to practice. Maybe she practiced by herself, signing to herself all alone, or with her other interpreters, I don’t know. But she didn’t want word getting out that she could sign, because she was afraid people would start signing to her in ASL and she wouldn’t be able to understand them. So in the end, she didn’t use it much. But it was an honor and a joy and a sweet sadness for me to help her learn to sign all those years after ASL had been denied her as a child.

**

And I liked watching her open her mail as we sat together in the red and the blue chairs, a pile of unopened mail in her lap, the already opened, organized mail in little neat bundles on the desk in front of her, everything in its place. She would open each piece of mail, then hand it to me and I’d read it to her. Sometimes, when alone, she’d read her mail herself, or reread it, by using her Optacon, an ingenious little device that allows blind people to read print tactilely by projecting the exact images of the print letters–with the use of a special handheld camera–onto a cluster of vibrating pins. It’s not braille; it’s print, vibrating and tactile. I’m told it’s hard to learn to use the Optacon and relatively few blind people have mastered it, which is probably why it’s not being manufactured anymore and the company that developed it, Telesensory Systems, has gone out of business. But she was very proficient with her Optacon and used it often to read print materials such as computer manuals, books and magazines, and her mail.

So impressive to me the way she was able to keep track of all her snail mail–and of course her email too, but that was less challenging to organize because email programs basically do it for you. But all those identical envelopes–some with glassine windows and some without: the utility bills, invoices, bank statements, subscriptions, solicitations, and the various correspondences, everything organized in discrete little piles that she kept tied up with rubber bands. She’d hand me a statement or a bill, ask me the date that it was posted, or the due date, or the balance owed, and I would tell her and she’d file the number away mentally while slipping the envelope back into one of the piles, which were all in chronological order. She never seemed to get them mixed up. She was tenaciously organized. It was a survival mechanism, and I see now that her being so organized (which I admired) and her being so particular (which I deplored) were really one and the same strategy that allowed her to be so independent, so competent, and so in control of her own life.

And I liked watching her face. She wasn’t very animated for the most part, not being an ASL signer, but her face could nevertheless be expressive in certain subtle, idiosyncratic ways. We’d be on the phone, for example, on hold (she’d be on the phone, me sitting beside her, interpreting) waiting for some rep or bureaucrat to come back on the line, the minutes ticking by, the muzak playing (which I’d be sure to tell her about, and she’d always ask if it was any good, and I’d never know how exactly to answer that). So we’d be on hold, waiting, waiting, her fingers drumming, and after a while her eyebrows would start doing this thing–and her mouth too–this little dance of impatience, jumping, stitching, twitching, as if to say, “Good grief, is this going to take all day?”

And I liked watching her eat. She liked to eat and she ate well, and her eyes had a way of expressing her approval or disapproval sort of mid-chew. She was very particular about her food. She was very particular about everything (Did I say that already?), not fussy but, well, yes, fussy. She had high culinary standards, let’s put it that way. But she always had a good appetite, right up until the end. Even when she was in hospice, at the very end of her life, she still had a good appetite, and it was especially there–when she was dying, and still able to extract a little joy from a grilled cheese sandwich, a cucumber salad, a brownie, brought to her on a tray for lunch–that I liked watching her eat.

I could go on for hours talking about her. But better keep it brief. Brief is how she would have wanted it. “Good grief, Paul,” she would have said (she was an avid Peanuts fan), “keep it brief.”

Finally, her faith fascinated me. She was born Jewish, but she had adopted a different religion sometime in her mid-thirties, I think. She was very private about it, so we never actually discussed it much. But as her interpreter, I was often a fly on the wall when she had conversations with her spiritual advisor or her friends from church. She took her faith very seriously. She was devout. I think it was a great comfort to her, even at the end. I don’t think she ever had any illusions about God healing her deafness or her blindness. Or even healing the rapacious illness that took her life in the end. I don’t think it was about that kind of healing for her. I think it was about spiritual healing. It was about coming home. Coming with wholly empty hands home. Which is where she is now.

And finally, what about Rodin? No, I don’t think he had a DeafBlind friend after all. Probably never met a DeafBlind person in his life. Most people haven’t. And even though “The Cathedral” probably isn’t meant to be a depiction of tactile fingerspelling, still, it does kind of look like it. But if you look closely, you’ll notice it’s a sculpture of two right hands, and the air between them. When I fingerspelled to her, she always used her left hand to listen; my right hand spelling into her left hand. Because that’s the way it’s done. So Rodin got it wrong, if he was thinking of tactile fingerspelling. Which he almost certainly was not. But he got it right in a different way. He got the title right. The Cathedral. Because even though talking to her wasn’t like prayer, I think talking to anyone–any kind of talking, any kind of communication at all–is a sort of communion, a sort of sacrament. We forget that, though. Don’t we? We forget it because we’re so busy talking all the time that we take talking for granted. For some of us, it’s only when we’re writing–or fingerspelling–that we remember.