This was no typical Rosh Hashanah; we were thousands of miles from home. We’d buried my father only twenty four hours earlier. And when the first blast of the shofar – the coiled ram’s horn – signaled the start of the Jewish New Year, my daughter’s eyes opened super-wide, and out came her own melodious ooooooh!
My daughter’s “big pretty hearing aid,” as she calls it, is actually the visible, pink and white sound processor of a cochlear implant. It translates sounds to electrical impulses and allows her to hear far more than her tiny auditory system, compromised by severe congenital hearing loss. And it was brand-new; she was hearing the shofar for the first time in glorious high fidelity.
This was a deeply joyous moment for my family, but also, part of a larger emotional loop-de-loop: I’d just spent a week standing vigil during the final days of my father’s multiple myeloma. The instant he died, I draped his prayer-shawl over his face and recited the Shema. Then, pulsing with adrenaline, I grabbed the bluetooth speaker from my backpack and played Bye, Bye Blackbird – the Miles Davis, John Coltrane version from 1957.
In a kind of aural see-saw, that final silence overtook over my father – and new, true sounds were coming to my daughter.
During her surgery, I drank coffee, texting in a near-panic. Even if the implant works, I was saying, the machine needs to be turned off at night! My daughter won’t be able to hear me sing a lullaby!
One friend answered: Hold her. Sing to her. She’ll feel your vibrations. She’ll feel your music.
Yes, vibrations. But also: come on, vibrations?! A poor substitution! The same way people say that a loved one, now departed, dwells everywhere. Sure, my dad is now everywhere…but I can’t ask everywhere for advice! Why is my car making that noise?! I can’t tell him about his granddaughter’s listening milestones.
For my daughter, I didn’t want vibrations and everywhere. I wanted real voices, right here, right now.
For all the glory stories – stories of how my Dad used to sound and look on stage – all sunglasses and turtlenecks, I never heard the old man play. He’d long since given up long nights in a smoky club. He would sometimes reach for that old brass magic, but after a few shaky scales, he’d be done.
As a teenager, I begged him to teach me how to play that sacred music. He couldn’t. Instead, he taught me how to drink coffee (dark roast in a heavy ceramic mug, a splash of half-and-half, no sugar) and sip-by-sip, to time travel. And so, when I hear Dizzy, it’s as if I’m at the Birdland Lounge. As if I’m off to the side of the stage where my Dad stands, blowing horn. As if my Dad is the coolest man on earth.
The chemo treatments took his hearing, but also, some other essential thing. My Dad used to be warm, funny, clever. Words were for play. Now, they were information, only: I don’t want soup. I don’t want coffee. Turn off that music, it sounds terrible.
The chemo treatments took his hearing, but also, some other essential thing. My Dad used to be warm, funny, clever. Words were for play. Now, they were information, only: I don’t want soup. I don’t want coffee. Turn off that music, it sounds terrible.
A year later, his deaf-bed became his death-bed. People had advised me: read to him, talk with him, tell him how you feel. But by the time my plane landed, he was doubly far beyond words. Days without food or water had transformed him, making him gossamer as a baby bird. His hands, however, were enormous, as though he were gripping, holding on. Since I could remember, he’d always told me not to worry, that he would be with me…until I needed him no longer. But suddenly, I had a new worry: that he was holding on too long.
And I had no way to tell him: I’m all set, Dad. If you’re ready, you can go.
I wondered: Could vibrations reach him, in some impossible, incomprehensible way? The answer came, neither no nor yes. Beginnings and ends are clear, but the magic is in the middle.
As the 1930’s standard says: You blow in here. The music goes ‘round and around, and it comes out here.
It’s the ‘round and around where the cochlea transforms vibrations into signals. It’s where the Jazz musician works – ahead of tempo, behind tempo, never where you expect them…arriving at your front door, right on time.
My father was unable to find real joy in his final years. He’d never learned to play trumpet as if musical satisfaction was only a toot away. He couldn’t speak with his grandchildren as if they could connect to him. He didn’t write down his final words for me, his son, as if they might be his last.
And yet, he’d taught me how to play with those magical words: as if. He’d talked about life after death, as if we could soar through the Universe, free of body, the constraints of time and space. He taught me to remember his own father, as if he were the grandest grandfather of all time.
It’s also what allowed me to get over myself and bring my daughter to the hospital to receive her big, pretty hearing aid… as if everything would be just fine. And despite the state of the world, “as if” allows me to live and act and choose – “as if” it is possible: peace.
Next year, when we bring our daughters to synagogue, to stand before the coiled shofar, my dad will be there: as if. The music will go ‘round and around and come out exactly where it needs to go: as-if. And now I know, at the moment of his death, when I turned to that most terrible of substances: vibrations, I’d actually known what to do: to play Bye Bye Blackbird from that little bluetooth speaker, placed on his chest so that he could hear – he could let go – a Jazzman finally free, cruising the universe on a chariot of sound.
Evan Wolkenstein is a high school teacher and author of YA novel Turtle Boy (Random House, May 2020), winner of the 2021 Sydney Taylor Book Award and the Cowan Writer’s Prize (2022); his work can be found in The Forward, Tablet Magazine, The Washington Post, Engadget, My Jewish Learning, and BimBam.
