Anything that is worth teaching can be presented in many different ways. These multiple ways can make use of our multiple intelligences.
Howard Gardner
My mother had the knack of making the world seem interesting no matter what was happening around our family at the time. For example, in a restaurant, she might say that a waitress had a strong accent, that someone in the kitchen dropped and broke dishes, that someone was arguing at the cash register about the amount of the bill. She might fill in even more details if she knew them, telling us who owned the restaurant, how business was going, and that the owner always hired family members when they turned sixteen.
My father had a different approach. He taught his boys about life by devising lessons and delivering long, serious lectures. My father and my mother differed in that she tended to be down to earth while he looked at the world through more aloof, even critical, eyes. My father worked hard to convey the meaning, the moral, and the overall picture of what was around us.
When I was about twelve and our family was on one of our many summer trips, we explored the Civil War battleground at Gettysburg. My father showed me the battlefield and explained details of how the Union and Confederate soldiers had clashed. Gettysburg is a large area, and we drove around to different memorials and points of the conflict. When we discovered a helicopter that took tourists over the battlegrounds, I became infected with the idea of having a view of the whole scene from above. My father agreed enthusiastically. In the air, my father gestured with animation toward different parts of the battlefield, interpreting the pilot’s explanations. He did a beautiful job of repeating everything the pilot said. It made the historic war much more real to me. I started to understand that wars were not always the well-organized affairs I had viewed in the movies and on television.
Visual examples are the key to communication with a deaf child. From above, I could see the battlefield and envision the fight. My imagination was fired by a living picture. From that living picture, I started to pick up abstractions such as “hero,” “conflict,” “North and South,” and “right and wrong.” The helicopter ride was one of my most memorable experiences with my father.
It also seemed to symbolize my father’s way of showing me the world—from up above. All my life, he tried to tell me what the world was like and how it was to be perceived. He wanted to elevate me to a position above, so that I could look down and view what was happening below with people, nations, events, and life in general. While my father was working hard to give me the broad overview, my mother was down on earth in the nitty-gritty of everything.
Both perspectives greatly influenced my understanding of life. I appreciated the day-to-day details that my mother provided, information I was unable to gather from listening in on conversations around me. And I was also grateful for my father’s “elevated” and often visual viewpoint, which gave meaning to what I was seeing and experiencing.
Neither approach prepared our family, however, for the tragedy to come. Although good education and active communication skills may help sharpen people’s awareness of what goes on around them, my family and I were to learn that some things in life can’t be foreseen, averted, or understood. In his way, this is the important life lesson that my brother David taught me. I was aware that my brother had problems, but I was not to know the severity of them for many years. Perhaps David’s mischievous side was because of these problems or a way to compensate for them.
In many ways, David was the most sensitive person in our family. It may be the reason he escaped into the world of pranks and may also be one of the reasons he decided to escape this world.
It was June 1960, shortly after the incident where David tossed a crocodile into a pond at the zoo, that he left our home in Huntington, telling my parents he was driving to visit his girlfriend in Tennessee. Three days later a pair of police officers came to our door. They spoke to my parents, who started to cry.
“What’s going on?” I asked my mother.
“David’s happy now,” she said through tears. “He’s in heaven.”
“You mean he’s dead?” I said. I was numb. I couldn’t believe it.
I wanted to know what had happened. I kept asking my parents about it, but the answer was always the same: “We don’t know.” Later, I found out that David had been killed by a shotgun.
On our way to Rogersville, Tennessee, to claim David’s body, we visited a rest stop. In the restroom, I again asked my father about what had happened to my brother. “We don’t know,” he said. “Maybe he was cleaning his gun and the gun went off.”
“Did somebody kill him? Did somebody come in and shoot him?”
“We don’t know.”
With no definitive answers, I grew more and more frantic. My mind filled with wild possibilities. “If someone shot him, we should all get the police and catch the bad person,” I said. “We should put him in jail.”
My father did not want to talk about it. “We’ll have to wait and see,” he said. Later, I asked to read the obituary. “We haven’t received one yet,” was my father’s reply.
Dunbar was studying for his PhD at Yale and planned to meet us in Springfield, Ohio, for David’s funeral. Jonathan was away at printing school in Nashville, so my parents and I drove from Rogersville to get him. I asked if I could be the one to tell Jonathan and my parents agreed. He was surprised to see us. We told him to sit down.
“David was on his way to see his girlfriend,” I said. “He was cleaning a gun and it went off.”
A strange expression crossed Jonathan’s face. He didn’t say anything for a while. Then, quietly, he began to cry. He packed a suitcase and we drove to Springfield. At my grandmother’s house the night before the service, I woke up in the bedroom I was sharing with Jonathan and saw that he was gone. I went to my parents’ bedroom and found my entire family there, talking. I felt excluded and sensed that everyone was withholding information from me.
At breakfast the next morning, I finally erupted. In an angry and loud voice, I said, “Where is the obituary? I know it’s in the newspaper. I want to read it!”
At last, my mother produced the paper and handed it to me. The article said that David had taken his own life. Oh, now I understand, I thought. This explains everything. I knew David had suffered from terrible headaches after he’d hit his head in a car accident years before. He also, like my father, dealt with depression. He committed suicide because he was in great physical and emotional pain.
Now I also understood why Jonathan seemed to hide his feelings from me when I’d broken the news to him. He and David had always been close. He’d realized immediately that David’s death was a suicide.
David’s pain was gone, but it continued for my family and me. In their grief, my parents could not bring themselves to tell me what David had done. I’m sure they felt that hiding the truth would protect me somehow. The result, however, was additional anguish and confusion for me. My grief was intensified because I didn’t understand, and because I sensed others knew what had happened yet would not tell me. Deaf children often get lost in emotional situations because the constant explanations they need to replace incidental hearing are forgotten in the turmoil.
During David’s funeral service, I was aware of a strange restlessness in the audience. The minister was unknown to us, and instead of giving us comfort, he preached that David was lost and even suggested that perhaps there had not been much hope for him in his life. My father was furious. Jonathan and I, used to reading people’s body language, felt the tension and anger in the audience. Going to the cemetery and leaving David there was difficult for me. No more David meant no more teasing, laughing, dancing, and storytelling.
David had written letters to his close friends and each family member the night before he died. My parents gave me the paper he left especially for me. It was a beautiful, page-long letter saying how he hoped I would have a good life and that he knew I would grow up to be a fine person. He also wrote that he hoped I would not suffer like he had.
David meant for his letters to soften the blow of his death. All I can say is that they didn’t serve that purpose very well. It was impossible for any of us to sit down and read those letters without breaking into tears. Years later, after seeing the many things that David’s suicide did to my family—creating guilt and sorrow—I concluded that suicide gives pain to everyone it touches. Only the one who dies manages to escape.