Deafening - Softcover

Set during 1915-19 in Canada, United States, England, Belgium and France, this is the story of a young woman in her 20 s, Grania O Neill (pronounced GRAW-NEE-YA, an Irish name meaning Love ), profoundly deaf from the age of 5 as a result of scarlet fever. She marries Jim Lloyd, a hearing man who, 2 weeks after their marriage, leaves home in Ontario to serve his King and country and do his bit for Mother England. Jim tries in every possible way to understand his wife s experience of deafness, and together they explore their love through the silence in which she lives. Jim is trained as a stretcher-bearer in one of the large camps on the southeast coast of England. He serves in Belgium and France with Number 9 Canadian Field Ambulance. His war experiences, friendships, and care of the dying and wounded during this brutal war of attrition, are moving, intimately detailed and carefully researched to show the realities of the life of a stretcher bearer serving in the front lines. On the home front, Grania s childhood in a small town on the edge of Lake Ontario, where her father owns a hotel; and as a residential student at The Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in a small Ontario city. A bright child, she has to learn real sign language (which replaces the private language she and her sister had, as small children, invented). She also learns, by necessity, extreme self-discipline and control over her emotions, which enables her to survive the trauma of leaving home and the facts of institutional life with 300 other deaf children around her. No visits home are permitted during the school year. Grania s Mother, guilt-ridden and never accepting of Grania s deafness, tries to make Grania hear. She tries for cures by miracle, and by taking her to Rochester, New York, in hopes of finding specialized medical treatment. Grania s early experiences inside her own silence and within a family that tries to overprotectdespite her gradually developing independence and strengthslater il