Mrs C in 2001

I went this week to the wake for Mrs C. For over twenty years, I
lived across the street from her. We stayed friendly with her family
after my wife and I moved down the street twelve years ago. But she
spent the last ten years of her life in care because she had
Alzheimer's Disease. That's an especially debilitating dementia when
you are completely deaf, as she was and had been since birth. I never
saw her in all that time.

Deaf or no, Mrs C was no shrinking violet and, in the 1980s and '90s,
she was the unofficial mayor of our neighbourhood, paying attention,
passing on news, looking out for neighbours, introducing herself to
new people, and so on. If you wanted to know what happened, you'd ask
Mrs C.

She did not vocalise with fluency as some deaf people do, though as a
child she'd gone to a school that taught her speech. They also taught
her ASL, and she picked up the local dialect of that when she moved to
Newfoundland in the early 1950s. Her husband was also deaf, though he
had become deaf as a small child, and he still had some residual
fluency as a speaker. I never heard him speak much, and certainly not
as much as his wife, but his children did, and so did other close
relatives.

Mrs C of course knew the North American hand-spelling system. I never
learned that; my mind was already filled with the two-handed system
that my father had taught me as a child. When I met Mrs C she was
surprised that I knew the two-handed system (which is common in
Britain and had been more common earlier in the 20th century in
Newfoundland) and she enjoyed seeing me, a hearing person, spell
things that old-fashioned way.

She also lip-read with ease, making her, in my mind, a kind of
five-language polyglot: ASL, Nfld SL, American spelling, UK spelling,
and English lip-reading. And of course she could read and write. She
could make herself understood to anyone who wanted to understand her,
and she readily understood anyone who wanted her to understand. She
was an amazing woman of whom -- in the two decades that I saw her
almost every day -- I only took two or three pictures. Now that she's
dead, I wish I had more.

This was the last picture I took of her. It was summer 2001 just
before we moved to a nearby neighbourhood. I think I was leaving for
work and we had a short conversation across the street. I grabbed
this shot in my Canonet, on Kodak Supra 100 film. Not exactly a sharp
picture or anything, but a nice one that shows her laughing at me in
mid-sign.


When some people die -- after long illnesses and after successful
lives -- their death is not so much filled with grief, as celebration
and relief. That's what the feeling was at her wake: a celebration of
the person she was, and relief that her long illness was over.