A Lone Hearing Aid
Photo by Mark Paton on Unsplash
Elevate the Discourse | Aug. 19, 2025
It’s been one of those weeks, and it’s only Tuesday. You know the kind, your Zoom meeting crashes, the car won’t start, or you forget that the Spanish word 'embarazada' isn't a cognate for 'embarrassed.' Or perhaps it's something like this: My mother (with late-stage dementia) lost one of her hearing aids yesterday. It disappeared sometime between 7:00 and 7:30 a.m. If you see it, ask it to come back home. We miss it.
The tiny device just walked away. (I didn’t realize hearing aids can have legs. They have ears, so why not legs? I know, that’s a dad joke.) Here’s what I think happened: one of its hearing aid friends must have pulled up to the house, beeped the horn, and her right ear’s hearing aid took off, then drove away to live in someone else’s ear. I am stumped. You tell me what happened. We’ve looked everywhere: couches, chairs, trash cans, and shower drains. Here’s what I learned over the past twenty-four hours: a single hearing aid is as useful as an inflatable dartboard.
I grant you, it's a little funny. I’ve wondered all day how something so small can hide on a floor so hard and wooden. That’s about where the humor ends. Even with her late-stage dementia, my mother feels incredibly guilty about losing her hearing aid (or anything, really). All day, she touched her right ear, as if it might have magically reappeared. When we turned the chairs over, she felt around, over, and under cushions, chairs, and couches. This is about all she can do. She’s practically blind. Her looking for anything is hopeless. Feeling and touching are things she can do.
Mother knows we’re not mad at her. How could we be? We all lose things. I think we are as frustrated as she is. Her frustration is more intense because she perceives it as a sign of her overall decline. To the rest of us (my father, my wife, and me), it is a simple thing that could happen to anyone. To her, this is yet another reminder of something she’d rather forget. She can’t remember many things, but she always seems to recognize that her memories are fading. That’s a unique kind of hell, or so it seems to me.
This ruined her day. It sent her into an emotional tailspin that included crying, fears that this might be the one thing that would convince us to put her in a home, and thoughts that maybe the best solution to all our problems would be for “the Lord just to take her away.” Saying, “Mother, it’s just a hearing aid, relax,” doesn’t help. This isn’t how you love someone with dementia. I believe I love her best by telling her that “the Lord isn’t ready for her” and that “we still need you.” Hearing aids can be replaced. Mothers are not.
The hearing aid will appear, or we’ll get a new one. But mothers don’t pop up in corners behind the couch or get delivered with Prime shipping via Amazon. They are once-in-a-lifetime gifts to be cherished. After all, it’s impossible to mass-produce something so unique. You don’t want to be casual or cavalier about the mother you’ve got—at least that’s what I think. I try to tell her that. I hope she can hear me. She probably won’t remember what I said tomorrow. If that’s the case, I’ll tell her again, in the left ear. I want to make sure she remembers, even for a few hours. She needs to know that losing one hearing aid is not a reason to give up on life. If I have to say that again, I’ll do it until I’m blue in the face. Because what else do I have to do besides look for one lost hearing aid? Right now, nothing. I’m glad to do it.
Richard Bryant
The Rev. Richard Bryant is an ordained elder in the North Carolina Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. This post is republished with permission from his Substack blog, Elevate the Discourse.