'You Shall Not Insult the Deaf'

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For a while, I didn't know what was happening or even if he was alive. I threw laundry into a bag and drove in the direction of home, flying 90 miles per hour down the highway, daring a cop to give me a ticket. When I got to the hospital I got the story. My father had been turning left and was hit by a man who had run a red light. The car door on the driver's side was smashed in, leaving my father with three broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a cut on his spleen. But alive. Very much alive.

There he was, my dad, my invincible dad, in a hospital bed hooked up to wires and tubes. He was awake, signing, asking for water. Each day he improved, first getting his neck brace off, then having his breathing tubes taken out. The human body is an amazing thing. Reinflate a lung and then it fixes the puncture itself. Drain some blood from around the spleen, and it heals itself. I could feel myself coming together as I watched him get better.

A Catholic woman in the hospital lobby was counting the beads on her rosary. "Do you pray?" she asked me.

"I’ve been trying to pray all day," I said. "But I can't."

"People pray in many different ways," she told me. "For me, waking up in the morning is a prayer."

"People in school used to tell me they would pray for my parents to be able to hear."

"Is that what you pray for?"

"You shall not insult the deaf," I thought, recalling a line from the Book of Leviticus. It was a line read as part of the Rosh Hashanah service. Rosh Hashanah meant the New Year, meant growth and change and renewal. "No," I said. "I pray that they'll both wake up in the morning."

I never wrote that essay about how hard my childhood was. Instead, I wrote an essay about how my father didn't die. The words I hadn't been able to speak suddenly gushed onto paper. I was grateful and sad and alone all at the same time. My own lungs were reinflated. The cut on my own spleen began to heal. I prayed on paper and watched my father sleep.