Losing Lydia

one

My grandmother owned a gramaphone, she listend to it everyday since she got it. She would always tell me how beautiful it sounded, then would ask if I agreed. Id always nod to be polite but i had no clue what she was saying at the time. I eventally learned to read lips. I still didnt know what was going on. I just knew what mouthing gesture meant my name, lydia.Everyone in my life thought I was mute and had some degree of a learing disability until I was five years old. No knew or even pondered the idea that I couldn't hear until the day my grandmother died. She asked me for the last time if I liked the music, that's when i spoke my firt words. "There is no music." She died that afternoon.

In her will she left me the gramaphone due to the fact she thought I enjoyed the music so much. My mother took me to the library and purchased a book on sign language. She learned it first then taught me. it came slow at first this new attempt at language, but soon I was spelling things so fast my mother couldn't keep up. She often asked me to slow down as if I was talking to fast. She tried hard to make me feel like a normal child who lived a normal childhood.

That wasn't the only major change in my life. We moved out of our house in the small town we lived in and moved to the contry side two towns over. We moved into my grandmothers house and my mother tried hard to keep it up to the stardards my grandmother had for it. She even tried her hand at replanting the garden. When , my grandmother died so did the flowers. A lot of people say its because of the chilly october air and cold rain, but we knew the truth. Her plants always lasted into early to mid december even in a foot of snow. When my grandmother didn't make it past october neither did the flowers.

Needless to say the house was never the same. Nothing was the same after that summer. My mother gave up the garden she tried so desperately to revive during the spring after my grandmother died. That summer my parents got into a huge argument, not that I could hear. I could hower feel the heavy vibrations travel through the thin walls into my room where I was sent so I could not read my parents lips. Eventualls my hands got tired of feeling the wall for sound and eventually the arguing subsided. My father was a retailor for real estate marketing agency. He left that morning like nothing happened. He paused at the door and signed goodbye. He didn't come back. Not that evening, not the next, not that week, not that month or any others to follow, he just never came back. I lost my grandmother and my father in the same year.

I secretly knew he'd never come back but I still waited for him. It pained my mother to watch. About a year later, when I was six and a half my mother became far to sick and far to disapointed in herself to let me stare out the window any longer. "He's gone" she said and signed at the same time, just so I could see it and she could hear it at the same time.

I'd always thought that my father was the biggest loss in my life and always would be for that matter. But it was not her greatest fear, it was not what kept her up late at night for years to come. Not even after getting sick was she more afraid of losing her own life. Looking back to the eve of my 12th birthday the day before my mother passed away I finally realized she was not afraid of losing her dear husband, her mother who died years earlier, or even herself. It was me, it was always me, she was afraid of losing me.

She was afraid of losing lydia.