I had the pleasure of meeting Judy living in Santa Barbara whose grandparents were deaf. She wrote this "Tribute to My Grandparents" with the following excerpt below:
All this sounds perfectly normal, doesn't it? And it was, except for one thing: My grandparents never heard a word I said. They were deaf. We communicated using sign language. My grandfather's blindness later on did make it harder to communicate. But where this is love and the will to achieve, not even blindness is a permanent obstacle to communication.
So when I hear people occasionally speak of the deaf as not being normal, or not functioning in the saul manner, I am incredulous. Who are they talking about? Certainly, not any of the deaf children and adults I know. My grandparents led happy, productive, useful lives. They reared three rambunctious hearing children to become sensitive, involved adults.
Being deaf does not mean you are less of a person that you do not think, feel love, and reach out for people like other human beings. Are Italians regarded as abnormal because they speak Italian or Frenchmen because they speak French? Sign language is just like that - a language. And people anywhere in the world speak in their native way.
