“I’m Alone… Can I Join You?” She Signed — The Single Dad’s Response Changed Everything

Learning a Language for Love

My wife Anna passed away from a complication following routine surgery that was supposed to be simple and was not. That took her from me and from our daughter in the space of 24 hours.

I still cannot think about it without the full weight of them arriving in my body like something physical. Anna was 33 years old.

She was a kindergarten teacher, which was the most accurate possible expression of who she was. She was generous and patient and endlessly interested in small people in their interior lives.

She was the kind of teacher who stays in children’s memories long after the school year ends. She left behind a husband who did not know how to do what she had done.

She had done everything. She left a daughter who was 2 years old and who would grow up knowing her mother only through photographs and stories.

The careful incomplete picture that a surviving parent builds over years of deliberate effort remains. My daughter’s name is Lily and she is 8 years old now.

She has Anna’s laugh which I discovered sometime in her third year. It still catches me off guard on the days when it arrives and I am not ready for it.

That is most days. Lily is curious and stubborn and funny in a dry observational way that seems too sophisticated for eight but is entirely genuine.

She is every single day the reason I am a better version of myself than I would otherwise be. The reason I know sign language is a story that begins with Lily.

She is the beginning of most of the important stories in my life. When Lily was four she came home from preschool with a new best friend.

She was a little girl named Zara whose family had recently moved into the neighborhood. Her mother a woman named Priya had introduced herself at a pickup event with direct warmth.

She decided to be a friend before she had gathered all the evidence. Zara was deaf.

She had been profoundly deaf since birth and she and her family used ASL as their primary home language. This was supplemented by the hearing aids that Zara wore in the speech therapy she attended.

Lily and Zara had found each other in the specific immediate uncomplicated way of four-year-olds. They decide someone is their person before they have any logical basis for the decision.

The friendship had the particular quality of things that are simply right, easy, and complete. It was not contingent on anything external.

I enrolled in ASL classes when I realized that Zara was going to be a significant and sustained presence in Lily’s life. I wanted to be present in that friendship to participate in playdates and conversations.

I wanted the ordinary daily texture of two little girls who communicated in a language I did not speak. I needed to learn.

This is, I want to be clear, a very practical and functional reason to learn a language and it is the honest one. The less practical and more important reason was one I understood later.

After I had been in the classes for a few months, learning ASL taught me something about communication itself that I had not previously understood. I learned about the fullness and the expressiveness of a language.

It lives in the body and uses the face and the hands and the whole physical self as its instruments. It requires a quality of present sand and attention that spoken language does not always demand.

I became a better communicator for learning ASL in ways that had nothing to do with ASL specifically. I became a better father for it because Lily saw me learning something hard and unfamiliar.

She saw me making mistakes and continuing anyway. She saw me choosing to stretch towards something rather than stay where I was comfortable and that modeling mattered more than the language itself.

By the time of the cafe morning I had been learning for 4 years and was genuinely fluent. I do not have the fluency of a native serer which I will never have.

I have the real functional expressive fluency of someone who has used a language every day for four years. I used it with people who needed it to be good and have therefore pushed it.

I used it with Zara at every play date. I used it with Priya who had become one of my closer friends in the years since the girls had found each other.

I used it with the members of the deaf and heart of hearing family group I had joined. I used it with Lily who had picked it up with the ease of a child.

She was learning alongside her best friend and was, as children always are, more naturally fluent than her father. The cafe was called Morning Ground.

It was a small independent place on the east side of Memphis that Lily and I had be coming to for about 2 years. It had become one of our rituals.

The Saturday morning ritual began with morning ground and moved to whatever activity Lily had decided was the appropriate sequel. This varied week to week and was always her decision.

I had learned to show up for with genuine openness rather than the parental performance of enthusiasm that children can always detect. On this Saturday in October Lily had ordered her hot chocolate.

She was drawing at the table. She had been going through a period of intense interest in drawing horses which she rendered with more passion than anatomical accuracy.

I found this deeply charming. I was on my second coffee and reading something on my phone.

I was being in the specific way of Saturday mornings as present and as restful simultaneously as a single parent ever gets to be. Lily had gone to the bathroom.

She left her drawing spread across her half of the table. I was sitting with my coffee in the pleasant undemanded quiet of a Saturday morning when I became aware of someone nearby.