Keep Singing, Geri

By Patrice Stephenson

Here was the first successful Deaf woman I had ever known and she had lots to share. She had plenty of degrees, expertise, energy and enthusiasm and with those came expectations.

I was fascinated at Geri’s attempt to sing Danny Boy to me. She was at least fifty years old and hadn’t heard the song since she was five when she lost her hearing to meningitis. It wasn’t pretty. Her attempt to sing the tune was both entertaining and hard on my ears. Her rhythm was impeccable, painfully sustaining notes that were close to the pitch she remembered but could not quite match. I listened to all of it. She loved music and lyrically beautiful poems. She knew lots of songs and sang them without restraint. It was with such a love of verse, that she approached her life. This is a tribute to Gerilee Gustason, July 5,1939 – November 9, 2018

I met Geri and Esther Zawolkow in the 1980s. Their pictures were (are) on the back of our Signing Exact English (SEE) dictionary, and their crew came to us for a school-wide sign language Skillshop. It was brutal. After a couple of days of instruction and practice, every teacher, interpreter, paraprofessional and parent was videotaped and received a critique. I was a young parent with a small sign vocabulary, but I came away with scads of information that have proven to be vitally important. We were exposed to historical and current trends in education of the deaf as well as communication styles of nationwide users of sign. I learned about the background of the English delivery of signs from American Sign Language (ASL). Here was the first successful Deaf woman I had ever known and she had lots to share. She had plenty of degrees, expertise, energy and enthusiasm and with those came expectations. (For more on that, see both the Memorium recently published in the Winter 2019 American Annals of the Deaf and an article on S.E.E. in the Journal of Early Hearing Detection and Intervention (JEHDI) 2018: 3(2):18-29.)   

Geri expected the most of the more capable of us. If we were willing to learn, we were to learn more, do more, teach more, and perform better. My inspiration for communicating with our profoundly deaf child, in light of Geri and Esther’s expectations, eventually led to my joining into SEE instructor status. Esther and Geri introduced SEE to hundreds of communities in the U.S., and into Canada and Singapore, and together we continued that work. When I roomed with Geri, I learned that I could talk on the phone, listen to music, practice signing or interpreting all night long, but when she wanted to sleep, I did so in the dark. Once her eyes closed, I did not open the door of a light-filled room, or cause the floor to vibrate with my footsteps, or I could expect a cranky greeting in the morning. Might as well just go to bed as our friend Sadie also learned. She had lain in bed wide-awake singing “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…” while drumming out the rhythm on her chest, in the dark.

Most children with hearing loss are born to hearing parents who have much to learn about deafness, and about seeing language, both its beauty and its barriers. As ambassadors of sign language communication, we learned to provide SEE as an option for mastery of English. In production, our goal was to deliver what we said or heard in the air. In reception, we learned to recognize the mastery or the missing pieces in the language we saw produced in the air from our children. Geri was insistent that we study ASL as well, since so much SEE originates with it, but also because it is the language of the Deaf in the United States. We gained the attitude that “As adults they can communicate using Japanese for all we care, but our job is to see that they learn to read and write in English.”

Skillshops served lots of purposes. Interpreted education was emerging as a thing. It was evolving into careers and most who served as interpreters in educational settings had no means for skill assessment. Parents complained that those who taught language to their children didn’t provide complete language models. Geri and Esther to the rescue! Together they developed the Educational Sign Skills Evaluation (ESSE), one tool for interpreters and one for teachers. As the tests were being developed, Skillshops served as field tests. We videotaped students by day and scored their productions by night. Geri taught us to count the components of signs as well as to determine the concepts penned on the page. We could give students a number and a percentage of accuracy and pinpoint areas for improving. We all took the test in PSE (Pidgin Signed English), SEE, and ASL and learned to administer it. We still do that.

Gerilee never married, but she chose to raise a child. She fell in love with a little girl who was more than a toddler but not ready for school. Geri went about giving her a language and unconditional love. Zoey accompanied Geri whenever it was feasible, and sometimes when it wasn’t. The headstrong daughter came along with us on Skillshops, playing under tables and running through the halls. This child learned to sign, to read and write, and to think for herself. Geri was devoted to Zoey as the greatest love in her life (at least until her grandchild came along).

Geri’s sundown years were contentedly spent with her large family of canine and feline friends and helping Zoey with her son. From her beautiful home, she continued to fight for the rights of parents and children in their state of Washington. She was working on updating materials and on ESSE teams. I was personally afraid that falling over one of those dogs would kill her, but she recovered (more than once), and I saw her last January when we met…at Esther’s house.

So appropriate that we would see each other for the last time, in the same company, and with the same commitment for educating children who are deaf or hard of hearing.  ~

Editor’s note: The author resides near Wichita, Kansas. Rather than listing her own professional accomplishments, she notes that she is very proud of her family and friends who share rich regard for deaf and hard of hearing individuals who cope with the hearing world. As she says, who knew hearing loss would teach us to listen?    

H&V Communicator – Spring 2019