I found my husband’s hearing test inside the cookbook

Dear Delyara, My husband refused hearing aids for almost a decade. We argued constantly because I thought he was ignoring me and he insisted I mumbled. He died last year. Today, I opened an old cookbook and found his audiology report folded between two recipes. The test was from eight years ago. His hearing loss was worse than he ever admitted. On the back, in his handwriting, he had written: “Mary thinks I don’t listen. Maybe I actually can’t.” I sat at the kitchen table and cried until my tea went cold. How many arguments did we have because I believed attention was the problem? How many times did I say, “You hear what you want to hear”? He eventually got hearing aids, but by then we had built habits around misunderstanding each other: me speaking sharply, him pretending he heard rather than asking again. I wish he had shown me that sentence. I wish I had asked differently. Marriage is full of tiny wrong explanations you live inside for years because nobody knows they are wrong yet. The report is beside me now. I keep reading the line where my husband privately considered the possibility that I was hurt by something his body was doing without either of us understanding it.