Halfway through our family reunion, my mother-in-law pushed my 68-year-old father off a wooden dock and into a muddy pond. Then she laughed and told him he needed to learn to take a joke. What she didn’t realize was that my father was wearing his $4,100 hearing aids, the only things that had allowed him to hear properly in fifteen years. When he surfaced, soaked and confused, he reached for both ears. They were gone. Forty relatives stood watching as he looked up at the woman who had pushed him. “They’re gone, sis,” he said, his voice trembling. “I can’t hear anything.” I pulled him out of the water, wrapped him in a towel, and tried to hold back my anger. My husband, Josh, soon came running down from the barbecue.

When he learned what his mother had done, he went completely silent. His mother, Cindy, simply shrugged and said, “He should have taken them out before coming near the water.” For hours, Josh and his cousins searched the muddy pond, but the hearing aids never appeared. I knew they were ruined. Their warranty had expired six months earlier, and Medicare wouldn’t cover replacements. My father had spent two years saving for those devices, putting away fifty dollars at a time from his retirement checks. Without them, he would return to the lonely life he had known before: sitting alone at home, unable to follow conversations or even hear the phone ring. That evening, I drove him back to Buffalo. Before leaving, he leaned toward me and whispered, “Please don’t make trouble with her on my account.” But I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened. And then I remembered something Josh and I had been saving for eighteen months: $4,500 for his mother’s dream birthday cruise…