The Awkward Beauty of Grunts and Hiccups

The Awkward Beauty of Grunts and Hiccups

Not every sound is beautiful. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth keeping.

A grunt is not much of a legacy.

Neither is a hiccup.

A throat clearing probably isn’t going to make the family history. Neither is the little sigh before someone answers a question, the snort that escapes in the middle of a laugh, or that one song a family member insists on singing every Christmas while everyone is playing cards.

We all know one family member who just can’t stop singing that song.

They’re just noises.

Sometimes annoying ones.

Until they belong to someone you love.

Hear something enough times and it becomes familiar.

Listen to it for enough years and it becomes part of a person.

And then it’s not just a sound. It’s the footprint of a life.

People Have Sounds

Spend enough time with someone and a strange little catalog of imperfections begins to form.

There’s the noise Dad makes when he lowers himself into his favorite chair. At this point, it’s unclear who is going to go first, Dad or the chair.

Mom has the inhale from the kitchen just before she says something she knows she probably shouldn’t. The eye roll usually gives it away.

There’s the cough from the bedroom that doesn’t need to come. Nobody is sick. Nothing is smoky. Nobody is choking. And yet, right around the time everyone wants to go to sleep, there it is. Jagged little spurts developed over years of anxiety, habit, and probably too much drinking.

There’s the whistle between the teeth. Not an easy whistle, either. This is a specialized skill formed over years of puckering, leveraging the tongue to land just right between two air gaps in the teeth. It's a geographical masterpiece and said whistler is now actively seeking new recruits to join the parade.

There’s the “well....lll........ll” that goes on for far too long. An answer should follow, but well seems to enjoy hearing itself too much.

Nobody writes these things down.

Most of them don’t even have names.

But families know them.

Sometimes a single sound from another room is enough to know exactly who is there.

A person can become recognizable without saying a single word.

That’s How We Remember Them

Written words are wonderful at preserving what someone said.

But that isn’t always how we remember them.

The crazy people in our lives—the ones we love, the ones who annoy us, the ones whose habits become so familiar we barely notice them anymore—don’t live in our memories as perfectly edited sentences.

They come back in pieces.

Sometimes unexpectedly.

Sometimes years later.

And sometimes all it takes is a sound.

That’s how we remember people. Not only by what they said, but by the strange, imperfect, completely ordinary ways they moved through the world.

Maybe that’s why those little sounds matter.

They aren’t background noise.

They’re traces of a person being here.

What Do We Do When the Sound Stops?

And then one day, all we hear is silence.

The chair is still there, but there’s no one to break it.

The kitchen is still there, but there are no more long-winded “welllllls.”

The bedroom is missing its familiar coughs and spurts.

It’s just... quiet.

Because the person who occupied these spaces, who we loved, is no longer here.

And those sound monstrosities that drove us to pull our hair out?

They become our everyday bedfellows.

The song they sang on repeat becomes our wake-up call.

The grunt after morning coffee becomes something we’d give anything to hear one more time.

The sounds haven’t changed.

We have.

And we want them back.

Not in a nice, tidy package.

Ripped and torn, just the way we loved them.

Leave a Little Noise Behind

Life is messy. Imperfect. Ugly sounds and half-forgotten sentences.

Love and acid reflux.

It’s the in-between moments that we can forever dance to.

So make the ridiculous sound.

Tell the story the way you tell it.

This is, after all, your story.

And you write the soundtrack.

Being human is not perfect.

So stop polishing.

Start living.

Be loud.