Review: Losing Music by John Cotter

Review by Gretchen Walsh

Milkweed Editions. 2024. 304 pages.

When I consider what it means to write about chronic illness—specifically to write about those mysterious ones we don’t understand and can’t quite cure—I often return to a quote from Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill. She writes, “Among the drawbacks of illness as matter for literature there is a poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.” 

John Cotter’s memoir, Losing Music, emerges as a profound and earnest effort to capture the pain, discomfort, and uncertainty that comes with becoming mysteriously, incurably, ill. To do so, Cotter grounds his readers in collective emotions. Meditations on luck, misfortune, and grief arrive in a prose that verges on lyrical—he doesn’t sugarcoat the loss that has come with the onset of his condition or present himself as all-knowing in the process of coming to terms with it. Rather, he organizes his narrative in a way that lifts and falls like a song. John Cotter’s writing, like music, “[gives] feeling a pulse.”

It is not uncommon for our grand ideas of the world—of fairness—of agency—to become shattered after the sudden onset of loss. This certainly holds true for the loss of ability, when a body we have known as fairly reliable becomes faulty. Part I of the memoir follows this rupture. Cotter first started losing his hearing at thirty. It was not all at once, or progressive hearing loss, but rather an ever-changing sense of sound. Some days he wakes up with a persistent roaring in his ears that drowns all other sound out. Some days his hearing is normal, some days he is completely deaf, and some days his hearing drifts in and out. His hearing loss is coupled with migraines, balance issues, and bouts of vertigo that leave him sick for days at a time, lying on a bed with a ceiling that won’t stop spinning. What Cotter shows us, at the start of his memoir, is that when his hearing started to change, so too did his work, his relationships, his own view of himself and disability—all of which were now subject to the whims of an unpredictable body.

Through a series of trips to specialists that culminate in a trip to the Mayo Clinic, Cotter illuminates the defeating nature of the American healthcare system and how challenging it can be to find care when your symptoms don’t fit in a box. He eventually gets diagnosed with Ménière’s disease, but the way his hearing fluctuated on the hour didn’t quite make sense with the diagnosis. Cotter will go on to call Ménière’s disease “a diagnosis of exclusion, a lack of understanding made into a mouthful of air.” What I found particularly compelling about these stories is that he describes his experiences with doctors with the same frustration and urgency that I imagine he felt in the moment. However, it seems that in returning to these visits to write about them, he has approached them with an unexpected and nuanced undercurrent of empathy. He describes one visit, when he pulled out all of his paperwork—medical records, tests, research—to try and explain to a doctor how a diagnosis of Ménière’s disease didn’t account for the atypical aspects of his hearing loss, and the doctor responded, “alright, so how do you think I can help you?” Cotter writes:

I understand this question better now more than I did at the time. Here was a healer face-to-face with something he was almost certain he couldn’t heal. Living with misfortune has made me belatedly sympathetic to characters like this overworked doctor…

Why do we assume doctors can fix nearly anything? Why do we assume that even when cures aren’t around now, they’re around the corner, or a few yards ahead? The cosmos is too big for us to understand, and the human body is too mysterious.

As so many of us do when our medical systems fail us—when there is no obvious cure for the ways our bodies have changed—Cotter eventually takes on the role of philosopher, researcher, medical anthropologist, historian. He turns to the experiences of others as a means of understanding his own misfortunes in health—and how to make meaning, how to proceed.

He begins Part II with his time in Fort Lyon, CO. There’s a call for teachers at the new homeless shelter there, a new community engagement initiative. With hearing that comes and goes and no definitive cures or suggestions from doctors, Cotter signs up to teach at the shelter in need of a change. As he lives and works there, he becomes familiar with many residents. Their narratives illuminate the heavy hand of luck, chance, and fate. He references a brief questionnaire that social workers administer to determine the level of trauma in someone’s childhood. The higher people score on the trauma test, the more likely they are, statistically, to develop an addiction, fall victim to domestic violence. Risk of chronic health problems escalates, chances of heart disease, emphysema, and obesity rise. So much of life is luck. If you decide your life is built on luck, how do you make sense of your misfortunes? How do you decide how to live?

At the end of his time at Fort Lyon, he notices that he’d been able to hear better while he was there. He says,

How much of this was the condition finally, after impossible years, coming to retract its claws? And how much was my body adapting—learning to work with the machines in my ears, learning to better interpret the sounds they provided? How much was my body learning to compensate for the impairment of my balance?

And how should I live—how should I regulate my emotional life, my expectations of the world—when health could be given or taken away so capriciously? When it might worsen again at any moment, or might hold off indefinitely? When so much that mattered rode the currents of fate? Or of luck?

As a reader with her own mysterious illness, what I found particularly charming about this book was how Cotter subtly shifts the way he views his own life and disability—how he begins to shift uncertainty into mystery. There’s a scene towards the end of the book: he and his wife, Elisa, have travelled to New Mexico for the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta to see the annual launch with a group of friends. He’s hoping that viewing the hot air balloon launch will be nothing short of transcendent, but the night before the balloon release, he comes down with a vertigo attack. In the morning, he chooses to miss the main attraction to stay at the house and rest, saying, “I could come if I wanted, feel sick and exhausted at the fair, but part of living a good life is not heaving that strain onto others, not acting like I’m immortal. Letting them go.” I know this scene intimately: calling in, missing out, staying home to curse and nurse the unpredictable body. Which is why I was surprised when, instead of responding with a commentary on the day’s loss, Cotter takes the focus somewhere else entirely. He says,

Life has every mystery. This event I miss, the balloons in the air, the ecstatic moment, is merely one of millions of things I can’t access—the mind of a bat, the pattern of this small gust about to touch me. No one can visit all the cities—we take them on faith. We’ll never count the species that once survived on Earth.

If life has every mystery, becoming ill is one of them—how to handle it is another. Losing Music shows us what it means to have a world ruptured by disability. It uses that same world—one of luck, misfortune, uncertainty, awe, and pain—to ask us to consider all that remains.

Gretchen Walsh is the Undergraduate Fellow at the American Literary Review. She is currently working towards a degree in English: Writing and Rhetoric and minoring in Medical Anthropology at the University of North Texas, where she combines her special interests in creative nonfiction and health narratives. She also manages the Sustainable Arts Garden on campus. Read more of her writing on That’s Sick!