John Cotter’s memoir “Losing Music” is full of unanswered questions. The cause of his loss may be Meniere’s disease, but no one really understands Meniere’s and he may not have it. His disabling vertigo may be related to migraine, or it may not be. His tinnitus drives him crazy, then goes away, and inevitably returns.

Hearing and vertigo loom large, and come close to defining his life, as they did mine when I wrote “Shouting Won’t Help”. His descriptions of vertigo are so accurate that just reading them nearly gave me vertigo as well. But it is the loss of music that is the undercurrent of the book: “What I feared losing—the catastrophe that the roaring shadowed forth—wasn’t just a series of structured sounds, but the world those sounds created, a world you could live inside: Bach on a snowy afternoon, hard blues on a long night’s drive, the background mood in a restaurant or at a party… Music is color… You feel it on your skin.” Cotter is not a musician, he’s a listener, and shares his eclectic passions with the reader.

Cotter’s hearing loss takes a form that is new to me. He has hearing aids but often hears better without them. His hearing fluctuates – more dramatically than the wobble I sometimes experience. Not only can he hear from time to time without hearing aids, he also sometimes cannot hear even with them.

The book is loosely structured and swirls around Meniere’s, much as Meniere’s swirls around those who suffer from it.  Hearing comes and goes, tinnitus washes in and recedes, vertigo is always in the wings, hovering. A whirling to the right, then flat on the bed or the floor or whatever is closest, eyes closed, don’t try to turn over. Figure out where vomiting will be the least offensive.

Cotter is a lyrical writer. “I had one good ear that afternoon, and it let me hear [his friend’s] voice. What I also heard: the brush of my feet in grass and dry leaves and the pops of breaking twigs. Wind: the stop and start of it you can’t predict, or control. Skittering insects, chirps of forty birds, fifty clicks, chitters, squees, throat clearing, a rusty hinge squeal, a piping, pinched flutes, calls like a finger on a wet glass, return calls. The green insect almost too small to see—you couldn’t make out its shape, just a speck of green.” 

“Losing Music” is a thoughtful account of life-altering events, and a probing into a medical mystery, mostly unsolved. There are detours, some of them lengthy. Jonathan Swift, who may have suffered from Meniere’s, gets a chapter to himself. The title, “The Hundred Oceans of Jonathan Swift,” refers to Swift’s use of water metaphors to describe the sounds in his ears — oceans, or the “noise of seven Watermills.” The occasional brutal fact pops up: The British explorer John Speke, convinced that the buzzing in his ear was an insect, stabbed himself in the eardrum to get rid of it. The Mayo Clinic does not come off favorably.

I do hope readers don’t accept his assessment of cochlear implants. Someday, he says, he’ll get cochlear implants “installed.” He isn’t hopeful. “Implants aren’t like real sound – for the majority of users, they’re far worse than real sound — so I can’t help but dread the day.” I think the vast majority of cochlear-implant users would disagree. He’s right that the moment of activation can be jarring. But with time and practice, the brain comes to hear the digital cochlear-implant signals as normal sound. They do not do as well with music, so Cotter’s fears are not entirely unfounded. But I know dozens of people with cochlear implants, including professional musicians. I don’t know anyone who regrets the decision to get them.