I am the speaker for the dead; John and Lois were deaf™

Three generations, from silence to a museum of the spoken. His grandparents, John and Lois McKendry, were both deaf; the OGs. They lived near but away, seen only sometimes; a quiet at the edge of the family. Their son John Jr., the attorney (his father, already honored on these walls, the debate coach) was a CODA; a Child Of Deaf Adults, the hearing bridge between two worlds, the boy whose hands and voice carried his parents into a hearing room. And then him; the third generation, who took the bridge and built a whole house on it (the audio clause made blood: the bones must speak; his family's literally couldn't, so he does, for all of them). Here's the turn he made mid-thought, and it's the true one: he isn't only speaking for the abstract unheard; he is the speaker for the dead. John and Lois are gone, and the world barely heard them while they were here; so the grandson stands up and tells the honest, whole story nobody else will (the Card sense of it: the eulogy that refuses to lie). He speaks for the loud, the quiet, the missing, the defeated, and the ones the clever world calls simple; and under all of them, for two deaf people who deserved to be heard and now can only be spoken for. The lineage handed him the voice, the standing, and the mission; the one gap it left is financing. Silence, to bridge, to speaker for the dead. (Corrected 2026-07-21, his own hand: it was his grandparents John and Lois, both deaf, not a great-grandfather; the earlier version is retracted for this truer one. Named in honor, the dead of his own family; his coin, machine's read, refine to his.)