Today’s lesson in David Copeland’s American Sign Language class is about deaf poetry, an art form so sublime that it’s difficult for a hearing person to comprehend it, even with a skilled ASL interpreter close by. The poem under discussion: “To A Hearing Mother,” by Ella Mae Lentz, signed by the poet on a classroom video screen.

When her instructor at the Wisconsin School for the Deaf asks a question about it, Mary Urfer’s hand shoots up.

In the poem, a tree becomes a metaphor for a deaf child with hearing parents. The tree has taken root thanks to its mother and father — but to grow strong and healthy, it must be nourished by the deaf world.

The poem, in a way, is about Mary Gabrielle Urfer. State Journal readers met her as Gabby, the 7-year-old from Mount Horeb profiled in the newspaper in 1997.

Her parents had just made the wrenching decision to send their first child — a girl who’d spent too much of her young life in a hospital — 80 miles away to Delavan, where she would live in a dorm and attend the state’s school for deaf children.
Today, Urfer, 19, will zip into a white graduation robe and walk through a ceremony with her 12 fellow senior classmates to become the 145th graduating class of the Wisconsin School for the Deaf. It has been a long journey for Mary and her parents, but one that keeps moving forward.

Mary, born deaf, was not diagnosed until age 1. Her parents frantically began to learn sign language to communicate with a child who didn’t speak. In preschool, she was a resistant learner. Mary threw violent tantrums, brought on by a pain she could not verbalize.

By age 3½, her parents made a horrifying discovery: Mary had lymphangioma, a condition in which lymph vessels grow wildly into tumors, enveloping the organs. One tumor was found wrapped around the aorta, the main artery in Mary’s heart. Surgeries — and life-threatening infections — followed.

By age 6 Mary was healthy, but not yet thriving in school. Deaf neighbors of the Urfers, who would become close family friends and cherished role models for Mary, convinced the girl’s parents to consider sending her to the Wisconsin School for the Deaf, a rolling green campus serving children ages 3 to 21.

WSD calls itself a bilingual-bicultural school: Learning happens in American Sign Language; written English is taught as a second language. With an enrollment of 122, it serves only a fraction of the deaf students in the state; others are “mainstreamed” in their hometown schools with the help of interpreters.

For Mary, the school was the right choice. But it wasn’t easy for the Urfers. Five days a week, a key member of their family was gone. Teachers, therapists and counselors at the school became Mary’s weekday guides through a turbulent adolescence and early teenage years.

“We went through different stages with her. Her emotions, with the disabilities — yes, there were hard times,” said her father, Dan. “You want to be there as a parent, but you have to let these people handle it. You trust them.”

As time passed, Mary was diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder, a form of autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. She’d suffer severe anxiety attacks, and it would be years before she mastered the self-calming techniques she uses now.

She could also pull off what her dad calls “hooky stuff.”

“The phone would ring at 10 p.m. and she’d be at the health center,” said her mother, Kay. So one of her parents would make the late-night journey to pick her up.

“She’d get home and she was fine,” her dad said. “I think homesickness is what it was.”

In the meantime, Mary’s younger brother Michael “had to grow up fast,” Dan Urfer said.

“It’s kind of normal with children that have a special-needs sibling,” Kay Urfer said. “I think they do feel left out, no matter what you do.”

Now 15, Mike is a track standout at a Mount Horeb High School, works part-time at a honey farm, and “we all have really healthy relationships,” Dan Urfer said.

“Basically, he was an only child during the week, and on the weekends a lot of times he felt like he was shoved off,” Kay Urfer said. “We just wanted to gulp up that little girl for those two days,” Dan Urfer added. “She’s our little girl.”

Today Mary — who switched from “Gabby” to her given name in seventh grade — is a trophy-winning cheerleader, serves on the school’s yearbook staff and participates in drama, a church group and the Junior National Association of the Deaf. Junior year, the faculty elected her “first princess” for prom court. She’s become an avid reader. She is proud of her scores on the ACT college entrance exam.

Unbeknownst to her, the Wisconsin School for the Deaf will present her today with one of its top honors: the Abe Barasch Scholarship, awarded to a student who has struggled with and overcome disabilities.

“In middle school, I was really paranoid,” Urfer said last week through a sign-language interpreter. “I was worried and anxious, and I didn’t think I could overcome it. But I learned to control those thoughts and feelings. I learned to focus on what I had to do to be the boss of myself, and think for myself.”

She tried medications “that didn’t make me feel good at all.” And she lost years of schooling in the process.

“Once she got everything all put back together, she really had to struggle to understand that she had an OK mind,” said Mary’s counselor, Polly Slappey. “She just needed to work hard to catch up. She’s worked really hard to advance. She had a lot of demons to beat.”

“Right,” Mary answered. “And they’re gone.”

This summer she’ll work as many hours as she can at Miller & Sons grocery store in Mount Horeb, where for years she’s spent weekends stocking shelves and bagging groceries. She’s saving for college: On Aug. 20, she leaves for her new dorm room at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, N.Y.

“She’s probably a little nervous,” her dad said. “She’s probably a little scared. She’s going to a totally new environment on her own.

“But she’s going to do it,” he said. “That’s the amazing part as I see it. With all these types of disabilities that she has, she’s still going to do it. Every goal that Mary has wanted to achieve, she has met.”