Deafness is not death. If you die, you can't do anything at all, because there isn't a you left to speak of.

If you cannot hear, but you can communicate linguistically, and you did not recently lose hearing in a traumatic fashion, your hedonic set-point incorporates that fact. Acquiring a sense of hearing if you don't have one already is non-trivial and often imperfect; it also does not make it easier to speak in a way others will react to normally (many hearing people listen to the voices of deaf people speaking aloud and subconsciously dehumanize or belittle them since their speech often sounds awkward to someone used to hearing/fluent speakers of their native language). So even then their problems don't go away, and social acceptance is not total.

Not the same thing as rationalizing death.