Saving Graces (44 page)

In the package from Christine was a scarf. I’ve gotten lots of beautiful scarves, and this is certainly a beautiful scarf, but more wonderful is the story of this scarf. Christine had taken it with her on tour, and she had asked women in her audiences to work on it, to make a little knot tie or knit a little. John and I had seen her sing at the Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro once, and as I read her letter, I imagined that scarf making its way through an audience like that Carrboro audience. This scarf was everything I believed in. It was a gesture—not a difficult gesture, but a thoughtful one. It was the counterpart to including the bag boy in the conversation. It was remembering to say hello to the child, not just the adult. It was thanking the referee after the game. It was pulling people in because you believe in the grace a community gives each of us. Anyone who thought to do it, to reach out to others and bring them into this gesture, could have done it, but too few know the blessings a simple gesture actually brings. This scarf is Christine’s gift at the same time that it is the gift of all those women whose names I’ll never know. And it is, also at the same time, something in which I can literally wrap myself and something in which I can figuratively wrap myself, this huge community of people—spread out among the towns she toured—people who were pulling for me and who believed in the strength of that tiny knot they tied.

CHAPTER 15

HOME

I
N
M
ARCH, MY
niece Jordan married her long-time boyfriend Ken. The whole family gathered in Sarasota, and people from the campaign who had known Jordan when she worked in the primaries came as well. Marc Adelman was sitting at one of the tables, and Jack crawled up in the chair next to him.
Hi
, Jack said, maybe a little surprised to see him there.
Are you in my family?
Marc responded,
Well, not exactly
. Almost, but not exactly.

Family is what we make it. The Anania family that includes the Ohio Ananias. The traveling family of the campaign. The young people who shared Thanksgiving with us—the young soldier from Vietnam in 1966 and the campaign workers in 2003. Our closest family includes Wade, who has been dead for more than ten years. Emma Claire, so used to hearing of Wade, lamented once that it was sad that Jack was born too late and never knew Wade. But neither had she. He had just been so much a part of our family that it hadn’t occurred to her that she never met him. This Valentine’s Day, they released helium balloons to him in heaven. Their idea, not mine. In our family, we talk about Wade and the funny or silly or wonderful things he would do because we have accepted his new place in the family. When I see Emma Claire fly across the yard with grace and speed, I always think how much Wade would have loved to have her acceleration instead of his lumbering gait. When I open Jack’s palm and point to the single freckle improbably placed there, we laugh that Wade sent one of the many from his cheeks, just to let us know he was all right. And as Cate watches Emma Claire and Jack cuddle and fight, play and tease, she almost always turns and asks, “Were we like this when we were their ages?” And I almost always say, “Just like that.”

Just like that, life has found its cadence again. The cancer seems to be gone. I have yet another set of doctors. We have a new town, well, an old one really, for John and I found land near where we started, near the Chapel Hill church in which we were married. We’re back buying flowers at Southern States and ham at Cliff’s Meat Market. Back home. The younger children are in school, and in basketball, and soccer, and baseball. Cate is starting law school. The house we are building is nearly done, and I can walk through the shell of it, imagining our lives there, imagining the sounds of the children playing or the
ka-thump ka-thump
of a basketball being dribbled. When I am there alone I can even hear the washer running, so real is the life to which we have been, for a decade, slowly moving.

And I have finished this book. But in the writing of it, so many people came back to me, sat here in this room with me. I know that my father’s great gift to me, of reaching out and pulling people toward me, has made this life possible. Because from each one, I have taken something—and I hope that I have also given back—and that something meant that I could weather the next storm. From the first important days with my brother and sister as my constant support, and in each step since. From all of them together I could create a net, a huge safety net that allowed me to climb ahead with the boys on Mt. Fuji, or to protest a war when my father’s job was to defend it, or to go out with a fellow in law school who didn’t seem to share any of my interests, or to breathe again after Wade died, or to try to have more children with Cate’s blessing, or to say,
Yes, you should run
and then to do whatever was asked of me, and finally to keep standing when I heard the words
It’s breast cancer.

It has been easier to do all these things not simply because of my splendid family, not simply because of the Hargraves and Glenns and Sallys in my life, but because everywhere I go, people smile back at me. I am stronger because John Moylan and Ed Smith give me a hug when they see me, but I am also stronger because Edward the mailman smiles, and Sam the bagger at the grocery store smiles. So what this book is, after all, is a shout from up on the tightrope: thank you all. Like the letter my father received forty years later from the crewman aboard the Mercator he flew safely home over the Sea of Japan. I’ve had a good life, and I just want to thank you for it.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The note I wrote to Wade that I placed in his casket said only You know. And it is the note I send to each of you who helped me and touched me and laughed with me or cried, who climbed or fell with me. You know. The great impossibility of this book has been that I cannot stop thinking of each of you and how much you have meant to me, and how much this life—and certainly this book—would not have been possible without you. It was hard in the writing not to include every one of you and nearly impossible here not to thank you, each of you. But I will reluctantly conform to convention and thank by name those who have made the actual writing of this book possible.

I came to this process a neophyte and was fortunate to find just the professional guidance I needed from Bob Barnett, who placed me in the hands of Doubleday Broadway and an editor, Stacy Creamer, who believed in me and in this story and made the experience as easy as an editor possibly could. This book is clearly better because Stacy read it before you did. And I was lucky that Stacy had such an incredible supporting cast, David Drake and Laura Swerdloff, in particular. I was fortunate in the first days to have the skill and vision of Aimee Molloy and throughout to have the wisdom and kindness of my longtime friend John Auchard, both of whom helped me find a shape for the book. I pressed into service those to whom I so often have turned in the past: Brad Anderson, Alexis Bar, Jan Bolinger, Saundra Daddio, Guy Decker, John Dervin, Dan Doherty, Karen Finney, Randy Galvin, David Ginsberg, Martha Hartmann-Harlan, Eileen Kotecki, Miles Lackey, Hargrave McElroy, Kathleen McGlynn, Ryan Montoya, Sam Myers, Jennifer Palmieri, Jonathan Prince, Christina Reynolds, Kim Rubey, John Schoo, Meghan Scott, Gayle Steele, and Colin van Ostern. They have never once let me down.

There were some without whom this book might never have been written for they made the physical pulling of the pieces together possible, including Heather North, Lisa Carey, Andrew Young, Martina Young, Lori Krause, and Matthew Nelson. There are those, too, whose constant support and love made these pages better, including Glenn Bergenfield and Sally Plyler.

And my family. When I bare my life, I know I bare theirs, too. They haven't just been gracious about that, they have been my best cheerleaders and my most honest critics. My thanks and my love to my brother Jay and my sister Nancy, to Mom and Dad, to my beloved John and my precious Cate. This is your book, too. You know.

PUBLISHED BY BROADWAY BOOKS

Copyright © 2006 by Elizabeth Edwards

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.broadwaybooks.com

BROADWAY BOOKS
and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Edwards, Elizabeth, 1949–

Saving graces : finding solace and strength from friends and strangers / Elizabeth Edwards.—1st ed.

p. cm.

1. Edwards, Elizabeth, 1949– 2. Edwards, Elizabeth, 1949– —Philosophy. 3. Legislators’ spouses—United States—Biography. 4. Cancer—Patients—United States—Biography. 5. Lawyers’ spouses—North Carolina—Biography. 6. Edwards, John, 1953 June 10– 7. Edwards, John, 1953 June 10– —Family. 8. North Carolina—Biography. I. Title.

E840.8.E29E24 2006

973.931092—dc22

[B]

eISBN: 978-0-7679-2635-5

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