Elizabeth Edwards, who died earlier this month, was and will remain one of my heroes. She lost her teenage son in a one-car accident in 1996, and she wrote about it in her 2007 book, Saving Graces. She was one of the prime inspirations for my manuscript, His Father Still (I am still seeking a publisher). Below is an excerpt from my book, about my admiration for her life and example.
As soon as Senator John Kerry picked Senator John Edwards as his running mate in the 2004 race for President, the news media began to report the story of how John Edwards and his wife Elizabeth lost their sixteen-year-old son in a car accident in 1996.
As I read about the Edwards’s tragedy and how they were faring eight years later, I entertained the same initial, cynical thought that others no doubt had at the time – that Senator Edwards was exploiting his son’s death in aid of his political career. (The events that later ended Mr. Edwards’ political career had yet to unfold.) But I eventually concluded that that was not the case. Senator Edwards rarely if ever talked about his son, yet freely admitted that Wade’s death in part propelled him into public service, that he ran for Senate and then sought the presidency in part to honor his son’s memory. It was then his wife Elizabeth who spoke candidly and publicly about their grief, which she did at length in her 2007 book, Saving Graces.
In late December 2007, The New York Times profiled the impact that Wade’s death had on his parents. In 1996, John was a successful trial lawyer and Elizabeth, also a lawyer, was accomplished in her own right in a variety of ways. What the article said I immediately and intuitively understood:
In an instant, a world in which everything seemed right suddenly seemed all wrong. John and Elizabeth Edwards’s 16-year-old son, Wade, their first-born, was dead, with nothing to blame but the gust of wind that had flipped his car off a wide-open road.
As the couple walked down the aisle of the church for his funeral, they braced each other, friends recalled, as if they could not stand alone.
In the bleak months that followed, the Edwardses looked for ways to keep Wade’s name alive. Determined to honor their son publicly and fill their life with meaning, they created a learning center named after him. They chose to have more children. And they decided Mr. Edwards would enter politics.
But to the Edwardses, their decision simply showed a sense of purpose and a lesson learned a decade ago from crushing pain: If you can’t control life, you can at least embrace it more urgently. [My emphasis.]
Friends say Mr. Edwards probably would have gone into politics even if Wade had lived. But his death provided a catalyst.
In her book, Elizabeth eloquently describes her relationship with her son, ten years after his death, in two respects that also describe my experience and Ellen’s so precisely that we could substitute “Hollister” for “Edwards.” She explains visiting the cemetery and talking to Wade and tending his grave and those of other children nearby. I quote her at length because her words illustrate better than anything else I have read the notion that in the stories of other parents I have found the most comfort, whether the details of our tragedies matched or not. Saving Graces says:
I went every day to Wade’s grave until our second daughter, Emma Claire, was born, because that was what felt right to me. Whatever we do – going or not going to our children’s graves, sleeping with a toy, or closing the door to their rooms – has only to be what we each need, what we require to make it through each day without them. There is no other yardstick. It served me best to visit Wade’s place daily . . . .
I went to Oakwood then, and I go now – though less often – because the rest of the living world ends at that cemetery gate. There his body lies, surrounded by the bodies of families, by stories of lives long and short, and there the inevitability of death seems like but another chapter. And there I could not help but speak to him . . . . I would speak to Wade and pray and read aloud. And I planted and tended and cared for the space that now surrounded his body. I cleaned around Wade, like cleaning his room, and I cleaned around the graves of the children like Oliver and Gerald, since next to each child were his or her parents, who died after them and were unable to tend the graves themselves.
It doesn’t matter to me whether all this sounds odd. I did it because it made it easier for me, easier for me to think that there were mothers who would come after me and tend to Wade’s grave when I no longer could. Easier to think that we were all in this together, that we formed a bond, a community – these long-dead mothers and I, and the mothers who would come later – and the creed to which we all subscribed was the sanctity of the graves of our children.
Elizabeth and John Edwards’ observations stay with me now in two ways. She is correct that, when all of the upheaval and tumult that follow a teen’s death has abated, we parents are left, ultimately, with landscaping: a rake, a hoe, and other gardening tools are the implements by which we tend the memory of our kids. Second, I remain inspired by the idea that if we cannot control life, we must embrace more fervently what we have. What use I will make of this inspiration remains to be seen and will be judged by others, but I certainly feel it.
