Authors: Elizabeth Edwards
I often take respite in music, the old songs usually of the 1940s and of Broadway. I could listen to Dinah Washington or Lena Horne for hours. I compiled a book of lyrics so I could sit and sing the old songs, teach them to my children. But now they were hard; the love song I thought accompanied our marriage, accompanied our love affair, well, it hardly fit anymore. It had been Irving Berlin's “Always”:
so lucky to be loving you
. I would walk around the house singing it and dozens of others like it. It was never John's taste, but it was the soundtrack that I wanted, that I chose for my life.
But now it was Stephen Sondheim's “No One Is Alone” to which I turned, hearing Mandy Patinkin's voice in my head. “Mother isn't here now. Who knows what she'd say. Nothing's quite so clear now.” It was true, I knew. My mother had only shown me that staying and fighting for a marriage was possible—at a time when nothing seemed possible. I was bouncing from feeling sorry for myself—where I spent an embarrassing amount of time—to
what might seem unachievable—feeling sorry for him. He was so clearly full of pain that what he had done had come to light. He was so full of pain and guilt and shame, it was hard not to want to reach out. And hard not to want him to reach back. Some gesture grand enough to wipe it all away. Some sweep of his arms that put us back together. A thousand photographs. Sondheim again in my head: “People make mistakes. Fathers, mothers, people make mistakes.… Everybody makes one another's terrible mistakes.”
If it had been possible to view it all from some altitude, it might have seemed so easy to see how we came together and pushed each other away … for days, for weeks, for months. But I had no altitude at all. It was quite the opposite. I was too low to have any perspective at all. All I wanted was my life back. I didn't like this new life story; I wanted my old one. It felt so much like after Wade died—I wanted to turn back time so we could avoid the wind, avoid the woman, avoid the pain. Open a drawer and find my life again. But I would open a drawer and find my new reality instead. Everything I tried to do to allow me to go to some safe place turned out to be filled with the same pain. I would look at a happy
family picture and break down. I tried to write and could not. Even now it is hard to put it into words.
When I die, my place in the lives of others will be filled by other people. I know this. It is true for all of us. Someone else will have your job; someone else will mow your lawn; someone else will kiss the cheeks of those you love. I worry about it, actually. One of the reasons that I spend time labeling baskets and organizing Christmas ornaments is that I have tried to create a world for my family that will last longer than the years I now have left. I am so in love with my family, so protective, that—odd as it may sound—long before I was sick, I would tell John whom he should marry should I suddenly die. Ann, then when Ann married, it was Kristen. Women I knew I could entrust with taking the same care I had taken. And now I was dying and he had chosen to spend time with someone so completely unlike me. It almost goes without saying, for I would never have, could not have, stood on a sidewalk in the hopes that some clumsy come-on line might work on a married man. But it wasn't just that; this woman was different from me in nearly every way. Not Ann, not Kristen, and not me.
It may not matter whether the hot glue goes
back in the glue basket or whether the snow globes are placed together on the shelf at Christmas or whether the birthday-present gift cards are in the same drawer, but if these inconsequential things might change, what of the things that have really mattered to me? At this moment I saw my death not simply as a transition for my family but as my complete erasure from my family's life and a complete erasure of the life I hoped they would have. I was afraid of what John might do when cancer finally wins, but he has been as assuring as I could have hoped. I am now at ease that John would not make the same choice in the daylight that he made in the dark, but for some time that thought dogged me, kept me awake at night, stoked my anger and my pain.
If this could happen, and it had, was I even someone with the ability to define a family or the outlines of a family's life? I must be less than that. I know what the books say: In an otherwise secure and loving marriage, such indiscretions have nothing to do with me. But I doubt there is a person to whom this has happened who did not, for some time, beat themselves with self-doubt and self-loathing. What did I do? How had I failed as a wife? Self-doubt
wasn't that long a journey for me, frankly. The reason I was compulsive about learning whatever I needed to know on the campaign trail was that I was certain I would be humiliated if I was caught not knowing what everyone else in the room knew. So I learned four times the facts I would ever need, and I kept staff up nights finding answers to the questions I feared I might be asked. All the work to avoid being embarrassed was wasted; I now felt thoroughly and publicly humiliated.
Wade had written a short story when he was sixteen. Wade had gone on an Outward Bound Colorado climbing trip when he was fifteen, and he used his experience—he was, according to his own report, the least athletic and, according to others, the most thoughtful boy on the trip—for a short story he had to write the next year. “Summits” is about a boy on a mountain-climbing trip who is forced by circumstances to be a Good Samaritan first by carrying the gear of an injured camper and then by giving up the summit altogether. As he begins taking care of the injured boy the narrator confesses, “My only two thoughts were how bad I felt, and how hard it would be to pack two people's stuff and not hold the group up. (Truthfully, the only reason
I didn't want to hold the group up was so that I wouldn't be embarrassed.) This was exactly the situation I had been trying to avoid for the past two weeks (and, really, my whole life).” Wade had been trying to seem more athletic than he was in front of people he knew were watching him to see if he failed; I was trying to seem more self-confident, more appealing than I felt in front of my own larger audience. Like mother, like son.
And even before learning of a single night, I felt vulnerable to humiliation. Because of the fish-eye lens through which we all see someone in the news—the lens that makes some traits seem bigger and some seem smaller—people had too high an opinion of me, and I knew I had no chance of meeting their expectations. I have been described as self-effacing; that is true, but I should be described as “appropriately self-effacing.” I, and I do so hope this is like most people, am certain I will be found out as not as smart or as generous or as thoughtful as I should be. And now this had happened. John knew. Perhaps this woman suspected. Was I to be found out like this? The possibility of public humiliation was a multiplier of my already numbing pain.
How to write on a few pages what that time
was like? Morning, afternoon, evening, sleepless night. Morning, afternoon, evening, sleepless night. Morning, afternoon, evening, sleepless night. It didn't seem to stop, and I could not see when it might. Just the opposite of James Joyce, I said no, no, no, please, no. So I did what I always do: I turned to others for support and love. I don't know what I would have done without my brother's voice. He let me cry when I needed to, and he made me laugh when I needed that. Another friend who had stood where I stood either honestly told me that my reactions were typical or generously lied that they were. I wasn't alone, but so much of the time I felt alone because I felt separated from the one person on whom I had so long relied.
I wanted to tell my sister Nancy, but I could not. Nancy had been married. She moved to Florida where they were going to retire to a home they bought together, and when she did, her former husband had brought another woman into their Ohio home. One of the things that has upset me is that I feel like my past is perhaps not what I thought it was and my future is certainly not what I dreamed. For Nancy, you could add to that that the actual pieces of her life were picked apart. Her clothes and
jewelry from her Ohio home were put in garbage bags by this woman—some were missing when she finally retrieved them. Her furniture was rearranged, her children's rooms taken over by the other woman's children, her credit cards reissued to the intruder as if she were the wife. My life was figuratively injured; hers was literally dismantled. And Nancy, like Jay, loved John, loved how he had been so good to me, how he had cared for me through the cancer, loved what we represented: a marriage of equals built on love and respect. For the longest time, I could not take that away from her, could not compare my battle with her war. I could not tell her. I was wrong; when I did tell her, she was generous and honest. I needed both.
Nancy did not want her old life back. I did. I put on my earphones and dreamed. “Hard to see the light now. Just don't let it go. Things will work out right now. Ask me how I know.” I thought I could fix it; I think John thought he could, too. But we were not living in our house, working on fixing it. We were separated. He was on the campaign trail. At first I could not, would not go. What would I say? I had said, in the months before, how this man had been my rock, and he had been, but I couldn't
say that now. When I finally did campaign, I was pointed, so pointed I thought someone might suspect: We elect a vision and a person capable of making that vision become reality. If we yield to what we find appealing or engaging, if we yield to personality or appearance, we yield to an easy and false path. I could say that easily. It was, in fact, easier than I thought it would be. In a field of caution by the candidates, John had real vision. This is where we haven't been riven apart. We shared the honest discussion of our responsibility to our communities; we shared a passion for eliminating poverty and providing health care for those sitting outside the clinic doors. Whatever separated us, this did not. And I needed that, needed to feel that some part of my life with this man I had loved so long was intact. John had the most progressive policies and I could say that. I could do this, and in doing it, I could feel as if I were standing closer to the core of who he was and is than when I let his indiscretion capture my thoughts. I was with him in a sense. And in a sense, of course, I was not.
It turned out that a single time was not all it was. More than a year later, I learned that he had allowed someone else into our lives and had not,
even when he knew better, made her leave us alone. I tried to get him to explain, but he did not know himself why he had allowed it to happen. In months of talking with him, I have come to understand his liaison with this woman, if I have, not as a substitute for me. It was more like his relationship with a former staff member. Most members of campaign staffs are young people who believe in the candidate or in his or her vision. There are a rare few who are obsessed with the candidate. A young campaign staffer in one state became fixated on me. He would make special arrangements for me and plan to be close to me when I was in his state; when he was fired, he continued to show up at town halls, staying in the same hotels I did. John had several like him, but one in particular whom I thought he let into our lives for much the same reason he had let this woman. There is no reason to name the young man in the other state who followed me, and there is no reason to name John's obsessed fan. I will call him Jim.
Jim had first volunteered in the Senate campaign in 1998, working in fundraising. Julianna Smoot, who ran the finances, found him overbearing and did not want him even as a volunteer. What
harm could he do, I remember saying then and regretting since. Jim volunteered for everything, making himself indispensable. He would drive John wherever he needed to go. Did John need something dry-cleaned overnight? Did he need his car washed? There was no job too menial for Jim. When you are busy campaigning, as John was, it seemed harmless, even helpful. When John went to the Senate, many of the campaign workers either went to Washington or stayed and ran the North Carolina office. Jim stayed in North Carolina, but he was openly jealous of everyone who went to Washington. He wanted to continue to drive John, and did when John came to North Carolina. Jim would drive across the state just to pick John up at the airport and deposit him at a meeting and then return him to the airport. When we were in North Carolina, he had his wife—who worked night shift—leave McDonald's breakfasts for us outside our door before she went home. (I saw her one morning, and I told her to stop.) Could he help John's parents? How about his sister, what could he do for her? I now remember him telling me that my family didn't call on him often enough. A friend who worked in the North Carolina Senate office warned
me about him: He is too possessive, he knows no limits, no boundaries. John was Jim's ticket, the friend said, and he was not going to let anyone get between him and John. That included me.
I complained about Jim. John had gotten used to Jim's unbridled loyalty, his willingness to do anything John wanted, and his obvious adoration of John. John and I would argue. Why are you so hard on Jim, he would say. I stood back for a while, but after Jim lied to us, I finally had the reason I needed to ban him from the house. It meant he could not drive John, that someone else would. He tried to find ways around it, to keep in contact, to keep as much of John's life as his own as he could. He bought cars like the ones we drove. He wanted to vacation where we vacationed. He had birthday parties for himself and invited all our friends. He sent daily e-mails to almost everyone we knew. And he became close with the videographer, who also did not understand boundaries. It was some time, but John finally saw what I saw.
In truth, the existence of a Jim made it easier to accept the existence of this woman. Those with any fame or notoriety or power attract people for good reasons and bad. Some want to contribute and some
want to take something away for themselves. They fatter and entreat, and it is engaging, even addictive. I wanted to be less stern with the young fellow who followed me around than the staff thought necessary; to me he was simply sweet and wrong-headed, not dangerous. But too many are dangerous. They look at our lives, which from the outside in particular are pictures of joy and plenty, and they want it for themselves.