Resilience (12 page)

I had seen that look before, of course, in hairless women who were navigating the hallways at Georgetown, where I got my first chemotherapy—a hospital, like many, that seems to be in a perpetual state of renovation. Confounded by the absence of a once-familiar hallway, she had a look that admitted defeat. Beaten by cancer and by “progress.”

Now, I don't think you can will your way to good health. To say that is to suggest that those who died didn't have will enough, that this cancer spread in me because I let it, and I know that is not true. But I do believe that none of us knows how many days we have, and it is a shame that any of our spirits capitulate to this disease—or any other—for even a day of the ones we have left.

But I have to acknowledge that one thing is clear: Every decision I make is colored by the fact that I know only that I will die before I thought I might, that each day has a number I cannot yet read. So when I decided to continue working in John's campaign after my rediagnosis, I was holding on to the life I wanted, even if the life I had was clearly less than what I wanted it to be. I adjusted my sails, but as little as possible.

There is a personal dignity that comes with resisting the word “victim” and all that it means. Resisting by living each day and doing it well, even if, like Phil Connors, some of those days are still imperfect. I see it in the faces of women everywhere, some strong and healthy, some pale and hairless, who have a power in them. Was Donna in Minneapolis this determined before the cancer? Would Sharon in Atlanta have approached me before we had this bond? Not only had their spirits not capitulated, they had risen as they took each day into their own hands, made each day all it might be. Like Phil Connors, and like me, they probably hadn't done it the first day, but we all learned that how we adjusted made a difference in the life we had left.

There is just so much I can do to fight the disease in me. I know that. It frustrates me, it makes me afraid. I want control over it, and I have no hope of that. So I treat it as an asymmetrical war: I attack from another flank. I spend my time fighting for the health of women who have my disease but do not have the benefits of the great health care I get. I fight for more research to cure cancer.

I was in Cleveland to give a speech shortly after my rediagnosis in March of 2007. It was a lovely large room at the Cleveland City Club, the kind of stately room we don't build anymore in a magnificent old downtown building. After the luncheon speech some of the audience, which was mostly women, lined up to meet me or to have me sign a book or the program. There was a woman who had had breast cancer and her lovely daughter, a political supporter of my husband's, a scarved woman in the middle of chemotherapy. The thought of one woman in particular has stayed with me. She was wearing an ivory suit and stockings, so I assumed that she was working downtown. (I always assume that someone wearing stockings is working; why else would they wear them?) She leaned over and whispered in my ear.

“My name is Sheila,” she said, “and I am afraid for my children. I have a lump in my breast, but I cannot get it checked. I have no insurance.”

“Stay right here,” I said. I called to Jennifer Palmieri, who was traveling with me, and we tried, right then, to get her connected with someone who could get her the help she needed, but by the time we found someone, Sheila had left. I assumed that her lunch hour was over and that she had gone back to work. At one level, this is a depressing story: a working woman with children who cannot get the health care she needs in a country of such abundance. But at another level, hers is a story of hope: She believed that we live in a country where things can change if we just whisper in the right person's ear.

She whispered in my ear. I am not the right person who can change things. But I am not the wrong person, either. It is like my sister's dime. She could want the dime for herself partly because she was five, but also because she couldn't understand that her dime in the offering plate was going to join other dimes and buy dinner for a hungry family or a jacket for a cold child. I certainly could have felt the same impotence in speaking out against a health care system that denied that working mother the care she needed that I feel fighting against the disease within me. And by thinking of myself as a single voice, I would give myself a perfectly reasonable excuse to do nothing. Or I could choose to see what I do as a small part of a collective effort that might change things. I remember protesting the war in Vietnam. Certainly my individual voice meant nothing, but the power was in the chorus of voices that might in time contribute to the end of that war. And I was in a war now.

Sheila gave me a great gift when she whispered in my ear. She reminded me that whether I had cancer or not, whether I lived five years or fifteen, my voice might be part of a chorus that could make a difference. I spoke about health care before meeting Sheila, but after she spoke to me, I recommitted myself to fixing a system that does not work for too many of us. I was luckier than I can say to have the opportunity to speak out. I am not the most talented of speakers, I don't know nearly as much as the experts know, but I have somehow found myself at a place where notoriety and disease open doors for me, hand me a microphone. I don't look away from any opportunity now. And with each short straw I draw, like the latest diagnosis, I recommit myself again. I may not have enough time for all I hope to do, but I do not have to accept my impotence against this disease.

Of course, every pain, every bump is a reminder of who will ultimately win the war, even if I win all the battles before that day. My job now is to stay alive until the doctors and researchers out there working find a cure. Using the days I have left as well as I can, hanging on to each day, another Groundhog Day, hoping that one day those doctors and scientists will get it right and I will have enough time to get it right myself.

Until then, I live with cancer, adjust my sails, and remain inspired by the power of Sheila's whisper. I choose life.

CHAPTER 8
2008

he house was crowded this Christmas with family and school friends. Someone moved the Christmas CDs, apparently a well-intentioned attempt to clean up, but they chose as their first target the pile of Christmas CDs we had pulled out to play while trimming the tree. No one confesses, but even if they had, it would be no use; we can no longer get to the cabinet where the CD player is housed. My sister Nancy has come for Christmas, as she usually does, and has brought with her a dozen lovely framed pieces of art she has created. Displaying them in our family room away from the couches and the children, she chooses the protected location in front of the cabinet, but in front the cabinet that holds the CD player and the radio receiver. Christmas music seems out of reach today, the one day we really want it, while we decorate the Christmas tree. Modern life to the rescue: There is now Christmas music on a cable television music station. So we turn the televisions to the appropriate music channel, grab our baskets, and fill them with the ornaments I have unwrapped and piled high on the kitchen table. And singing along to the Christmas songs that really are Christmas songs (I don't use the word “Xmas,” but some of the songs seem more like generic-brand unfamiliar Xmas songs than Christmas songs and we do not sing to those), we decorate the tree. Cate is home from school, her last school vacation before she enters the work world without three weeks off at Christmas. Two of her friends, Marlo and Chris, are passing through and spending the night before heading north. Cate, Nancy, Marlo, Chris, and I are trimming the big tree, and Emma Claire and Jack have corralled their father into helping them decorate the tree in the playroom. And my mother sits in a chair by the tree in the living room. In photographs it would look like the picture of a happy family, with the imperfections—like the Xmas songs—unable to be heard. And there were imperfections.

My mother lives in an assisted-living center near me, but she is at my house for the tree trimming, although I don't know that she even knows that. Now frail and sunken into herself, physically and mentally, she sits in the chair nearest the tree, periodically sleeping. When she awakens, she invariably points out something that disturbs her. An ornament she thinks is out of place, a person she doesn't recognize. My mother was once one of the most ferociously intelligent women I knew, and later that intelligence was a mask for many years of a departing mental acuity. Now no mask is opaque enough to hide the truth: The woman who was once my mother, like the six-year-old boy who was once my son, is gone, replaced by another person I love, but—in the case of my mother—one I do not always recognize and who does not always recognize me.

One by one, we each go over to her and tell her something about what is happening. Do you see the plastic stars over some of the lights, I asked. You and Dad helped put those on last year. With respect to my mother's contribution last year, this would be a generous description; with respect to my father's, an outright lie. Dad had almost no fine motor skills left in December of 2007. And this is the first Christmas since he died. She doesn't argue; she simply mumbles something unintelligible. I touch her hand and return to the tree. My mother has never recovered from my father's death. He gave her great joy and great pain when he was alive, but now all she feels is the pain of his absence. So tremendous is the pain of the thought that he has died that sometimes she just rejects that truth: Sometimes she decides that he is simply somewhere else, maybe lost; maybe by choice because he doesn't want to be with her, a thought that breaks my heart; maybe he is just on his way here. Has Vince gotten here yet, she will ask. The experts say to let it go, and most of my family does that. When my sister tried to remind her of Dad's peaceful death, of his lovely funeral in Annapolis, of his interment across Weems Creek from the United States Naval Academy parade ground on which we used to live—in sight of our old house, in fact—Mother just got angry:
Have it your way
, she snapped. Nancy doesn't argue with her anymore. If Mother needs to believe that Dad is alive, is on his way, had lunch with her yesterday, Nancy lets her go where her mind seems most at peace.

I have never been as easy to get along with as Nancy. And I have an advantage, if the death of a child can ever be so described, because I can talk to my mother in a way no one else really can. When Mother insists that Dad is still alive, that he was with her last night or that she doesn't know why he doesn't want to be with her anymore, I disagree with her. I know, I tell her, how easy it would be to think that he isn't really dead. I have been there, and I know what you are feeling, but in the end, Mother, all our wishing doesn't change anything. And from me, she takes it, she doesn't snap back. Somewhere inside her she understands that we have lost Wade, and she doesn't argue with me.

So when I have been talking to my mother and she looks sad, I sometimes think it is because with me she knows she cannot act in the play where my father is somewhere off stage. With me, he is dead. So as she watched me decorate, I thought that she looked sad because she knew I wouldn't play along with the willing suspension of belief. I sat my basket beside her and kneeled on the floor.

“Mother, you seem sad.”

“I am.” She didn't look over at me. Her eyes have become so deep set that they are little puddles with pencil drawings of eyes reflected deep in the bottom of them. She was looking somewhere past the tree, out the window and past the meadow behind the house.

“What is making you sad?” Imprudently maybe, I opened the door, but I was surprised to find what was behind it.

“It started thirty or forty years ago.” Forty years ago, I thought. I started to calculate my own age. I would have been nineteen or twenty-nine. Nothing happened then that would have made her sad. What could it have been? And then I figured she hadn't any way of choosing thirty or forty years over choosing fifty or sixty.

“What was it?” I asked.

She fingered the corners of her mouth, speaking while she contorted her lips. I hope I understood her, for maybe it was one of the last lucid things she might ever say. Or maybe I hope I didn't understand her because it was hard to think these were her last clear thoughts. “I learned my hopes for how my life was going to turn out were not going to be.”

I waited a few moments. She didn't say any more. “What does that mean, Mother?”

“The trust was supposed to be deep,” she said. “The smiles were supposed to last forever.”

We are not so different from one another. The hopes we have may have different backdrops, different accents, different details, but the central outlines are pretty much the same. The trust is supposed to be deep. The smiles are supposed to last forever. Did she figure out at forty-five that it wasn't going to be that way? Or did it dawn on her at eighty-five that life had fallen short? Or maybe it wasn't life in general, maybe it was one of us, one of the people on whose trustworthiness she had relied, one whose smiles were supposed to keep her company, who had let her down.

I hadn't understood much of what my mother had said in the previous six months, but this I understood. I am sad because my life has not worked out as I had hoped. It is no secret that my husband of thirty years told me that he had not been faithful to me. This is not about his indiscretion. He has his own battle to rediscover himself and realign his life. This is about my looking around me one day and finding, first, an ugly crack in the foundation of my life, and then finding out in time that the crack was deeper than I had first thought. Sometimes I need to say to myself what I said to my mother that night: “I want you to close your eyes, and I want you to spread your arms out and fall back into the pillow of all the people who have loved you.”

In 2006, I was busy. I wrote a book and built a house; rather, I actually wrote the book and I watched the house being built. I cared for two youngsters and measured for draperies. I sat with my husband as he planned to run again for the Democratic nomination for president, and I got treatments for the cancer that was in remission and periodic scans to make sure it was. I cleaned the rental house in which we lived so the landlords could try to sell it, and I negotiated with contractors to repair our longtime family home in Raleigh that had been flooded the previous Thanksgiving, forcing us to the rental house. I volunteered to find the names of children missing from the yearbook at Frank Porter Graham Elementary School and helped with the Book Fair. Cate and I went to Massachusetts to find a place for her to live in Cambridge when she started that fall at the law school at Harvard. And the two of us drove her furniture up when school started. I gave speeches and promoted my book, and I helped move my elderly parents from Florida to Chapel Hill where I lived when the assisted-living center in which they lived there told them they would have to go. I was busy. Too busy, it turns out, to notice that my life had left its orbit. My husband had an affair.

If you have picked up this book in hopes that in it there will be details of a scandal, you should now put the book down. This is my story, and my story is filled with pain and anger, with great erasures of my history and new outlines for my future, but it is not filled with the clatter you seek. The story from my side is quite a different story from the one of grocery store papers, a story played out too many times but rarely as publicly as my own.

It would be comforting to think I had sense enough to recognize that something was happening, but life had changed so often since Wade had died. There almost seemed no normal. For a woman raised in a military family moving all the time, a constantly changing life was not a sign of anything except normality.

John was gone a lot in 2003 and 2004 running for office, and although I saw him all the time in 2005 when I was getting treatment for breast cancer, I knew I would see him less in 2006. I even participated in his being gone. I thought he should do a spring-break trip for college students in New Orleans to help with the Hurricane Katrina cleanup. I agreed that he should work with various groups to help raise the minimum wage. His antipoverty work would take him across the country, and I knew that. When he told me that the political action committee was going to have behind-the-scenes videos made of some of these efforts, it didn't seem like that bad an idea, and it certainly didn't occur to me to ask about who was making them. It didn't occur to me that at a fancy hotel in New York, where he sat with a potential donor to his antipoverty work, he would be targeted by a woman who would confirm that the man at the table was John Edwards and then would wait for him outside the hotel hours later when he returned from a dinner, wait with the come-on line “You are so hot” and an idea that she should travel with him and make videos. And if you had asked me to wager that house we were building on whether my husband of then twenty-eight years would have responded to a come-on line like that, I would have said no.

I said as much in a speech I gave in April in Boston. What, one questioner asked after the speech, was the secret of a good marriage? I told her the truth: I don't know. We don't do date nights, we don't take long romantic vacations together. We care about the same things, but I think the real secret is to marry the right man. I thought I had. I was deeply in love with my husband for many of the reasons I talked about in the campaign. He was generous and cared about the plight of others; he was soft where a man should be soft and tough where a man should be tough. I could laugh with his staff about his weaknesses, teasing him, and he would good-naturedly laugh along. This was simply a weakness I did not expect.

John told me of his indiscretion on December 30, 2006, after returning from a tour to announce that he was running for president. My family had come for Christmas, and the plan was that he would announce in a series of cities and return to Chapel Hill for a final rally with his hometown supporters and his family. While he was gone, we talked—as we had our whole marriage—many times a day. We had talked about the initial announcement when he was in New Orleans—should he wear the green shirt or the navy? The navy. Was what he planned to say strong? It was. How were the children? The usual/unusual banter of a long-married couple with this odd twist in their lives. Again each day and again each night as he announced in New Hampshire and Iowa and Nevada, we talked, and finally, near the end of the month, he announced his candidacy at a rally in Chapel Hill, this time with his family by his side. After the rally, we came home to the chaos of a house full of family—my brother and his family and my sister and hers.

Before the announcement tour he had asked my brother to come with him to film it, since Jay taught film at the graduate film school at NYU, but when Jay found out another videographer was coming whether he came or not, Jay said no and had come here instead. Now the announcement tour was over and we were sitting in our family room, John telling us about the response in the various cities. John pulled Jay aside and asked him again to film the campaign or help him find someone to accompany him and film the campaign itself. The female videographer who had been on the announcement tour was not going to travel with him again. John did not tell him why, but Jay said he would. The next morning he told me why, or told me a version of why. He had made a terrible decision and had been with the woman. After I cried and screamed, I went to the bathroom and threw up.