Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [150]
At midnight, Cinderella’s coach turns back into a pumpkin, and on the day after the election, the chartered plane that had carried John, a staff, and a press corps across the country for more than four months was gone, not even a pumpkin left. My smaller jet and my pilot Brett Karpy were carrying someone else where they needed to go, or maybe he was having a long-overdue vacation. And we were in Boston, Cate and John and I were leaving Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and stepping into an unknown future…with no way to get there. My good friend Gordon Livingston had once told me about a friend who was going helicopter skiing, whatever that is. He added, somewhat embarrassed I think, that he thought it was good to know people of all classes. So now I add that it was our great fortune that someone we knew owned a plane that would get us back to Washington, to the children who had left Boston earlier that morning, so we could contemplate, in our own home, alone, what we had been told that afternoon at Dana-Farber. There was a small staff with us on the plane ride home, a skeleton crew of John’s Secret Service detail and mine, Peter Scher, and Miles Lackey. We decided that we would release the news of the breast cancer to the press, that maybe other women would then get the timely mammograms I had missed and would not have to hear the news we had just heard. But we didn’t mention the possible metastasis, not to Miles or Peter, not to the public. We needed to deal with this news privately first. In some ways working with the press release was good. It gave us something to talk about, and when it was done, we all fell silent. There was a sad dignity to the silence.
It was dark by the time we got home, and the children were already asleep. We put our suitcases filled with dirty clothes down on top of the suitcases filled with dirty clothes that we had left the last time we had been home, and we went in and kissed the foreheads of our sleeping children. When I came back to our room from loading the first of twenty loads of laundry, John was sitting in the chair next to the bed. Sometime during the campaign he had taken one of the Elizabeth! buttons that Ryan had had made and clipped it into the upholstery on the back of his chair. Somehow it was too much to come home to such an uncertain tomorrow and see that gay button, the symbol of a time of promise. He had his head in his hands when I walked in. I have always believed that one of the things that makes a marriage work is the teeter-totter of it: when he is down, it is my turn to be up. When one of us is overwhelmed, the other has to tighten up and take the blows. It is never a one-way street. It surely wouldn’t be in the months ahead. He just needed a few minutes, and then we were ready for bed, but not, it turned out, ready for sleep.
All of what had happened in the previous twenty-four hours, which included the emotional weight of all that had happened in the last years, was heavy on us, but the heaviest of all was the one-third likelihood that the cancer had metastasized to my liver. John fretted that he hadn’t taken care of me, though the blame, if blame had been useful, was mine, not his. When he finally picked up a book from the night table, finally forced his mind to think of something, anything else, I got up and got onto the computer. I typed “metastasis liver cancer prognosis” into Google, and I pressed Search.
“If the surgery is not successful, the disease is often fatal within three to six months.” That’s what I read. And that’s when I decided I wasn’t searching for prognosis again.
The next morning we got up, and the first hours were so innocent and familiar: Jack climbing into our bed as soon as the sun came up, the dressing