Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [151]
“Well, Jack, I’m going to be leaving now.”
“So when are you coming back?”
“I’m not coming back.”
“Why?” said Jack. “We’re friends.”
“Well, since the campaign is over, I won’t be coming back.”
I don’t know which one was sadder. Jack said, “Oh,” and he gave him a hug.
Jack invited him and Joe Casey, who had been with Jack earlier in the campaign until he got a significant promotion to the President’s detail, to his fifth-birthday party the following May. After all, they were friends.
When we came home from delivering the children to school, we turned ourselves fully to this next battle. It was now Thursday, November 4th, and we didn’t know whether I had cancer somewhere other than my breast. We didn’t know who was going to do the testing I obviously needed. We didn’t even have a doctor in Washington, D.C. All we knew was that we needed to move on all these fronts right away. At the same time, it was still just two days after the election, one day since the campaign into which we had thrown ourselves for so long had closed its doors, although it was still weeks before the last vote would be counted. I was sapped; I had held on to the secret of the cancer so long that when it came out, almost all my energy went with it. Whatever little was left evaporated when I Googled “metastasis liver cancer prognosis.” But John was a cauldron—restless, wanting to fix it all, knowing he was blocked in every direction. In the next days while we waited for a call back from the doctor or while I read to the children or talked to Cate on the phone (she’d finally gone to New York to start the job she had put off for four months), he would slip upstairs and, in whispered phone conversations, continue the campaign battle. He did it until the doing of it was patently useless, trying all the while to protect me from his frustration and disappointment. I needed, he was certain—and he was certainly right—the power of his optimism. He had to turn himself entirely to the battle in which he could have some effect.
He would be there for my fight, as I had been there for his. But it wasn’t a fair trade. My fight was one neither one of us wanted; we knew it would drain us in ways we hadn’t even yet imagined. We would have to summon reserves that we knew from sad experience were there, but it was nothing to which either of us could look forward. On the other hand, I thrived on his fight; it had fed me to campaign beside him these past two years. I needed it, and in the months ahead, when I would sit so tired and alone or with him beside me, I missed it—Hargrave and Ryan and Karen, the young people around me, the seniors I embraced, the mothers and the waitresses, the sense of purpose that was so much bigger than cancer. But it was over, and all I had to fight was cancer, a fight that would only take from me and from him and would never nourish me, or him. He got the short stick.
We talked to Dr. Cliff Hudis at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York on that anxious Thursday. We asked Cliff to oversee my treatment, to make sure we were making wise decisions. Cliff had precisely the no-nonsense way of talking that we needed. He’s brilliant in the most accessible of ways, and although he serves nothing with sugar, he’s never negative. If it hadn’t been for that spot on my liver in the CAT scan, I would have felt great after talking with him. But there was no denying that spot. We also talked