Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [158]
My last chemotherapy session was on February 15, 2005. Mercedes had a friend of hers make me a cake with the UNC logo on it. Mercedes, as usual bragging about someone else, told us how difficult it had been to get the N and the C just right, and hadn’t her friend done a nice job? We brought cookies—for Mercedes and all the nurses who had fed John cookies over the last fifteen weeks, and we brought flowers for Mercedes and Ann. It couldn’t be a tearful goodbye because it was such a happy goodbye. We couldn’t be sad, and yet, despite the cake and the cookies, we couldn’t quite celebrate either the end of a great collaboration.
Beginning right away after Boston, in the first days after we told the public, we started getting letters and notes. The first mail came to John’s Senate office—cards, faxes, letters, e-mails, gifts. It was clear the Senate staff could not add this to their job description, so we released my e-mail address to the public. The first day there were more than a thousand e-mails. By the end of the week there were twenty thousand. I tried reading the e-mails, answering some as I could, but they kept coming too fast for me to have any hope of responding quickly. For much longer than a reasonable person should have, I held on to this pipe dream that it was going to be possible to answer them all as they came in. Among the first I read, to which I responded, was from a woman who, upon hearing that I had breast cancer, had scheduled a mammogram and discovered that she, too, had breast cancer. She started her treatment just weeks after I started mine. That single e-mail was all the reassurance that I needed that we had done the right thing by making a public statement. As I type this today, I am still responding to each one. And the number of e-mails is up to sixty-five thousand.
And then the notes and cards started coming. Tens of thousands. It was daunting, but I started writing notes to people who had sent letters and cards and gifts through the regular mail. The staff worked with me on a form I could send out in response, but it turned out I could not just sign a form letter, not after I read the notes and letters, not after I opened the gifts. Even a card that had been simply purchased and signed was such a tender gesture. As I look over the vast variety of cards, I think of the imagination that went into buying each of them and choosing the exact right one—every one of them as different in their way as people are different—and two or three times there were cards with part of the front cut off, and I think one was a birthday card and I imagined it had been sent by an elderly woman who wanted to reach out right away, so she cut off the “birthday” part of an unused card she had in her desk. I look at the card from the Gilbert family, a get-well card with a teddy bear holding a bouquet of glittery pansies, and it occurs to me that the youngest daughter, Clara, might have picked it out. I recognized some cards, slightly yellowed, as being in the style of the 1930s or 1940s, and I imagined a widower finding a card his wife had saved for all these decades and sending it now to me. Some cards captured all the cards, as Ann Shewcraft’s message that This is the tiny seed of faith that grows into