Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [159]
So, for as long as I could write—and at one point it became too hard—I signed the letters we had drafted and I wrote a personal note of thanks on the bottom of each. But it was finally too hard, as my hands cramped and my fingers became swollen. A box might have five hundred letters in it, and once I could sign and write notes to two boxes’ worth in a day, but I would pay for that. I started on a more sensible regimen of signing, but it was slow, and I was embarrassed that we had printed out all the letters with the same date, in the beginning of February, and then it became April and then May, and I was still writing notes on the bottom of letters dated February 7th. Finally my hand gave out, after about fifteen thousand responses. It was not too long after the surgery when I developed lymphedema, for which I was supposed to avoid repetitive motions—and I had to stop altogether for a time. The only upside was that I didn’t worry any longer about that February date. Now I have started again, despite the lymphedema, despite some neuropathy that has dulled the nerves in my right hand, and I will write—as slowly as I need to—for as long as it takes.
Even when I wasn’t writing in response to the letters and the e-mails, these strangers who had reached out to me were my companions. I had talked to the press a little. I had early interviews about the breast cancer with Katie Couric and Larry King, trying to encourage women to get the mammogram I had not gotten for too many years and trying to encourage breast cancer patients to participate in these important clinical trials and studies. But after going out once, to the Kennedy Center Honors, in my wig, I pretty much tucked myself into the job of fighting the cancer and being as much of a mother and a wife as I could manage. And answering mail.
It’s not that I wanted to crawl in a hole, but it drained me to get dressed up and go out. It was easier to give all of my energy to this fight and my family and not any energy to trying to be a personality or even to being a pulled-together human being. But my companions now were my family, my caregivers at Lombardi Cancer Center, John’s devoted staff, the Moores—or, as Jack called them, the Mister Moores—next door, and the tens of thousands of people I did not know whose hands were linked, who were holding me up with letters, cards, candles, and books, with quilts and caps, and with prayer.
I was warmed by the great affection and concern for me in the letters, particularly from cancer survivors. For me as Elizabeth Edwards, yes, but mostly, I think, just for Elizabeth as a woman they would never meet but who now was a sister in something deeply painful and gripping and mysterious. Many—some who wrote in thick black pencil in language plain and fierce on lined paper ripped from notebooks—said they had never written a letter anything like this one before. One woman said she was worn out helping her children with homework and she suddenly just reached for one of their three-hole notebook sheets and began writing to me. I felt graced to have given them the cause or chance to record or transmit what some had held inside for a very long time. It was my fierce and probably stubborn, and definitely naive, ambition to respond to every one. I wrote, and many wrote back. Some people Xeroxed my original handwritten letter and sent a copy with their second note, or third. One man wrote back to say how astonished he was that I even wrote out the envelope, which suggests that the response to him got into the right envelope, for which I am very grateful, since the stacks of letters would sometimes tumble under the