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By Root 1043 0

weight of a child’s hand “helping” me straighten the piles. One woman religiously resent a picture of her dog eating a George Bush chew toy. Another sent a different card every week for months. I am overwhelmed with the immensity of the net with which I was provided and overwhelmed with the impossibility of containing it here in a thousand words or two thousand, for it was the seeming endlessness of it that took my breath away, then and now. Henry James wrote in his preface to Roderick Hudson that “universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to” stop. And this will be my problem here. It is impossible to come to terms with the enormity of the net that these people threw out to the floundering me, without reading each line, without imagining each sender. And drawing the circle around those I will share leaves too many who touched me outside it.

There were two kinds of men who wrote, those who treated me as a mother and those who treated me as a daughter, and I was left to guess whether the treatment corresponded to their ages. The women who wrote seemed to convey both an intimacy and a distance. From Montana and New Mexico and Hawaii they wrote “Hello from Montana,” “Hello from Hawaii.” Some, and this touched me, never even put a return address. Many invited me over to lunch when I was in town, or to use their guest room, and some looked forward to “hearing from you soon,” which I think was just an upbeat way of closing and made no demands. Some sweetly apologized for their audacity, as they described it, in writing to me familiarly. The connective tissue of the net they wove for me—and for themselves—was that much stronger because the threads were so different from one another. As they wrote to me, I honestly think they were writing to each other and to all of us. Their desire to share, which means to give more love, was almost overwhelming. And there was something, too, about the contact that I suspected, and hoped, put their own lives and their own trials onto a larger scale and on a greater stage and helped them understand their dignity and importance and the connected scope of their lives, for they really did share with me, and maybe, knowing that, you can understand how I could not simply sign a form letter in response.

One of the first survivor letters I received was postmarked November 5, 2004, right after my breast cancer was announced. It was addressed to Ms. John Edwards. Washington, D.C. That’s all there was on the envelope. Because of a hunch and the special kindness of some unknown person in the United States Post Office, it got to me. Then the letters and e-mails from breast cancer survivors and others—and over 65,000 e-mails—began to pour in. They came from all over my home state of North Carolina, from New York and Los Angeles, from small towns, from farms, from prison inmates, from nuns and rabbis and pastors, from the entire Republican Women’s Club of Lake Highland, Texas, from people I had met and people I would never meet, from fathers and brothers and sons, and men like John V., who told my husband what his wife’s surgeon had told him, that husbands can become the forgotten patients. Verlene B. was one of the first to write me that breast cancer is a family disease, and she is right. I was soon overwhelmed by the sea of support, or perhaps more literally by the lines cast me when I was still at sea and still coming to terms with what breast cancer might mean to me, to John, and most of all to my children. Five of the many boxes of letters sit across from my desk right now, and every card, note, every line, photograph, drawing, ribbon, and letter, mattered deeply to me and matters still. My gratitude goes to everyone for their tenderness, advice, encouragement, humor, honesty, courage, tears, recipes, and love, and also for the generosity they showed in understanding how right it can sometimes be to be touched by the hand of a stranger. I can only thank a few people