Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [173]
CHAPTER 15
HOME
IN MARCH, MY niece Jordan married her long-time boyfriend Ken. The whole family gathered in Sarasota, and people from the campaign who had known Jordan when she worked in the primaries came as well. Marc Adelman was sitting at one of the tables, and Jack crawled up in the chair next to him. Hi, Jack said, maybe a little surprised to see him there. Are you in my family? Marc responded, Well, not exactly. Almost, but not exactly.
Family is what we make it. The Anania family that includes the Ohio Ananias. The traveling family of the campaign. The young people who shared Thanksgiving with us—the young soldier from Vietnam in 1966 and the campaign workers in 2003. Our closest family includes Wade, who has been dead for more than ten years. Emma Claire, so used to hearing of Wade, lamented once that it was sad that Jack was born too late and never knew Wade. But neither had she. He had just been so much a part of our family that it hadn’t occurred to her that she never met him. This Valentine’s Day, they released helium balloons to him in heaven. Their idea, not mine. In our family, we talk about Wade and the funny or silly or wonderful things he would do because we have accepted his new place in the family. When I see Emma Claire fly across the yard with grace and speed, I always think how much Wade would have loved to have her acceleration instead of his lumbering gait. When I open Jack’s palm and point to the single freckle improbably placed there, we laugh that Wade sent one of the many from his cheeks, just to let us know he was all right. And as Cate watches Emma Claire and Jack cuddle and fight, play and tease, she almost always turns and asks, “Were we like this when we were their ages?” And I almost always say, “Just like that.”
Just like that, life has found its cadence again. The cancer seems to be gone. I have yet another set of doctors. We have a new town, well, an old one really, for John and I found land near where we started, near the Chapel Hill church in which we were married. We’re back buying flowers at Southern States and ham at Cliff’s Meat Market. Back home. The younger children are in school, and in basketball, and soccer, and baseball. Cate is starting law school. The house we are building is nearly done, and I can walk through the shell of it, imagining our lives there, imagining the sounds of the children playing or the ka-thump ka-thump of a basketball being dribbled. When I am there alone I can even hear the washer running, so real is the life to which we have been, for a decade, slowly moving.
And I have finished this book. But in the writing of it, so many people came back to me, sat here in this room with me. I know that my father’s great gift to me, of reaching out and pulling people toward me, has made this life possible. Because from each one, I have taken something—and I hope that I have also given back—and that something meant that I could weather the next storm. From the first important days with my brother and sister as my constant support, and in each step since. From all of them together I could create a net, a huge safety net that allowed me to climb ahead with the boys on Mt. Fuji, or to protest a war when my father’s job was to defend it, or to go out with a fellow in law school who didn’t seem to share any of my interests, or to breathe again after Wade died, or to try to have more children with Cate’s blessing, or to say, Yes, you should run and then to do whatever was asked of me, and finally to keep standing when I heard the words It’s breast cancer.
It has been easier to do all these things not simply because of my splendid family, not simply because of the Hargraves and Glenns and Sallys