Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [42]
Wade died on Maundy Thursday. With Easter weekend, we could not have the funeral until Monday. The days in between were impossible and, if I can use an odd word, wonderful. Every day our house was full of food and flowers and friends. The washing machine was running. The kitchen was swept. And when we finally slept at night, they went away. But they were back in the morning, with more food, more support. I had never thought about how our lives had managed to intertwine with all these people, but they had, with some by just living, with most by doing—reaching out, helping out, coaching, carpooling, just being there. And now they were all here for us.
Hargrave had volunteered to come early that first morning. When she came at 8 A.M., John was already sitting on the front porch with his father, consumed by grief. Cate was up, and she and Hargrave hugged and cried. I was sitting at my computer printing out the phone numbers of the private schools that had admitted Cate for the next year. “I know it seems irrational,” I told Hargrave, “but I have to contact all those schools this morning first thing to let them know that Cate will not be coming. She can’t go anywhere.”
By midmorning the house was full. Diane Payne, the principal from the high school, and a clutch of teachers arrived asking what they could do. Martha from next door, or Ihrie answering the door, Sally or Bonnie answering the phone, Tricia or Ellan or Lisa—it could have been a dozen people—making hotel reservations for family coming from afar, and everyone intercepting reporters. Soccer teams from the twelve years that John had coached, and book clubs and PTA. People from the church we attended. People from the Y. From basketball and Urban Ministries. Lawyers and maids and secretaries and bankers. All there. The house was crowded with them, and yet in the most important way, the house was empty for us. There were people, just not the one person we craved.
There were things we had to do, impossible things that all parents who lose children have to do. We had to pick out a casket and flowers for our boy—cherry and a blanket of pure white roses—and ride around in the back of a sedan while Chuck Gooch from Oakwood Cemetery showed us the available burial plots. Sitting in that car, Chuck’s tender voice could not change the fact that he was driving a knife into us with each word. Here’s where you can bury your son. Here’s where you can put him in a box and let us cover him with dirt. I leaned into John. Make it end.
The visitation was on a cold rainy night, and I am told it lasted for hours, but time had no meaning for me. We stood in a long room with Wade’s casket at the one end. We had decided to bury him with letters from each of us. His father and his sister wrote long letters to him. I had sat with my paper and stared. “My dearest Wade,” I wrote. “You know.” That’s all I could write. We each placed our letters in the casket and had the top closed, so it was just a lovely box at the other end of the room. But it was Wade, just as surely as if he had been lying on that morgue cot, only a vinyl bag around him. The line of friends and neighbors, teammates and classmates, teachers and coaches went out the building and down the block. I had a moment, or should I say hours, of clarity, and I knew the name of every person who came through the line, even names I did not know I knew. Except for one. An older woman came up. She had to have waited in the cold rain for at least an hour, maybe two. I reached for her hands, searching her face. No, I did not know her. Then she spoke.
“Is this the line for Joy?” She was there for another visitation entirely.
“I am so sorry. This line is for our son, Wade. I don’t know where she is,” I said, then added as her tiny hands squeezed mine, “But if you find joy, please let us know.”
The funeral was the same. Our church was full. Even though it was spring break, people had come back—every one of Wade’s teachers, from preschool through his junior year, the boys with whom he played soccer and basketball