Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [43]
We had always sat in a pew about two-thirds of the way back, far enough back that it wasn’t a distraction that Cate, with a purseful of crayons, and Wade, with a nub of a pencil, were drawing during the sermon. That was our pew for fourteen years, but not today. On Easter Monday our pew was the first row, and at the end of the pew was the casket we had chosen. I suppose it was the one we had chosen, but honestly I do not know because I could not look at it. And I had to not look at it for an awfully long time, as the service went on and on. The three of us who remained were to speak, and Wade’s friends and some of the adults with whom Wade had been close. I could have listened forever to the voices of those who loved him. But first the associate minister spoke. He was a dear man, but he did not know Wade, and in what would turn out to be a terrible decision he chose to speak from Lament for a Son, Nicholas Wolterstorff’s book about the death of his son Eric. It must have seemed a right choice, a love song to Jesus, really, occasioned by Eric’s death. And as the minister read, as Eric emerged, a selfish boy took form. “When I got angry at him,” his father wrote, “it was usually over his self-centeredness.” Who was this boy intruding on Wade’s funeral? He was not Wade. Wade was imperfect—we all are—but he was never once selfish, never once self-centered. Did anyone here think this was Wade? I wanted to scream out, That’s not him. The sermon about this stranger and his tormented father went on and on. I leaned into John. Just make it stop. On it went. Please make it stop. Please. And finally it did. It was finally time for the rest of us to speak.
Unimaginatively, we had always called Wade’s friends—who nearly lived at our house—“the boys.” It was now the boys’ turn to speak. They had met at the house of one of our neighbors and planned what each would say. They stood together in front of the altar, and each one in turn stepped to the pulpit to say one special thing about Wade.
One boy stepped up but couldn’t speak. His face was dissolving in grief in front of fifteen hundred people. It was all I could do not to leave my pew and go to him, for these weren’t just “the boys”; they were my boys. They had been a part of my every day for years. Another boy, the boy I always thought of as the closest to Wade in spirit, went to him. After they finished, Cate spoke, reading something she had written and speaking with the beautiful grace that has always accompanied that child. She was fourteen, and she transcended age.
John read from Wade’s Outward Bound journal. Wade had climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro with John the previous summer, and, in order to get himself acclimated to the heights, he had gone to Outward Bound Colorado to spend time at high altitudes. He had told me about the journal he wrote at Outward Bound, but we hadn’t read it until he died. The hardest to hear was the last he wrote. And John read it aloud. “The course director said that the solo is where you become a man. I disagree with that. I think that you become a man by slowly maturing. I think that it takes different experiences to help you mature and I think that you never really stop maturing and growing as a person…. I know that when this course is over I will be very proud of myself and very self confident. Whenever I have an obstacle to overcome in the future, I will think back to this course and know that I can conquer it. More than any other goal that I have set for myself I want to show my love and appreciation to my family for all that they have done for me…. I really want to do something great with my life. I want to start a family when I