Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [44]
For a time, the house was noisy with visitors, and then it was mostly still. The damp funeral flowers, as Edna St. Vincent Millay said in “Interim,” “strangled that habitual breath of home,” so we sent the lilies to the retirement communities around us, places Wade had gone with his Latin class to carol and to dance. The hours passed, then days, then weeks. Each evening two friends came to our house. David Kirby and Gwynn Winstead, who was a friend of mine who had lost her son eighteen years before. From dinnertime to bedtime, we sat in our family room, the television off, the music off, the only sounds our voices. We relived sixteen years with them, night after night, week after week. For months. Sally, the mother of Cate’s closest friend, came nearly every day. Hargrave and Ellan and Martha, who lived near me, kept watch. Did I need anything? Could they do anything? Jim, who had written a column in the paper about Wade a few weeks before he died, was a welcome sight at our kitchen table. Letters daily, wonderful letters about the difference Wade had made in his sixteen years. “He was the good one,” one boy said. Most of these gestures were small, but a walking stick is small compared to a man, but when a man needs one, that small stick is all that will do. And we leaned into it.
Still the quiet house was hard for all of us. The Weather Channel with no sound. The Weather Channel with sound. Then C-SPAN. Then news. Finally sports. But even that was background. In the foreground was silence.
In order to tell the real story of the extraordinary people who gathered around us then, I have to tell the story first of a noisy house. And I don’t mean it figuratively. Our house had been so full, so loud, before Wade died. Cate’s friends, who had sometimes gathered at our house, were now asking her to come to their houses, their parents undoubtedly thinking they were helping. Maybe they were, but they left behind the silence.
Before Wade died, Cate’s friends had gathered in lots of places, our house included, often locked away in her bedroom teaching each other to dance, talking about middle-school romances and middle-school humiliations. Wade’s friends, on the other hand, filled every part of our house every day—and every weekend night—for years. Our house was the hangout for his class. My kitchen would fill up after school until I chased them back to the basketball court or upstairs to the playroom. I had a sign on the drawer where I kept the snacks for lunch that reminded them they could not eat from that drawer and another on the cabinet where we kept basketball tickets and travelers’ checks that said, “If this isn’t your house, stay out of this cabinet.” But they ignored the notes, because it really was their house. They would tell me their grades, talk to me about politics, ask for my help with homework and projects. One Sunday night before Mr. Baker’s famous leaf project was due in biology, my kitchen was filled with children, and I mean actually filled, most of whom—but not all of whom—I knew. Until late into the night, I helped freshman boys, friends and strangers, mount and label pressed leaves, many the extra leaves Wade had collected just in case any of his broke while being mounted. Report cards, PSAT scores, driving test results, breakups with girlfriends—it was all reported in my kitchen.
Just as they were learning to drive, one or more among them decided to take a truck from our driveway. The housekeeper listened to their plan and was