Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [47]
Gene Hafer, an attorney and the father of one of Wade’s preschool classmates, came by and asked if he could set up a foundation for the contributions that were coming into the high school in Wade’s name. What’s more, he had some ideas about how to spend that money. John and I had written out the things Wade cared about—writing and soccer and computers, Broughton High School and the University of North Carolina—and we used that list as our guide to what we might do in his name. When Gene suggested a computer lab adjacent to the high school, it seemed right. Wade had complained one day that an assignment was marked with the words “Ten extra points if your paper is typed.” Not everyone could type their papers, he’d said. Not everyone has a computer. It wasn’t fair to them. Well, now Wade could level that playing field. In his name, we built the Wade Edwards Learning Lab. I asked Matt Leonard, who with his father had climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro with John and Wade the previous year, if he would be the first director. He had just left Yale and was looking for something into which he could throw himself. He said yes. From the reconstruction of the office building to the wiring for the computers to selecting the Internet service provider, Matt cajoled and badgered and worked harder than anyone around him, until in October, six months after Wade died, the Wade Edwards Learning Lab—the WELL—was open and students who had no computers at home were at the long desks, checking their e-mail and writing their papers.
I had known Gwynn for eight years, since our daughters were in kindergarten together. And yet, after she took me to my first Compassionate Friends meeting, a meeting of bereaved parents that she moderated, I realized I owed her an apology. I hadn’t been such a good friend to her, I said. I hadn’t read the scars that the death of her precious son Drew had left nearly twenty years before. I hadn’t had eyes that allowed me to see, or maybe there was a part of me that did not want to acknowledge the possibility of burying a child. Whatever my excuses, I hadn’t been a good friend. I learned two things. From Gwynn, I learned that I needed to be more like her, to be someone who stepped forward when others stepped back at the death of a child. And she didn’t step up because it gave her an opportunity to talk about Drew—and you cannot know, unless you have been here, what a temptation that is. She stepped up and let a mother grieve her own loss. That’s what she did with me and with John. For years, really. So when I was campaigning in 2003 and 2004, I knew not just to hug someone who whispered in my ear that they too had lost a son. I held them but pulled back enough to look them in the face, my arms still around them, and I asked his name and when he had died and how they were doing and whatever else my time would allow, because it is not just a box to check for deceased children. Their boy deserved to leave more marks, and he could leave one with me. As I learned from Gwynn.
I also learned for myself that I had to give the people who cared about me instruction. I had to let them know what I needed, what would help. I got pretty good at that, although I was considerably less good at saying what didn’t help. It certainly didn’t help when a man I know, complaining that his son wasn’t getting into college where he wanted, told me that