Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [48]
I carried a picture of Wade in my pocket, in one of the stiff sports card sleeves into which he put his best baseball cards, so it wouldn’t get bent as I fingered it—and I did finger it. If, in a restaurant, I felt Wade about to overtake me, I would go to the restroom and take out the picture. If someone, anyone, was there, I showed them the picture and told them about my boy. I know it made some people feel awkward—I could see it in their faces—so I was always sure to say how much it meant that they had listened, so that at least they would feel good to go along with the feeling awkward. In a while, I felt more composed and could go back to my table. Maybe it was the time I needed; maybe it was the sharing. But what made it work was the willingness to reach out, the willingness to take a chance on the decency of strangers. And, frankly, no one ever ran out of those restrooms; they always stayed and listened.
Nothing was easy. Sometimes what I needed was to be left alone. The grocery store was a hard necessity. How many times could I pass his favorite food, his choice in soda? Not as many as I needed, it turned out. Once he came crashing in on me, and I was literally thrown to the floor. I sat sprawled in the soda aisle at the grocery store and cried uncontrollably. No one bought sodas for about five minutes. Although the store was crowded, no one walked down the aisle in which I sat, flattened by Cherry Coke.
Because of moments like the grocery store—I finally asked friends to go for me for a while—or restaurants, I tried to keep on a pretty narrow track. The house, the middle school Cate attended, the cemetery, Compassionate Friends meetings, more and more the Learning Lab, and Cate’s softball and soccer games. I started substitute-teaching at the high school Wade attended. Where people knew me, where people knew Wade. I didn’t need to go farther. I didn’t want to go farther.
John still coached Cate’s soccer team, and although the season was mostly over by the time we lifted our heads, there were still games to be coached, a tournament or two to attend. One dreadful tournament in Wilmington, near the beach house, was down that same highway where Wade had died. Cate’s team stayed across the street from the motel in which Wade and I had stayed—in a front corner room I could not miss—when his team attended the same tournament the year before. I would stare at the door to our room and wonder if I was ever going to be able to go anywhere again.
Despite having a mother who seemed to be made of ashes, Cate was trying to push through her year as cheerfully as possible. I went to all her softball games, where she pitched, and to her school programs, where she collected honors. She was doing her part; I tried to do mine. I took my camera so that people would see I was busy and wouldn’t feel they had to be solicitous. I was Cate’s mom then, not the mother of the boy who had died. It was good for her, and it was good for me. It was, I have to believe, good for them, too. They could give me a hug, and they did, without fear that I would collapse in their arms and they would have more than they could handle. So there was this unwritten boundary: I could be sad, but I just couldn’t be too sad. If I played my part, I got enormous support, support that continues even now, ten years later. But I couldn’t ask too much, or the deal we had implicitly forged might be broken.
It might have been an impossible deal for me to keep—remember, I did sit and cry in soda aisles—except that I had other places to put the grief, other things I was doing that let me parent the memory of Wade, and, as I will tell