Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [49]
First, I had John. In every activity, in every project, in every moment of grief, I had John. For years, I had been writing a letter to my children, a letter that they would read, I thought, when I died—my “dying letter.” I read it to myself when Wade died. Afraid I might not be there to interfere with whomever they were choosing to marry, I expressed my opinion in advance, on paper. What they had to understand, I wrote, was that passion is not a constant river from which they could drink for a lifetime. What kept the passion there, what filled the gaps when the passion hit a drier spot, were respect and friendship and love and communication. And I was now living such a time. Though we were both filled up with emotion, overloaded with emotion, there was no room amid the grieving for passion. And yet our relationship was deeper as that river dropped. For the first six months after Wade died, John and I were only a few feet apart nearly every single minute. Some couples grow apart; I saw it happen in couples in Compassionate Friends. It had happened to Gwynn. But we had what I had hoped Wade would have, and what I still hope Cate will have: a relationship in which there was passion, respect, friendship, love, and communication. And there was something else, something that is just dumb luck: we needed basically the same things in our grieving—not entirely, admittedly, but basically the same things. So we walked together, and still do.
So first and last, there was John. And Cate, whose two-chairs-and-an-ottoman bed in our bedroom also had a little bit to do with the lull in passion, but who brought much more than she took away. Cate, who worried that the good child to whom she could never measure up had died, although it was Cate who got most of the awards, Cate who was the better athlete, Cate who got the best grades, and—this like her brother—Cate who had devoted friends. She was there for me; I only worried that she wouldn’t let me be there for her. When she was seven, she couldn’t blow a bubblegum bubble, so she went to her room, practiced for as long as it took, and came out only when she had mastered it. The year before Wade died, she said she wanted to be a softball pitcher. None of us could help her with the exaggerated slow-pitch windup. But she got a pail of softballs and stood in the backyard each afternoon, until she was the starting pitcher on her team. And when the league changed to fast-pitch, she did the same thing all over again. No one could have asked more of herself and less of her mother. I always had the feeling that the support I gave her was the support she thought was good for me to give, rather than what she needed. But it was something, and, after a decade, it still is something.
And I also had Matt Leonard, whom I had loved for almost his whole life, and whom I could fuss over like a mother while he fussed over the Learning Lab. He’d have to tell you if it was good for him—and time might give me a break on his answer—but I know it was good for me. I fussed too over the WELL, like a lioness protecting her den. John, and Cate, the WELL and Matt, the cemetery and the staff there—they were my companions.
And Wade, too. Every day I would sit beside him, on a blanket with a thermos of water, and I would read the Bible aloud to the place on the ground under which he was buried. I read from the Bible my mother’s parents had given me in 1957, a zippered New Revised Standard edition that was worn before I started. It got so much use in those next months that it is now too fragile to be taken from my house. After I finished that, Wade’s godfather, Glenn, sent me Sages and Dreamers by Elie Wiesel, and I read that aloud. When Wade’s senior year started, I read aloud all the books on the twelfth-grade reading list. The whole thing. As I did, I remembered our years of reading together, his head on my lap, his fingers linked in mine, as first he read and then I read and then it was his turn again and then mine until he would sleep and I could feel the deepness