Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [51]
I went every day to Wade’s grave until our second daughter, Emma Claire, was born, because that was what felt right to me. Whatever we do—going or not going to our children’s graves, sleeping with a toy, or closing the door to their rooms—has only to be what we each need, what we require to make it through each day without them. There is no other yardstick. It served me best to visit Wade’s place daily. On my way through the cemetery, I passed the graves of other children I knew to be well loved and did not often see their parents. In some ways, I suppose, I envied that they had a way of facing the death of their children that was not so vulnerable to weather, that did not require checking the papers to schedule around large funerals, that did not have a locked gate at sunset. It meant nothing to me that they came less often; I didn’t think then or now that they loved their children less than I loved Wade. We were, undoubtedly, different people before our children died, and we are different yet, with different ways of reaching for some measure of acceptance of this.
I went to Oakwood then, and I go now—though less often—because the rest of the living world ends at that cemetery gate. There his body lies, surrounded by the bodies of families, by stories of lives long and short, and there the inevitability of death seems like but another chapter. And there I could not help but speak to him. I read him letters that people had written to us about him as if they had been written to him. I took his SAT score out to him when it came in the mail. He would have been able to go to Carolina, where he so wanted to go. I told him, too, that Matt had gotten a good score. Before Wade died, I had kept trying to chase his great friend Matt home when he and Wade would sit at Wade’s computer, Wade helping Matt prepare. “Wade has to prepare himself, Matt,” I would say. But Wade wanted to help, and Matt stayed. And when Matt happily shared his score with me, I shared it with Wade’s grave. But it wasn’t just Wade I talked to. I also spoke to Oliver and Gerald, young brothers who died, each at two years, half a century ago, before I was born, and their brother Robert, who died in World War I, and to Ben and Emily and Betsy, who died within months of Wade’s death. I would speak to Wade and pray and read aloud. And I planted and tended and cared for the space that now surrounded his body. I cleaned around Wade, like cleaning his room, and I cleaned around the graves of the children like Oliver and Gerald, since next to each child were his or her parents, who died after them and were unable to tend the graves themselves. I placed flowers on the grave of Barbie, who fell from the Bay Bridge in Maryland; her parents lived too far away to place them there themselves. I never knew her, or them, but when I read her obituary, read that she would be buried at Oakwood, I thought how Wade, who was her age, surely would have liked her. I cared for the grave of Ida’s baby daughter, and I cleaned the cross of John, who died at twelve, carefully washing the dirt that had gathered in the words inscribed on his cross: In his mouth was found no guile.
It doesn’t matter to me whether all this sounds odd. I did it because it made it easier for me, easier for me to think that there were mothers who would come after me and tend to Wade’s grave when I no longer could. Easier to think that we were all in this together, that we formed a bond, a community—these long-dead mothers and I, and the mothers who would come later—and the creed to which we all subscribed was the sanctity of the graves of our children.
CHAPTER 7
RALEIGH, AND NOT RALEIGH
I FOUND A special place to share what I couldn’t share with every stranger