Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [56]
For now, almost everything I did was centered on Wade. The Learning Lab certainly, and we met with the North Carolina English Teachers Association—including a professor named Collett Dilworth, with whom I had gone to English graduate school a quarter century before—and set up the Wade Edwards Short Fiction Contest for North Carolina high school juniors, which awards college scholarships for stories that inspire. We went to the Wake County awards ceremony for literary arts and accepted an award for a short story Wade had written—given, fortuitously, by Jim Jenkins, the sweet man who had written the column in the paper about Wade before Wade died. And John read aloud from Wade’s short story at a reading of the literary arts winners at our local bookstore. So many children asked for pictures of Wade that I wrote to Lifetouch, the yearbook photography studio, and asked them—though it was past the time for ordering—if they could send more of his junior pictures. I enclosed a check, which they sent back when they sent the pictures. I wrote to the boys with whom he had gone to Outward Bound Colorado and sent them a story Wade had written that was loosely based on that experience. Letters from those children and the ones with whom he had gone to Washington three weeks before he died comforted us. We went to a reading by the splendid author Kaye Gibbons, and before she read from her new work, she read from Wade’s journals. “Like Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories,” she said. I could have lived for a month fed only by those words. We traveled to Myrtle Beach, where the trial lawyers’ association was announcing that the high school mock trial competition it sponsored would be named for Wade. A tree at his elementary school. There were so many gifts. And on ASG, I talked about the gifts, the ideas on which we followed through, the ideas left for another day. I gave advice on foundations and encouragement where I could. I hadn’t thought, though, how it all might be received.
A speaker came to my meeting of bereaved parents, a respite from our usual commiserating, I suppose. After he spoke, he turned to me and said, “What are you doing to honor the memory of your son?” Out of the blue. It hadn’t been the topic at all. But, coincidentally, that morning we had gotten the brochures from the foundation we were starting. It had pictures of him and descriptions of several projects in his name. I had brought one to share with Gwynn. Without thinking, I pulled it out, and it was passed around the table. And then he asked the other parents the same question. One woman, who had just moved to Raleigh and had little in the way of support, said, “I pick up money I see on the street; I always think it comes from my son. And I decided I would do something for him, so I counted the money, and it was $2.73. I didn’t want to add to it because the ‘found’ money was from him. Then in church they said they needed crayons for the Sunday school, so I used the $2.73 to buy crayons.” As she spoke, I slowly put the brochure back into my purse. What she had said was so sweet and lovely, and I told her so, but I could not erase my own blessing. Although she had been at every meeting before that, she did not come to the next meeting or the next, and it broke my heart. After that, before I posted a blessing on ASG, I thought of her out there, listening and alone. Of course, I am glad I am able to parent Wade’s memory so vigorously, but the height of the gestures measures nothing at all. They were all just expressions of our continued love, whether in the form of a computer lab or a box of crayons.
We went to Wade’s spring Latin program—another blessing. It had been renamed Attic Night, for his name in Latin class, Atticus. The Latin class was small and had been together since freshman year. Each year the energetic teacher, Jennifer Holt, gave them new Latin names, and each year the names got closer to their personalities as she got to know them better. Atticus had been Cicero’s