Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [58]
Kellam’s mother, the bereaved parents at the Compassionate Friends meetings, my new family at ASG—we were linked. It is why I felt linked with mothers whose children had died—and those who feared for their children at war, mothers I hugged and held as I campaigned across the country in 2004. We were alike in the most essential of ways. We wanted—needed, I suppose—to hug someone who truly knew. Like the men and women who sat alone in front of monitors and typed out their fears and tears and nightmares hoping for a listener who understood.
Write as we all did, there was no elixir that could return us to the world where unbridled happiness was possible. We were all searching. Keep his things? Pack them away? Change his room? Move altogether? Not moving, moving; being surrounded by their things, being isolated from them—these were but rearrangements of the physical and could not reach the part of us that needed redesign. What we all had to face was not something present but something absent. And although anyone could escape something’s presence, there was, we each discovered, no way to escape its absence.
The picture I need to draw, to be accurate, is not an engaging one. We weren’t really trying to escape. We were trying to immerse ourselves. We all sat reading and writing about dead children. I wrote about my dead child and, for hours on end, I would read about theirs. I did this for them, for their child, and they would do it for my child. It is selfless and selfish all at once. What you’re afraid of, as a mother of a child who died young, is that he will be erased, and there is nothing you can do about that. Acknowledging these children is an affirmation that we won’t allow them to be forgotten. In that society, you were not alone. When I was with the parents of my son’s friends or my daughter’s friends, their sons were alive, their daughters were alive; I was the different one, I was the oddball. In ASG, I wasn’t the oddball. We were all the same, wounded. In Annie Proulx’s magnificent book Shipping News, Quoyle is a misfit who moves to a community in Newfoundland, a land that’s unforgiving and hard and bitter, and all the people who are there are one form of misfit or another. And there miserable Quoyle becomes happy with this life—the odd man out who finds comfort and happiness in the community of like people. I too was out of place anywhere else. I couldn’t express myself fully anywhere else. Here everything that I felt could be wide open. And so I’d walk in there and open my coat, and nothing could have been better for me.
It functioned in the very best ways communities can function. Everybody comes in need, and everybody wants to get their needs filled, at the same time they understand that they have a role in filling everybody else’s needs, too. The one thing I hated to happen was when somebody would start a thread and nobody would respond. I felt obligated to post something in that thread so that that person wouldn’t feel like they were just shouting into the void. Because that’s exactly the opposite of what we were supposed to be. It was the very best functioning community—and it was made of people who were probably not functioning at all in their real lives. People who didn’t know me well would offer me antidepressants. I had my antidepressant, this wonderful community of support. I didn’t need a drug, didn’t want one. A drug would just make me feel numb. These people made me feel like I was home.
It was nearly Wade’s birthday. What had been such a day for celebration was now what? When Wade was born, John