Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [65]
On October 29th, we called back to Raleigh on our way home from a soccer trip with our daughter and a car of girls. “I have bad news.” Another child from our school. Our school of just under two thousand, children who mostly grew up together in the part of town where people do not move, where the children have gone to the same schools, played ball in the same Y gym winter after winter and soccer on the same teams, gone to the same camps, belonged to the same youth groups.
Wade, then Ben in a fire, then Jackson drowning, and Edward in a coma. And now Betsy Draper, a sophomore, a promising soccer star, fell to the floor while dancing with a friend in her bedroom. That night, we were told, she was unable to breathe on her own and was in a coma with a cerebral hemorrhage. It was grim. And the children who remained were reeling. What were we to say? The world makes no sense? Your life is held by the thinnest of threads? And with their innocence gone, they did not want to leave each other’s side. The girls in the backseat huddled, holding hands. So like what Cate and I had done six months before.
The next day I wrote to my family at ASG, I have four images in my mind. One is a picture of Wade I carry with me, three weeks before he died, handsome, happy, at peace. The second is Wade’s still face as he lay in a permanent and cherubic sleep. The third is the flat empty faces of the children I saw today at the hospital, uncomfortable where they were, unable to be anywhere else. The last, juxtaposed oddly, is an image from this weekend’s soccer tournament: the girls, having won the semifinals in a shoot-out, linked arms and skipped across three fields to where the championship game would be played. The perfect picture of blissful childhood. Eighteen hours later, there was no joy whatever in those faces.
As I type, Cate has pulled out Wade’s yearbook from last year, looking for pictures of Betsy, I know. She will not find what she really seeks: some reason, some explanation for the injustice of these tragedies. I want to hold her and tell her I will keep her safe, but now, such words would be wasted: she knows better.
The deaths of our children confound us. The foundation blocks of living have been upset. As time passes, we start putting together the crumbled wall, trying to find in life enough rationality that action, even the action of living, makes sense. But the assault is too fast: do not rely on fairness or right, we are reminded over and over. When Solomon speaks to his son in Proverbs, he promises that a righteous life will be a long life; it turns out that is not true. The story of Cain and Abel is the truth: no one will step in and protect the pure from death. And if that was not enough, we learn we cannot rebuild the wall even with mercy and grace, for too many of the blocks are now missing. I am so very tired.
I used to think that the greatest gift you could give a child was the sense that anything was possible. Now that gift has a horrid twist: anything is possible. You tempt death as you sleep, as you drive on a clear day, as you walk, as you dance. Maybe this is all naive. Maybe the cocoon never was there. Instead it is like the public service announcements on breast cancer, I wrote eight years before finding out I had breast cancer. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, you get breast cancer. One, two….
Tomorrow I substitute-teach at our high school. I will try not to look at them as targets of irrational tragedy; they will try not to look at me as the symbol of a dead child.
In the midst of this, the Learning Lab was about to open, the bench about to be dedicated, and we wanted to find a grand way to do that. I wasn’t much in the business of making things joyful these days, so my friends—my dear friends—took over. Tricia, who had experience organizing such events, took control of a day of celebration, and everyone pitched in, including women I didn’t know well. The dedication of Wade’s memorial wall and bench went as well as I could have possibly