Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [68]
But they weren’t really our children, I had to remind myself. John and I sat one rainy day and wondered if this was what life would be now. A house once full of life was still quiet. A child who should be comforted was comforting us. And a child who should be applying to college was in the ground. Other people’s children were coming and going from our lives. We were investing ourselves in them, and that gave us pleasure. But where, we wondered, were we going to find real joy? We couldn’t pin the responsibility for creating joy entirely on Cate, although she’d certainly have tried to meet the challenge.
We asked ourselves, what gives us joy? Well, that was easy. Children gave us joy. Should we have more children? That would be wonderful, but I was forty-six. Could we? We went to my doctor, Shep, who sent us to a specialist, who after a round of tests said it would be tough, but we could try. We only needed the tiniest hope, and we had untapped hope to spare. So we decided, after we got Cate’s blessing, to do just that. Cate couldn’t have been more supportive, and we set out with an optimism we thought we might never feel again.
But the process was slow. Tests, appointments, procedures, failures. It was not until the week of Wade’s eighteenth birthday that the shots and medications and good fortune were translated into a pregnancy. I speak less of this not because it was unimportant. This pregnancy and the one to follow were two of the most important events of my life. I speak less of it because I did what others who wanted children did: I spent hours online looking at the faces of children who might be adopted. I read the online postings, almost as full of pain as anything on ASG, of women who had tried fertility treatments and failed to get pregnant. I heard the grief of women who had gotten pregnant and were unable to carry the pregnancy to term. It was heartbreaking. When John was in the Senate, a London newspaper contacted me. Did I want to do a piece for them showing them how older women can get pregnant? No, I said. The chances are so slim, and false hope is a bitter poison. People will have unreasonable hope, as I did, without me. But I could not encourage it, for I knew the cost of it when there was not a baby at the end of this difficult path. The paper should tell its readers to get pregnant younger, I said.
About this time, there was an interesting post on ASG by a sixteen-year-old girl who was born after the death of her brother. Her parents told her very little about Stevie; they did not want to talk about him. Did she even really lose a brother? she wondered. Dee, I wrote, You did in fact lose a brother, and for that I am very sorry. And, from your description, you lost a chance to know him and also a chance to know of him. That is no one’s fault, for the treatment of grief has changed. None of us can speak for your parents; none of us can say whether talking of Stevie with them now will bring them disproportionate pain or will bring them solace that you are interested in knowing your brother as well as you can. I can tell you that one of the things that naturally occurs to a parent who has lost a child is the desire to rebuild their family and reintroduce joy into their lives. No one who has lost a child really believes they can replace the child they buried. A child can bring joy, but the grief is always there. You said that you felt unhappy with yourself, but that is not fair. You are responsible for the joy and you are not responsible for the grief. The fact that you felt this burden, however, is edifying to those here. You have probably helped some parents who intend to have additional children think about issues that they might have neglected, and for that, I thank you.