Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [76]
Anna Virginia Johnson is buried not far from Wade. An English boxwood planted by her grave decades ago when she died, as Wade did, at sixteen. I think about Anna Virginia, though I only know her name. There is no sign she is otherwise remembered. If there is no life eternal, then Anna Virginia is gone, faded, only a name on a stone, a stone being slowly covered by that boxwood. We can cry out, I do cry out—but I cannot change it.
On Talk of the Nation, Science Friday on NPR they talked of the origins of man. How recent, a caller asked, are the differences in man we attribute now to race? Very recent was the answer. Race has emerged in the last 100,000 years. There was so much in this: if 100,000 years is recent, what then is sixteen years? A blink, less than that. And even something as seemingly basic as race is mutable. It exists briefly, maybe to be washed away again as gradually we intermarry and live in common climates. It confounded me, but the words that cut me were the truths I confronted every day: Parts of death—at least parts—are cruelly permanent. I will not brush his hair from his eyes, I will not feel his arms wrap around me as I work, I will not watch him as he shoots a basketball in the backyard, I will not sit beside him at the table now or in ten years or twenty. This is the life I must now live and in this life he is forever dead.
New Year’s Day was followed by the nine-month anniversary of his death, on January 4th. In the nine months since he died, I had been to the movies only once. It was Emma. I could do that. I went once to a light opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors. I could not do that. As Amahl’s mother held him and loved and watched him, I could not stop the tears, grateful for the curtain calls to come and the darkness that allowed me to cry. And finally for the first time we watched something besides sports or a convention or the news on television. I walked into the family room and sat down with John. He was watching The American President. Michael Douglas walked down the portico from the Oval Office, the boxwood gardens to his right. Three weeks before Wade died, I had walked that portico with him, the gardens to our left, when he had gone to Washington for the speech contest. And I knew, as I watched the movie that night, that all my strength and all my smiles were doomed. It would always come down to this. That sweet boy, my precious son, lay in the ground, his hands, his long squared fingers, crossed on his chest, wearing that same jacket he wore on the portico. Everything was hard.
I thought endlessly of odd moments, not necessarily happy times but intense times, times when having Wade as my son took everything from me. When he was in Colorado for the eighteen-day journey with Outward Bound, it was unlike other camps he had attended: I could not speak to him or write him, and he could not write to me. On the day he was to fly home, I had calculated when he would be at the Denver airport, and I arranged to be home if he might call, as I hoped he would. He did, but he called earlier than I had thought, and when I came home, there was only the tail end of his collect call recorded on the answering machine minutes before. It sounds foolish now, but I was inconsolable. I had saved up all my expectations, for days I had been anticipating his voice, and now I had been frustrated. Hours passed while he walked the Denver airport and talked to other boys who were leaving on earlier flights, shopped for shampoo and washed his hair. Hours that I sat there, staring at the phone. John tried to distract me, but it was no use. I wanted