Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [9]
As I walked to my room, I wiped away my tears. There would be plenty of times in the days and months to come when I would need John; now it was his time to need me, and I couldn’t be in tears.
Even though I was afraid of what breast cancer would mean to my family, and even though I didn’t want my parents or my children to have to hear that I had cancer, I really was at peace about the disease. I have sometimes talked about the strange gift that comes with the awful tragedy of losing a child. I had already been through the worst, I believed; we all had, and I had the gift of knowing that nothing will ever be as bad as that. The worst day of my life had already come. And I knew too that I had a chance to beat this, a chance my son never had, a chance we never had to save him. Wade was dead by the time an EMT came to the side of his car to help him just seconds after his accident, and there was nothing I could have done in that moment to save him, no matter how many nights I had spent begging God for the opportunity to go back and give us the chance to try. But this was different. I had a chance. I was resolved, not defeated.
And I sensed that I had a few people who would be pulling for me, maybe speaking to God for me. Those women I had just left, who had stood with me in the last months, I thought they would be there—and they were. The people I had met as I campaigned, people who had told me they counted on me, I thought I could count on them, too—and it turned out I could. Those two spirited women in Cincinnati who asked if I was a survivor. I knew I wasn’t walking alone.
I went back to my room. John and Cate were waiting to meet me, to tackle all that still lay ahead of us that day. I pulled on what Hargrave called my Courage Jacket, and we went out to Faneuil Hall.
CHAPTER 2
JACKSONVILLE
MANY PEOPLE GROW up in one house, and there they learn the stories of most of their neighbors and of their town. Their home phone number is one they will have for twenty years or sometimes much longer than that. Decades later they take their children back to their old neighborhood and point out the places that marked the events of their lives. I always wanted that, but, like every child who grew up in a military family, it was not to be. For me, it’s not one place. Sure, I could drive through Alexandria, Virginia, and show my children where the Topps Drive-In once stood, where its aging posts with mounted menus touting Sirloiners have been replaced by a shiny Lexus dealership. I could circle Hemming Park in Jacksonville, Florida, and ride past the old May Cohen windows that had delighted me at Christmas when I was seven. There I could show my children the Morrison’s Cafeteria where we ate after Sunday school, beckoned by the enveloping intonations of James, the doorman, whose warm, “Come on in, no waiting in the Carriage Room” drifted across the park and invited us in. I could, and did, fill my children with the stories of Pistol Pete Maravich when we passed by his high school on the way to basketball at the YMCA in Raleigh, how he’d averaged thirty-two points a game and no one could stop him.
But the truth is, I was in those places, but they weren’t in me, not like a hometown is. I didn’t watch them change as I grew, and I cannot measure the changes in my life by the evolution of a place. When I date an event, I don’t ask, “Was the new high school built then?” but rather, “Where were we stationed?” Things happened in a place, but eventually I moved away, and one place was replaced by another and then another. James in front of Morrison’s was replaced by the wooden backstop at Bandy Field in Atsugi, Japan, which was replaced by the red metal roof of the Topps Drive-In. My life is measured by which air station, which town, which country I lived in. And the cast