Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [99]
The meeting took place on September 9th and September 10th, 2001.
And then there was September 11th. In some respects, it was not unlike Wade’s death. September 11th wiped everything else off the calendar, off the map, out of the conversation. For us, for everyone. Erskine decided he needed to do more than help with a race, and he decided that day to run for the Senate himself. We thought more of him for that decision. For now we were all, like the country, focused on that terrible morning, focused on our families and our larger national family, and it is not too much to say that John was focused on the new challenges the Senate would face.
Although our family was scattered when the planes hit the Trade Center and the Pentagon and crashed in a Pennsylvania field—I was shopping, John was on his way to the Senate, Jack, almost sixteen months, and Emma Claire, three, were taking a walk with Jennifer Madison, who helped us care for them—we quickly gathered in our house in Washington. Phone lines were jammed, so neither Jennifer nor I could reach our North Carolina and Florida families or Cate in Princeton. The Senate was evacuated, and John came home. The sounds of planes and helicopters, which were usually constant at our home near the vice presidential residence, were gone. There wasn’t much traffic. The world went quiet except for the sound of the television set. Within a few hours, the Capitol Police came to the door to pick up John to take him to a secure location. Was the Senate meeting there? No. Was he required to go? They would like him to go. No, he said, he would stay here with his family. We did what America did that day: we watched in disbelief and sadness, together, and we reached for one another.
The next morning we all drove to Princeton. We needed to see Cate, to touch her and hold her. The local paper, the Princeton Packet, started in those first days publishing the names of local residents who had been lost. I suppose everyone read those stories in the Princeton Packet, or the New York Times, or their own newspaper. But many of us read the names and the stories differently, envisioning the life that was lost, and by our careful reading doing the little we could to pay homage to those who had died. I knew that my alt.support.grief family was doing this, each in our way, silent and separate, honoring lives that should not have had to be reduced to a paragraph. Those who remained couldn’t know we had done it, but doing it was right and fine, and so many of those people who died that day and those that remained to mourn them, people we never knew—mothers and sisters, sons and fathers—have stayed with me. One who has stayed with me is not one who died but one who survived: a woman with a son whose husband died on September 11th. She could not talk to the Princeton Packet reporter who called. She could not give her name or his. She could not talk at all. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Her paralyzing grief, which I well understood, was heartbreaking.
In those days and for many weeks afterward, as John devoted himself to his duties and I devoted myself to the children, there was no mention of the two-day meeting. But our lives, like the lives of so many others, finally started to regain a rhythm. By January 2002 the discussion of a possible presidential run started up again, and John’s scheduler, Will Austin, whom we adore, called to set up a trip to New Hampshire. A senator’s schedule is not