Resilience (7 page)

In this odd Internet family, everyone had lost a loved one. No one stupidly believed that by not talking about it, it wouldn't happen to them. It had already happened to them. And now death and pain and loss and grief and anger and doubt, they were already here. There is a song written by Billie Holliday, “Good Morning, Heartache.” She captures, in a song grieving the loss of love, the desire to avoid the pain and the impossibility of eluding it. “Stop haunting me now, can't take it no how. Just leave me alone. I got those Monday blues, straight through Sunday blues,” she starts. And then she capitulates to it: “Might as well get used to you hangin' around, good morning, heartache, sit down.” Pull up a chair.

We pulled up chairs, in front of computers all over the world, and we talked. At any hour of the day or night, there was always someone there, at their chair waiting for you. In the years since I typed my first message I have met a handful of the people with whom I shared my darkest moments and my deepest doubts. And although each one of those meetings was satisfying, an odd and wonderful reunion, I always worry, as it appears we might meet, that our in-face differences will somehow come between us. Wade, at seven, was asked, for a Martin Luther King Day celebration in school, what lesson he had learned from King.
Look at the inside of people, not the outside
, he wrote. The wish of a seven-year-old boy and now the wish of a forty-six-year-old woman. I did not want anything, like thick accents or huge tattoos, to strain or test the tender strand on which I so relied. Well, we met and we were alike sometimes and different others, and it was a comfort each time, and maybe now I would not even notice the differences. Or at least I would not care.

The communities—alt.support.grief (an Internet newsgroup), Cendra Lynn's
griefnet.org
(a collection of e-mail lists), Tom Golden's Web Healing pages (a discussion bulletin board)—all functioned a little the same way. A person who recently lost a loved one would post about their daughter or father or wife—an introduction—and those who had been participants for a longer period of time would respond. Many responders would mention their own loss (I found it hard not to do that), but some would merely be embracing. It took a while to write of Wade. I wanted it to be just right, to reflect the boy more than my pain, to be the tribute he deserved rather than a howl from me, and maybe, honestly, I wanted to make people want to know him. He would never again say Hello, my name is Wade. So I was doing it, and that was a pretty daunting responsibility. The paragraphs that began this chapter were the way I introduced Wade to my new community.

But sharing Wade, making certain that to the extent I was able I parented his memory as well as a mother might, that made that day easier, which made the next day easier. I created a new place for him. Just as I grew to know Wally and Michael and Christian, Lucas and Liza and Chase, their grieving parents grew to know Wade, or the version of Wade I showed them. And there, frankly, he was a nearly perfect boy. And there, I could be less than a perfect mother and less than a perfect grieving mother and still feel safe. The central premise of the groups, which was largely but not entirely honored, is that we protected one another. Anyone could ask anything or express a fear or expose an indiscretion without fear of being criticized. We all knew the new boundaries of our existence. Everything was safe. It was more than therapeutic; it was a new home where Wade's memory had a place.

In this wholly ethereal world where no one had a physical presence, I could accept his physical absence—in a way—and I could parent his memory, keeping that a central part of who I was. In this community, it was all I was: Wade's mother. A decade later, I talked to Astrid, Christian's mother. What have you been doing? she asked. I paused. Astrid didn't know anything about me beside Wade. I quit practicing law, I started. You were a lawyer? We have had two more children. My husband ran for the senate. The state senate? No, the U.S. Senate. He won, and we moved to Washington. That must have been interesting; are you still there? I paused again. No, we are back in North Carolina. He ran for vice president instead of his Senate seat. He lost, and we are back home. Now the silence belonged to Astrid. Astrid told me later she went to Christian's grave and spoke to him. You will not believe, Christian, who Wade's father is. In our Internet community, he was Wade's father and I was Wade's mother. The world outside demands that we be lawyers or bus drivers or teachers or senators. Here all we needed to be was mothers and fathers.

All I wanted to be was a mother. A mother to Wade and as much of a mother as I could manage being to Cate, who was then just fourteen. I stopped being a lawyer; I never went back after the accident and I have never looked back at that decision with any regret. It seemed to me that it had nothing whatever to do with Wade, so I left. But it meant that my days, once full, were pretty empty. People who cared about me tried to fill them, tried to provide solace, mostly in activities that had nothing to do with Wade—sweetly, they wanted me to move away from the grief, I suppose.

There was a long time, though, when I would brush off solace. Maybe I didn't want to move away from the pain. Maybe it was not wanting to rewrite my life without him, or maybe it was what Edmund Wilson, the incomparable twentieth-century literary critic, said. Why should I have solace when he hasn't breath? Wilson wondered how he could be expected to enjoy what life offers when what life offers had been denied to one as substantial and serious and dear as his wife. That is how I felt about Wade. I get solace, a balm for me, and there is nothing whatever for him? I can understand on some rational level that the pleasure we take from life cannot diminish our children's pleasure, but there will always be with that logic an unstated reservation: that our children should have this pleasure as well, or instead of us. But our children weren't going to have pleasure, because they weren't going to live. And so I tried, as much as possible, not to live too much either. Or at least not live for me.

I pressed my life, my hopes into a dogwood tree at his elementary school, a scholarship in his name, a bench at his high school, finally a whole computer lab. See it? See him? Don't let him pass unnoticed through this life. John went on to do things, back to the courtroom, back to work that made a difference for living people. I was still there, still at the cemetery, still at the computer lab, still in his bedroom.

These gestures that kept his presence in the lives of those who knew him also did something else. Little by little, it became easier to accept Wade's death, because I had something to parent in his place. I had someplace else where he would be, in a sense.

On the suggestion of a friend, Gene Hafer, John and I decided to start a computer lab for high school students in his name. It never occurred to us how ambitious the project was. If we had known, perhaps we would have shied away, but we didn't know and so we threw ourselves into it. Finding the location across from his high school, raising the money, doing the renovation, getting the computers and the staff, filled every day for months. And then I would go there, parent the children who were using the lab, tell them a search engine hint Wade had taught me, and it was as close to him as I could ever be again without my nose between the sheets of his now-empty bed or in the grass above his grave. The computer lab was more than a place, though; I was doing something, actively parenting his memory. You don't, I discovered, leave the need to parent the child just because the child has left you. So doing something meant I had a way to do that.

I wasn't alone either, and knowing that was important. Among our online community Lana planted a garden for her daughter Brooke; Bill was father to Michael and guide to all newcomers at alt.support.grief. The Internet itself gave parents a place to parent, and in the years that I spent as part of the grief community, hundreds of Web sites and thousands of individual Web pages came online, each a lifeline for a lonely parent. I visit them still, and in each one, I see the mother choosing the pictures, writing just the words she hopes will capture her child and will introduce her to those people she never got a chance to meet. I did it, too. I posted where I could; when the computer lab opened, I worked on a Web page for the Wade Edwards Learning Lab, and no page was more important to me than the one that awkwardly, sweetly I hope, told the visitor who Wade Edwards was.

But I also found that for me and for other parents, doing these things was not complete insulation. Sometimes I felt the same emptiness even while I was doing the things that kept his memory alive. It was as if some aching part of me was screaming at the part of me doing the remembering:
What are you doing, treating this child as dead?
It is a cruel result that the few things we can do for our children are also the things that sometimes intensify the sense of loss. When we got the building we had wanted for the computer lab across from his high school, it should have been a great day. It meant that the “Wade Edwards Learning Laboratory” would be in place in the fall. Matt Leonard, who had climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with Wade and his father a year before, was already planning how to turn the space into a computer lab. Everything was falling into place. And yet somehow the news that the lab would soon be real also had its hard edge. “Memorial.” “Dead.”

It is always there. Sometimes the most present thing of all is his absence. I close my eyes and see his lips and his breath across them. I shut out all the noise and hear his laughter in the next room. What was therapy yesterday is simply painful today. And I have to let that happen. I cannot pretend that I can't hear that laughter somewhere distant from me. But it is precisely because I let myself hear it today, because I let myself cry today, that tomorrow I can paint the walls in the lab. And each day, sadly, it is a little less likely that I hear that laughter. (I think, honestly, that one of the reasons I cannot watch the videotapes is that they would relight that voice I love and fear.)

Grief is a long process of untangling ourselves from the physical reality of the person and from our expectations of our future with them. I knew a girl in college named Laura Del Maestro. Some years before she came to college, her house in New Jersey had burned down; everything in it was destroyed. She told me that her family had grieved for what they had lost and moved to a new home, the grieving, they thought, behind them. But it wasn't. Some holiday or some old friend or some seemingly benign comment would trigger a memory, and they would grieve a loss they hadn't realized they had suffered. Something else had burned that they hadn't remembered at first. It is like that when you lose someone with whom you have expectations of a long future. When the late fall came after Wade died, we received in the mail our season tickets to the University of North Carolina basketball games. What had been an exciting moment every year before that was like a dagger: How can I possibly go? How can I enjoy the games he so loved without him?

The process continues for me today as his friends marry. These are boys—now young men—whom I dearly love, and they are experiencing one of the great joys of life, but I cannot go and tell them how happy I am for them. This is yet something else that burned in the fire, a loss I had not wrapped myself around in 1996. So now, with each wedding, it wraps itself around me. Even though it gives me pain, my feelings about it are unambiguous. I am the mother of a dead son and a living daughter. As the mother of a dead boy, I want Wade's memory to be a part of their lives, but I recognize, as much as it hurts, that it is but memory, that he is dead. As the mother of a living daughter, I want them to know that honoring his memory does not mean limiting their joys; they honor him most by valuing the fullness of life. It was a lesson I was having trouble applying to myself.

In the moments when I felt at loose ends—the wedding of a close friend of Wade's, Christmas and birthdays, high school graduations, the death of another child—all the work I felt I had done to come to terms with Wade's absence seemed to evaporate. In those moments, I turned, as I did so often in those days, to my fellow travelers, those struggling with the same kinds of moments, trying to keep their balance now that the world around them was so disarranged. I turned to the Internet.

It is hard to overstate what the online grief community meant to me. We helped one another with the smallest of things—do you buy a Christmas gift for the staff at the cemetery?—to how we were going to manage living at all after the death of one we cherished. In my first weeks in the community, I met Gordon Livingston, whose son Lucas had had leukemia. Gordon sent me his book,
Only Spring
, about Lucas's struggle against the disease and Gordon's attempt to save him. After I finished the book, I tried to write to Gordon to tell him what his book meant to me.

I turned the last page of Only Spring yesterday morning, my mind racing with your children and mine, with your despair and my own. I carried them with me yesterday, trying to imagine how to write you. And with me last night, and with me today. My fingers still, unable to write. And now, I write because I need to, not because I have matched words with my reaction to your words and to your children.

The closest I can come is to tell you how real Lucas seems to me. There was no mystery; I knew the end. I did not know, however, how I would feel about him as I read. If I could reach across time—oh, if that were only possible—I wanted to reach across and pull him over those last days to safety. I had thought how hard it was to never have the chance to say good-bye to Wade, to only think back on his last words, his last touch. I had thought how I wished I could have had that—except, of course, if it came at such a price as Lucas and you, and Clare and Emily paid. I don't know how you start the awful journey after death spent so much of you all.

The image of Lucas on the ride at Rehoboth Beach has stayed with me most persistently. I am certain it is because for so many years we went every summer to my parents' place there. The garden cart in which my father pushed Wade and his sister Cate and his cousin Jordan down the boardwalk sits empty in my garage now. A photograph of him running on the boardwalk, maybe at seven, and one of him in my father's arms on the benches in front of Playland a year earlier are special treasures. It may no longer be, but then it was a careless beach town, particularly at the end near Playland, that hadn't seemed to change or care about changing in all the years we vacationed there. And I can see Lucas, his hair blown back by the wind, on those rides.