Authors: Elizabeth Edwards
When Wade died, these friends lost a friend on whom each one had relied at one time or another, on whom they knew they could depend for a lifetime, whom they loved. They also lost their way of doing things, or thought they had; they lost their place for doing things, or thought they had, until we reassured them that this was always home to them. At first they were there all the time, not so much for us, I think, as for each other. As time went on, one or two would come by every day or so. They would stay awhile and talk softly to us, as if they were in a library. Honestly, it couldn’t have been much relief to come to that quiet kitchen and talk to those sad parents. John and I knew we had to break this pattern, for them and for ourselves. So we asked the boys and the girls if they would come by every week for dinner. They could come more often—and they did—but every week, every Tuesday, all of them could come at once. (Since I used to feed some of them five nights a week, this was actually less often than before.) And they came. It did me such good to come home to the sound of them. Together, like it had always been. We cooked steaks or spaghetti, or if it had been a tough day we ordered pizza. A dozen children one week. Twenty the next time. They took a picture for the senior yearbook at that basketball court in the back. When Mother’s Day came, the boys brought me a dogwood tree. The girls brought a framed poem surrounded by pictures of Wade. Still it was grades and sports, and politics and teachers. And soon it was colleges. They kept coming, until they graduated from high school the next year. And while they did the house was loud again, filled with stories of Wade and with stories of life that had happened after Wade.
Seeing Wade’s friends happy was the best thing and, honestly, the worst thing for me, but there was never a question about what I wanted. I wanted them to be happy. I want them to have the joys he did not live to have, the success he cannot win, the family he cannot raise. And they are the carriers of his memory. So once a week we would eat and talk, and they would tease one another until it was finally late. Sometimes a child would slip out of the kitchen and go upstairs to sit in Wade’s room. We would find them, with tear-streaked cheeks and red eyes, sitting on the edge of Wade’s bed. Why did this happen, they would wonder, but we had no answers, then or now. We would hug them, and we would leave them, letting them sit as long as they needed. I surely love those children.
I want to make clear that Wade was not perfect. Only the youngest of children who die are perfect. He loved us, knowing our shortcomings—I don’t think I was an easy mother—and we loved him with his shortcomings, though he was really a very easy child. Only once in the last five years that he lived did we quarrel. Of course, I had to tell him to leave his sister alone, and he wouldn’t; or to bring in the soda from the car now, not later, and he would dawdle; or to turn off the television and study, but I would still hear the music to
Saved by the Bell
coming from the playroom. But these were little things, truly. He found such pleasure in whatever was around him, stumped only by vanity or betrayal. John says something about our younger son, Jack, that was also true of Wade: he says, “I wish I had the same joy about anything in life that he has about everything in life.” The raw material for a fine man was there in Wade. And it gave us pleasure, and now it gave pain. But we were finding our footing. Wade was helping; he wouldn’t be, as we had feared, easily erased.
It was easier, too, because so many had hold of our waists, holding us up as Dick Henderson had held us up that first night when we walked to the morgue. Hayes Permar, a classmate of Wade’s, came by and played a song he had written for Wade, about wishing they had had more time.
I want to rock you in the water in the river of my mind. I want to thank you for your laughter; I only wish we had more time.
Wade’s English teacher told us a story of how special he was. In her AP English class, they had been studying
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
the week before Wade died. They discussed it for four days, and Wade participated. But until she read his obituary, she did not know, because he had not mentioned, that he had climbed Kilimanjaro the year before with his father. What child, or adult, could have refrained from such a boast, she wondered aloud. He had done the same thing when he was one of the winners in a national speech contest a few weeks earlier; he told his friends he was going to Washington “to look around with Mom.” Nothing about his award. There was another song by a friend of John’s, one that would be included in his band’s CD. Wade’s essay on voting with his father, for which he went to Washington, would be in a North Carolina textbook the next year. The yearbook, on which he worked, had just enough time to get in pages honoring his memory. An editorial in the newspaper entitled “A Great Kid” was one of the best gifts of all.
Gene Hafer, an attorney and the father of one of Wade’s preschool classmates, came by and asked if he could set up a foundation for the contributions that were coming into the high school in Wade’s name. What’s more, he had some ideas about how to spend that money. John and I had written out the things Wade cared about—writing and soccer and computers, Broughton High School and the University of North Carolina—and we used that list as our guide to what we might do in his name. When Gene suggested a computer lab adjacent to the high school, it seemed right. Wade had complained one day that an assignment was marked with the words “Ten extra points if your paper is typed.” Not everyone could type their papers, he’d said. Not everyone has a computer. It wasn’t fair to them. Well, now Wade could level that playing field. In his name, we built the Wade Edwards Learning Lab. I asked Matt Leonard, who with his father had climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro with John and Wade the previous year, if he would be the first director. He had just left Yale and was looking for something into which he could throw himself. He said yes. From the reconstruction of the office building to the wiring for the computers to selecting the Internet service provider, Matt cajoled and badgered and worked harder than anyone around him, until in October, six months after Wade died, the Wade Edwards Learning Lab—the WELL—was open and students who had no computers at home were at the long desks, checking their e-mail and writing their papers.
I had known Gwynn for eight years, since our daughters were in kindergarten together. And yet, after she took me to my first Compassionate Friends meeting, a meeting of bereaved parents that she moderated, I realized I owed her an apology. I hadn’t been such a good friend to her, I said. I hadn’t read the scars that the death of her precious son Drew had left nearly twenty years before. I hadn’t had eyes that allowed me to see, or maybe there was a part of me that did not want to acknowledge the possibility of burying a child. Whatever my excuses, I hadn’t been a good friend. I learned two things. From Gwynn, I learned that I needed to be more like her, to be someone who stepped forward when others stepped back at the death of a child. And she didn’t step up because it gave her an opportunity to talk about Drew—and you cannot know, unless you have been here, what a temptation that is. She stepped up and let a mother grieve her own loss. That’s what she did with me and with John. For years, really. So when I was campaigning in 2003 and 2004, I knew not just to hug someone who whispered in my ear that they too had lost a son. I held them but pulled back enough to look them in the face, my arms still around them, and I asked his name and when he had died and how they were doing and whatever else my time would allow, because it is not just a box to check for deceased children. Their boy deserved to leave more marks, and he could leave one with me. As I learned from Gwynn.
I also learned for myself that I had to give the people who cared about me instruction. I had to let them know what I needed, what would help. I got pretty good at that, although I was considerably less good at saying what didn’t help. It certainly didn’t help when a man I know, complaining that his son wasn’t getting into college where he wanted, told me that at least Wade was spared that unhappiness. It certainly didn’t help when a trainer at the Y said she had visited her aging grandfather and, boy, I sure wouldn’t want Wade in that condition. I didn’t want to teach them. I just wanted to run away from them, and I did. They weren’t trying to be hurtful, few are; they just had no clue. For the others, I tried to help them help me. It wasn’t always pretty. And frankly they didn’t always volunteer.
I carried a picture of Wade in my pocket, in one of the stiff sports card sleeves into which he put his best baseball cards, so it wouldn’t get bent as I fingered it—and I did finger it. If, in a restaurant, I felt Wade about to overtake me, I would go to the restroom and take out the picture. If someone, anyone, was there, I showed them the picture and told them about my boy. I know it made some people feel awkward—I could see it in their faces—so I was always sure to say how much it meant that they had listened, so that at least they would feel good to go along with the feeling awkward. In a while, I felt more composed and could go back to my table. Maybe it was the time I needed; maybe it was the sharing. But what made it work was the willingness to reach out, the willingness to take a chance on the decency of strangers. And, frankly, no one ever ran out of those restrooms; they always stayed and listened.
Nothing was easy. Sometimes what I needed was to be left alone. The grocery store was a hard necessity. How many times could I pass his favorite food, his choice in soda? Not as many as I needed, it turned out. Once he came crashing in on me, and I was literally thrown to the floor. I sat sprawled in the soda aisle at the grocery store and cried uncontrollably. No one bought sodas for about five minutes. Although the store was crowded, no one walked down the aisle in which I sat, flattened by Cherry Coke.
Because of moments like the grocery store—I finally asked friends to go for me for a while—or restaurants, I tried to keep on a pretty narrow track. The house, the middle school Cate attended, the cemetery, Compassionate Friends meetings, more and more the Learning Lab, and Cate’s softball and soccer games. I started substitute-teaching at the high school Wade attended. Where people knew me, where people knew Wade. I didn’t need to go farther. I didn’t want to go farther.
John still coached Cate’s soccer team, and although the season was mostly over by the time we lifted our heads, there were still games to be coached, a tournament or two to attend. One dreadful tournament in Wilmington, near the beach house, was down that same highway where Wade had died. Cate’s team stayed across the street from the motel in which Wade and I had stayed—in a front corner room I could not miss—when his team attended the same tournament the year before. I would stare at the door to our room and wonder if I was ever going to be able to go anywhere again.
Despite having a mother who seemed to be made of ashes, Cate was trying to push through her year as cheerfully as possible. I went to all her softball games, where she pitched, and to her school programs, where she collected honors. She was doing her part; I tried to do mine. I took my camera so that people would see I was busy and wouldn’t feel they had to be solicitous. I was Cate’s mom then, not the mother of the boy who had died. It was good for her, and it was good for me. It was, I have to believe, good for them, too. They could give me a hug, and they did, without fear that I would collapse in their arms and they would have more than they could handle. So there was this unwritten boundary: I could be sad, but I just couldn’t be too sad. If I played my part, I got enormous support, support that continues even now, ten years later. But I couldn’t ask too much, or the deal we had implicitly forged might be broken.
It might have been an impossible deal for me to keep—remember, I did sit and cry in soda aisles—except that I had other places to put the grief, other things I was doing that let me parent the memory of Wade, and, as I will tell you, other places to be the desperate grieving mother.
First, I had John. In every activity, in every project, in every moment of grief, I had John. For years, I had been writing a letter to my children, a letter that they would read, I thought, when I died—my “dying letter.” I read it to myself when Wade died. Afraid I might not be there to interfere with whomever they were choosing to marry, I expressed my opinion in advance, on paper. What they had to understand, I wrote, was that passion is not a constant river from which they could drink for a lifetime. What kept the passion there, what filled the gaps when the passion hit a drier spot, were respect and friendship and love and communication. And I was now living such a time. Though we were both filled up with emotion, overloaded with emotion, there was no room amid the grieving for passion. And yet our relationship was deeper as that river dropped. For the first six months after Wade died, John and I were only a few feet apart nearly every single minute. Some couples grow apart; I saw it happen in couples in Compassionate Friends. It had happened to Gwynn. But we had what I had hoped Wade would have, and what I still hope Cate will have: a relationship in which there was passion, respect, friendship, love, and communication. And there was something else, something that is just dumb luck: we needed basically the same things in our grieving—not entirely, admittedly, but basically the same things. So we walked together, and still do.
So first and last, there was John. And Cate, whose two-chairs-and-an-ottoman bed in our bedroom also had a little bit to do with the lull in passion, but who brought much more than she took away. Cate, who worried that the good child to whom she could never measure up had died, although it was Cate who got most of the awards, Cate who was the better athlete, Cate who got the best grades, and—this like her brother—Cate who had devoted friends. She was there for me; I only worried that she wouldn’t let me be there for her. When she was seven, she couldn’t blow a bubblegum bubble, so she went to her room, practiced for as long as it took, and came out only when she had mastered it. The year before Wade died, she said she wanted to be a softball pitcher. None of us could help her with the exaggerated slow-pitch windup. But she got a pail of softballs and stood in the backyard each afternoon, until she was the starting pitcher on her team. And when the league changed to fast-pitch, she did the same thing all over again. No one could have asked more of herself and less of her mother. I always had the feeling that the support I gave her was the support she thought was good for me to give, rather than what she needed. But it was something, and, after a decade, it still is something.