Authors: Elizabeth Edwards
Beginning right away after Boston, in the first days after we told the public, we started getting letters and notes. The first mail came to John’s Senate office—cards, faxes, letters, e-mails, gifts. It was clear the Senate staff could not add this to their job description, so we released my e-mail address to the public. The first day there were more than a thousand e-mails. By the end of the week there were twenty thousand. I tried reading the e-mails, answering some as I could, but they kept coming too fast for me to have any hope of responding quickly. For much longer than a reasonable person should have, I held on to this pipe dream that it was going to be possible to answer them all as they came in. Among the first I read, to which I responded, was from a woman who, upon hearing that I had breast cancer, had scheduled a mammogram and discovered that she, too, had breast cancer. She started her treatment just weeks after I started mine. That single e-mail was all the reassurance that I needed that we had done the right thing by making a public statement. As I type this today, I am still responding to each one. And the number of e-mails is up to sixty-five thousand.
And then the notes and cards started coming. Tens of thousands. It was daunting, but I started writing notes to people who had sent letters and cards and gifts through the regular mail. The staff worked with me on a form I could send out in response, but it turned out I could not just sign a form letter, not after I read the notes and letters, not after I opened the gifts. Even a card that had been simply purchased and signed was such a tender gesture. As I look over the vast variety of cards, I think of the imagination that went into buying each of them and choosing the exact right one—every one of them as different in their way as people are different—and two or three times there were cards with part of the front cut off, and I think one was a birthday card and I imagined it had been sent by an elderly woman who wanted to reach out right away, so she cut off the “birthday” part of an unused card she had in her desk. I look at the card from the Gilbert family, a get-well card with a teddy bear holding a bouquet of glittery pansies, and it occurs to me that the youngest daughter, Clara, might have picked it out. I recognized some cards, slightly yellowed, as being in the style of the 1930s or 1940s, and I imagined a widower finding a card his wife had saved for all these decades and sending it now to me. Some cards captured all the cards, as Ann Shewcraft’s message that
This is the tiny seed of faith that grows into the little act of trust that blossoms into one small and simple prayer then opens into a field of love and healing that completely transforms the landscape of the heart.
That was it, exactly, as described by American Greetings. Each card, each note, was a small gesture, and yet they became—each one and together—transforming. Even if John and Mercedes had left, I wouldn’t have been alone in that chemotherapy room. Look at all my company.
So, for as long as I could write—and at one point it became too hard—I signed the letters we had drafted and I wrote a personal note of thanks on the bottom of each. But it was finally too hard, as my hands cramped and my fingers became swollen. A box might have five hundred letters in it, and once I could sign and write notes to two boxes’ worth in a day, but I would pay for that. I started on a more sensible regimen of signing, but it was slow, and I was embarrassed that we had printed out all the letters with the same date, in the beginning of February, and then it became April and then May, and I was still writing notes on the bottom of letters dated February 7th. Finally my hand gave out, after about fifteen thousand responses. It was not too long after the surgery when I developed lymphedema, for which I was supposed to avoid repetitive motions—and I had to stop altogether for a time. The only upside was that I didn’t worry any longer about that February date. Now I have started again, despite the lymphedema, despite some neuropathy that has dulled the nerves in my right hand, and I will write—as slowly as I need to—for as long as it takes.
Even when I wasn’t writing in response to the letters and the e-mails, these strangers who had reached out to me were my companions. I had talked to the press a little. I had early interviews about the breast cancer with Katie Couric and Larry King, trying to encourage women to get the mammogram I had not gotten for too many years and trying to encourage breast cancer patients to participate in these important clinical trials and studies. But after going out once, to the Kennedy Center Honors, in my wig, I pretty much tucked myself into the job of fighting the cancer and being as much of a mother and a wife as I could manage. And answering mail.
It’s not that I wanted to crawl in a hole, but it drained me to get dressed up and go out. It was easier to give all of my energy to this fight and my family and not any energy to trying to be a personality or even to being a pulled-together human being. But my companions now were my family, my caregivers at Lombardi Cancer Center, John’s devoted staff, the Moores—or, as Jack called them, the Mister Moores—next door, and the tens of thousands of people I did not know whose hands were linked, who were holding me up with letters, cards, candles, and books, with quilts and caps, and with prayer.
I was warmed by the great affection and concern for me in the letters, particularly from cancer survivors. For me as Elizabeth Edwards, yes, but mostly, I think, just for Elizabeth as a woman they would never meet but who now was a sister in something deeply painful and gripping and mysterious. Many—some who wrote in thick black pencil in language plain and fierce on lined paper ripped from notebooks—said they had never written a letter anything like this one before. One woman said she was worn out helping her children with homework and she suddenly just reached for one of their three-hole notebook sheets and began writing to me. I felt graced to have given them the cause or chance to record or transmit what some had held inside for a very long time. It was my fierce and probably stubborn, and definitely naive, ambition to respond to every one. I wrote, and many wrote back. Some people Xeroxed my original handwritten letter and sent a copy with their second note, or third. One man wrote back to say how astonished he was that I even wrote out the envelope, which suggests that the response to him got into the right envelope, for which I am very grateful, since the stacks of letters would sometimes tumble under the weight of a child’s hand “helping” me straighten the piles. One woman religiously resent a picture of her dog eating a George Bush chew toy. Another sent a different card every week for months. I am overwhelmed with the immensity of the net with which I was provided and overwhelmed with the impossibility of containing it here in a thousand words or two thousand, for it was the seeming endlessness of it that took my breath away, then and now. Henry James wrote in his preface to
Roderick Hudson
that
“
universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to” stop. And this will be my problem here. It is impossible to come to terms with the enormity of the net that these people threw out to the floundering me, without reading each line, without imagining each sender. And drawing the circle around those I will share leaves too many who touched me outside it.
There were two kinds of men who wrote, those who treated me as a mother and those who treated me as a daughter, and I was left to guess whether the treatment corresponded to their ages. The women who wrote seemed to convey both an intimacy and a distance. From Montana and New Mexico and Hawaii they wrote “Hello from Montana,” “Hello from Hawaii.” Some, and this touched me, never even put a return address. Many invited me over to lunch when I was in town, or to use their guest room, and some looked forward to “hearing from you soon,” which I think was just an upbeat way of closing and made no demands. Some sweetly apologized for their audacity, as they described it, in writing to me familiarly. The connective tissue of the net they wove for me—and for themselves—was that much stronger because the threads were so different from one another. As they wrote to me, I honestly think they were writing to each other and to all of us. Their desire to share, which means to give more love, was almost overwhelming. And there was something, too, about the contact that I suspected, and hoped, put their own lives and their own trials onto a larger scale and on a greater stage and helped them understand their dignity and importance and the connected scope of their lives, for they really did share with me, and maybe, knowing that, you can understand how I could not simply sign a form letter in response.
One of the first survivor letters I received was postmarked November 5, 2004, right after my breast cancer was announced. It was addressed to Ms. John Edwards. Washington, D.C. That’s all there was on the envelope. Because of a hunch and the special kindness of some unknown person in the United States Post Office, it got to me. Then the letters and e-mails from breast cancer survivors and others—and over 65,000 e-mails—began to pour in. They came from all over my home state of North Carolina, from New York and Los Angeles, from small towns, from farms, from prison inmates, from nuns and rabbis and pastors, from the entire Republican Women’s Club of Lake Highland, Texas, from people I had met and people I would never meet, from fathers and brothers and sons, and men like John V., who told my husband what his wife’s surgeon had told him, that husbands can become the forgotten patients. Verlene B. was one of the first to write me that breast cancer is a family disease, and she is right. I was soon overwhelmed by the sea of support, or perhaps more literally by the lines cast me when I was still at sea and still coming to terms with what breast cancer might mean to me, to John, and most of all to my children. Five of the many boxes of letters sit across from my desk right now, and every card, note, every line, photograph, drawing, ribbon, and letter, mattered deeply to me and matters still. My gratitude goes to everyone for their tenderness, advice, encouragement, humor, honesty, courage, tears, recipes, and love, and also for the generosity they showed in understanding how right it can sometimes be to be touched by the hand of a stranger. I can only thank a few people and almost at random, but I thank all of you deeply. But for now I send my gratitude to only a few—
…to Joan C. for her recognition that you become a survivor on the day you are diagnosed.
…to Bessie B., who was operated on a few weeks before my own cancer was discovered and who showed her stubborn determination to be a survivor when she placed an exclamation point after her signature.
…to Gay Neil W., who said swimming was the best exercise, adding that I probably had a heated pool. I don’t, but I’m going to get myself one of those, on Gay Neil’s advice.
…to Barbara Ann E., who in the midst of her third bout with cancer sent me prayers, and also her sore regrets that her hair loss made her look so much like Dick Cheney.
…to Shirley R., who terrified me with warnings about a “cranial prosthesis” until her parenthetic note made it clear she was talking about a wig. (In a letter from Monnie B., I learned that because wigs are indeed considered prosthetic devices and that doctors write prescriptions for them health insurance will cover the cost. Unfortunately I read that one a little too late to do me any good.)
…to Sandra W., who at almost sixty continued teaching school when hooked up to an IV, and then, during radiation sessions, made plans to buy a Harley. She had gotten through the surgery fine, but when she made her first visit to the oncologist’s office and walked into a room filled with exhausted women in hats or turbans or with their heads bare, she cried for the first time. Bald men, she then announced, listen up. I share your pain and now understand about cold heads and necks.
…to Nancy D., who bothered to notice that we shared the same birthday.
…to Alan C., who was convinced I had touched lives all across America, and who told John, “I will not go a night without praying for her.”
…to Pam S., who fought cancer as a single mother of a son with diabetes. In the most grim moments, she believed, as I did, that “the refusal to be a victim matters.”
…to Sue S., whose mother had breast cancer and who wrote of her concern for Cate.
…to Ada C. and Mary C., who each wrote that they could hardly write for crying. I might have taped Mary’s closing to John’s bathroom mirror—“Your wife is a goddess of knowledge and beauty”—if I wasn’t afraid it would get a laugh from a husband of twenty-nine years who has seen a very un-goddess-like me more often than I can count.
…to the Bates family, whose note started, “We are not asking for anything.” And then they offered us their thoughts and prayers.
…to Jerry H., who had testicular cancer. He wrote that God gives us strength to do the hard things He chooses to lead us through. Personally, I prefer to go around such hard times but I can’t always convince Him to see it my way.
…to Angela L., whose confidence in a good outcome, was based on the fact that we “military brats safely get through many challenges in our young lives.”
…to Mark W., who reprised John’s campaign call “Hope is on the way.” Now I want them to feel the hope we send them.
…to Sharon C., whose lump was diagnosed as a ductal carcinoma the size of a peanut M&M—and who now looks at peanut M&Ms in an altogether different light.
…to the many who wrote to me as Elizabeth, or Eliz, or even sometimes Liz, and to the many others who with equal kindness addressed me as Mrs. Edwards, and who, some of them women in their eighties and nineties, apologized for having taken the liberty of including me in their prayers.
…to Donna R., who sent a fax the day the announcement was made to tell me of a product that had helped her beat long odds. She added, with such perfect honesty, if someone told me that holding a chicken over my head would cure my cancer, I’d probably try it.
…to Adele C., who gave herself one cry daily and decided it would be in the shower. Although she never allowed herself to cry in front of her children, she admitted that some days she took two showers.