Elizabeth Edwards
(4 of 6)
If it had been possible to view it all from some altitude, it might have seemed so easy to see how we came together and pushed each other away ... for days, for weeks, for months. But I had no altitude at all. It was quite the opposite. I was too low to have any perspective at all. All I wanted was my life back. I didn't like this new life story; I wanted my old one. I wanted to turn back time so we could avoid the wind, avoid the woman, avoid the pain. Open a drawer and find my life again. But I would open a drawer and find my new reality instead. Everything I tried to do to allow me to go to some safe place turned out to be filled with the same pain. I would look at a happy family picture and break down. I tried to write and could not. Even now it is hard to put it into words.
When I die, my place in the lives of others will be filled by other people. I know this. It is true for all of us. Someone else will have your job; someone else will mow your lawn; someone else will kiss the cheeks of those you love. One of the reasons that I spend time labeling baskets and organizing Christmas ornaments is that I have tried to create a world for my family that will last longer than the years I now have left. I am so in love with my family, so protective, that--odd as it may sound--long before I was sick, I would tell John whom he should marry should I suddenly die. And now I was dying and he had chosen to spend time with someone so completely unlike me. It almost goes without saying, for I would never have, could not have, stood on a sidewalk in the hopes that some clumsy come-on line might work on a married man. But it wasn't just that; this woman was different from me in nearly every way.
At this moment I saw my death not simply as a transition for my family but as my complete erasure from my family's life and a complete erasure of the life I hoped they would have. I was afraid of what John might do when cancer finally wins, but he has been as assuring as I could have hoped. I am now at ease that John would not make the same choice in the daylight that he made in the dark, but for some time that thought dogged me, kept me awake at night, stoked my anger and my pain.
I doubt there is a person to whom this has happened who did not, for some time, beat themselves with self-doubt and self-loathing. What did I do? How had I failed as a wife? Self-doubt wasn't that long a journey for me, frankly. The reason I was compulsive about learning whatever I needed to know on the campaign trail was that I was certain I would be humiliated if I was caught not knowing what everyone else in the room knew. So I learned four times the facts I would ever need, and I kept staff up nights finding answers to the questions I feared I might be asked. All the work to avoid being embarrassed was wasted; I now felt thoroughly and publicly humiliated.