He was 16 when a gust of wind pushed him off the freeway in North Carolina; the car flipped and the young driver died. The scene was like the picture above
The purpose of this article is to help the rest of us who have not experienced this know how such a death can impact a person and family. The following direct (or nearly direct) quotes from Elizabeth Edward’s book Resilience will help us understand what it’s like. Wade, 16, her first born, died April 4, 1996:
- When my son was crushed, I was crushed also.
- When my husband was elected to the U.S. Senate, I was forced to live 250 miles from Wade’s grave.
- In the 2004 election, John Kerry and John Edwards lost . . . and the very next day I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
- When my son Wade died, I spent so many days or weeks, or months trying to find a way to make it not so.
- How easily could God, if He so willed, set back the world a little turn or two.
- Without me knowing it, a woman spotted my husband one afternoon in a restaurant bar. She hung around outside the place until he returned to his hotel room from dinner and introduced herself. She included, “You are so hot.”
- Mrs. Edwards (pictured at left) said that her son’s class read Hemmingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro. And during three days of class discussion about the book, Wade resisted mentioning that he and his dad had climbed Mt. K. the summer before. And when he went to Washington as one of ten national winners of an essay contest two weeks before he died, he did not tell his close friends—who saw him on television.
- Nothing in life made sense to Mrs. Edwards since this boy could be dead.
- Where was God to put this right? Today made no sense at all. The world collapsed, and nothing we can do makes any difference whatsoever. Why did we do everything right?
- Nothing that I was doing [before Wade died] seemed important.
- I did nothing at all. Day after day, I went to the cemetery, read, did some writing, and eventually I tried to be a mother to our surviving daughter Cate.
- The first years after he died, I went to his grave daily. On bad days, I would go twice. For months John went with me, then I went alone. Sitting at Wade’s grave, reading to him. First the Bible, then Elie Wiesel’s Sages and Dreamers . . . and then the books he would have read in high school.
- No place that Wade had not been was of interest to me.
- No one who did not know him was good company for me. I didn’t eat, couldn’t eat and became thin, but I did not want new clothes. He had not seen them [new clothes], so I didn’t want them.
- I had a narrow life that brought no joy. But I felt his memory was safe. As the self-appointed guardian of his memory, he seemed to be present.
- Would his buddies, who played basketball in our driveway, remember him next year, or a decade from now?
- (In about 2000, the woman who had spoken to Elizabeth’s husband, Senator John Edwards, appeared again and an immoral relationship began.)
- How many of the details of Wade’s life, the sound of his laughter would I be able to hold on to a decade from now?
- I felt outside of myself. I felt like a puppeteer, stripped of the ability to invoke anything other than the rudimentary motions in my puppet body. Real life was something other people had, something I once had but cannot imagine having again.
- What I had to face was not present, it was something absent. Although we can escape something present, there is no way to escape what is absent. There is no place to go to where he would not also be absent.
- I cleaned around his grave . . . and the headstones of other children buried near him. I needed Wade to be a part of each day. I needed to tell him when his SAT scores came in. That may sound strange to others, but it is what I had to do.
- I wanted to believe, needed to believe that on some plane Wade also needed me still, maybe needed me even more dead than alive since he could no longer direct the impact of his life himself. He had done all he could and now it was my job, my new way of parenting him—protect his memory.
- I could not change his room at home in any way at all. His backpack sat on the floor near the chair for years. Not days or weeks, but years. Why should I move it? What would that accomplish? I felt that if I only waited for him, he would come or call. It took a long time before such thinking left me.
- All the love and wishes and prayers [for his safe return to life] were for naught.
- I wanted him back so badly that the reasoning part of me, the part that dominated my life until April, 1996—the debater, the lawyer, the logic puzzle addict—laid down its arms, even in daylight. I wanted my boy and no amount of logic would stand in the way.
- I used a different kind of logic to explain why I refused to change his room. He had made his room the way he wanted it. Since he had put few things together—living only 16 years—I could not bear to take any of it apart. There was already too little of him on earth. It was my job to protect his things—and I did—since he could not.
- When his absence was crashing in on me particularly hard, I would go into his room, lie on his bed, sit on the floor in front of his backpack, and ignore the reality of his absence. His room was where I could allow myself not to adjust to the new reality. This was the strongest medicine I had.
- I even saw him places he clearly was not. I looked in every black Grand Cherokee, the model of car in which Wade died, hoping to find him. It had all been a mistake I so wanted to believe. I even followed a Cherokee one day. The young driver had his arm out the window like Wade used to do. I followed him knowing it was not him, but unable not to follow on the chance that God had granted my wish only if I showed the tenacity to find Wade myself by following this car when it drove by.
- I wanted life to be as it had been before Wade died, but I came to see this most important matter in my life was invulnerable to my efforts and prayers.
- The movement of a bird, the flight of a butterfly, or a lightbulb going out were all triggers. The ring of a phone with no one on the other end. Some of us who have lost children sometimes see them there. We need them in such an enormous, encompassing way that we cannot imagine that need is not big enough to bring us at least some part of them back to us. So we look where no one who hasn’t stood where we stood would look.
- He had to be here somewhere. I looked in closets, I opened drawers. Drawers! He was six feet tall. Such is the distorted
biology[mentality-KGK] of a grieving mother. I knew as I opened a drawer he could not possibly be in there, and yet I was powerless—I had to open it. What if somehow he could be there? - A year after he died, I was still dreaming of finding him.
- But I was making some progress by realizing that part of me died with Wade, so Cate was getting only half a mother. Reality was slow to dawn.
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