When A Child Dies – Part 2

We continue with direct quotes from Elizabeth Edwards’ book Resilience. She helps us to see the impact of such a thing on a parent. Some feel, “She ought to be over that by now,” but she is not. Grieving parents are supposed to “snap out of it,”  “get on with life, and “just go on.”  Yes, ideally they should, but some do not.  The following will help the reader understand the perspective of such a parent.  

• I found a group of people who were as lost and miserable as I was and we helped each other find our footing and find our individual paths. I suspect there are few better examples of barely functional people than those who have just buried their children. We are fortunate just to be dressed, particularly fortunate if it is not exactly what we wore the day before. We barely eat, we don’t know where to go, we don’t seem to belong anywhere. Some gravitated to the Internet and there, with a little searching, we find one another. There are no faces, no races, no houses, no cars, no jobs, no reputations. Our children were equal. No one smarter or faster or better-looking, none were troublemakers or law-breakers. Equal in fashion. We were all parents who had done the impossible: We had placed our children in a box and the box in the ground and we did not know what to do next. 

• Internet participants obeyed the unwritten rule: protect each other. People were safe to ask any question or express a fear, or expose an indiscretion without fear of being criticized. It was my new emotional home, and a place where Wade’s memory was safe. I was Wade’s mother, not the wife of a US senator; not the wife of a Vice Presidential candidate. Just Wade’s mom.  
• Wade’s room was as close to him as I could get without my nose being between the sheets of his now-empty bed or the grass above his grave. 
• As Wade’s friends—young men I dearly loved—graduated from college and got married I wondered if they would remember Wade less and less which was painful for me. 
• At times all the work I felt I had done to come to terms with Wade’s absence seemed to evaporate. 
• Deciding to have more children was a huge step toward normalcy. Emma Claire was born April, 1998 when I was 48 years old and Jack was born in May 2000. I don’t have to bury the memory of Wade to accept that I have buried the boy.  I continued to shepherd his memory, expressing my need to be his mother. 
• She also wrote, “Recognizing that if I buried myself in his death, I was leaving, as part of his legacy, a wreck of a human unable to do what he would have wanted me to do—be a mother to his beloved sister.” 
• A hundred friends, at least, came by, called, or wrote to tell me that I needed to move forward, for myself, for my remaining family. What did they know? I was in pain and vulnerable to every trigger that reminded me of my boy. My dearest friends and my family who loved him helped. Some knew just what to do. Gwynn and David came every night in the first months, letting us talk of Wade until we were too tired to speak. They would put us to bed and come back the next morning, Gwynn often with dinner for us in her hands. Sally would come sit with me in Wade’s room. Ellan would find reason why I should go out, walk with her, anything to leave the house to which I was bound. 
• On December 6, 2010, Edwards’ family announced that she had stopped cancer treatment after her doctors informed her that further treatment would be unproductive, because the cancer had metastasized to her liver. She had been advised she had several weeks to live. Her family members, including her estranged husband John, were with her. 

Conclusion

Commendation  Elizabeth Edwards went through rough waters. Very difficult times. To lose a child is horrendous. My heart goes out to her. 

She impressed me with her honesty, writing with utter transparency.  And her powers of description were impressive. For example, she wrote well of a young Japanese woman who was scared by the Hiroshima atomic bomb, the connection being that as Wade’s death was something that happened beyond her control, so this young Japanese woman had her world turned upside down by the bomb, something clearly outside her control.  She also wrote well about men going off to war and war sending home a different person, again, something happening to people beyond their control.  

Mrs. Edwards hooked me—I read her book twice.

Not a Believer in Christ   However, there was little leaning on the Lord, little seeking of His presence reflected in the book. Even though she speaks of prayer and the Lord once in a while, there does not seem to be a relationship of redeemed to Redeemer. She did not write about experiencing God.  Her last posting on FaceBook speaks to this point:

“You all know that I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces – my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope.”  

I had hoped to read that in her need, she sought God’s grace. Alas, that is not in her book. Instead she had faith in faith. On pages 113-115 she addresses her relationship with God and says, “How can I lean on a God who has taken this righteous boy, or even on one who had allowed him to be taken?”  I reply to this hart-broken woman with a pretty stiff statement from the Creator of life: Romans, chapter 9, verses 19 & 20.  

Idolatry  Her obsession with her son helps us understand the degree to which parents who have lost children can be wounded (the purpose of this article). But her focus borders on idolatry.  God was not the main One in her life. She made an idol of her son.  Instead of building her life around the Giver of life, she built it around one who had received life (The “Which is greater?” question of Matthew 23:16-22 applies to this situation) 

Sad Ending   Wikipedia says, “When Edwards first admitted to the affair, he stated that Elizabeth was in remission from breast cancer. However, it became clear that Edwards continued the affair even after he and his wife made a joint announcement that her cancer had returned and was found to be terminal.

She separated from her husband and wrote him out of her will. But he sat beside her bed in her last days before she died at the young age of 61.