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发帖数: 2053 | 1 http://news.yahoo.com/s//dailybeast/20101207/ts_dailybeast/11313_elizabethedwardsstopscancertreatmentassemblesherfamily_1/
Margaret Carlson Margaret Carlson – Tue Dec 7, 6:29 pm ET
NEW YORK – The wife of former Senator John Edwards and a brilliant lawyer
and author, Edwards lost a six-year battle with breast cancer on Tuesday.
Margaret Carlson on the lessons in grace she’s taught us all.
We all have a terminal illness, except those who get hit by a bus, but few
have suffered more in the public eye than Elizabeth Edwards. Only in
retrospect do we know how painful it must have been to stand by senator and
presidential candidate John Edwards on that beautiful North Carolina day in
2007. The press corps had been summoned for what was expected to be an
announcement that Edwards, having learned his wife’s cancer first diagnosed
in 2004, had returned, would be dropping out of the presidential race for
the woman he loved.
Not at all. Edwards would be staying in with Elizabeth's full-throated
support, saying how important it was for the country. That day she acted as
if nothing had changed, in the desperate hope that nothing had.
Only later would we know that along with the dire medical prognosis had come
news that her husband had been having an affair with a campaign worker. As
she wrote later, she vomited when she found out. But she was convinced it
was brief and it was over. She was wrong on both counts.
That was March 2007. Much has happened since, including Edwards finally
admitting to fathering a child. Through it all, Edwards has been what she
heralded in her two bestselling books—resilient and full of grace. In a
posting on her Facebook page Monday, Edwards, 61, "The days of our lives,
for all of us, are numbered” and in some of those days, she has not been
able “to muster as much strength and patience” as she would have liked. .
. "It’s called being human.”
She did better than most of us with more to grapple with. A cheating husband
is nothing compared to the loss of a child. At 16, the Edwards' son Wade
died in a car accident. For months, she could barely speak. She’d think she
was OK and then she’d be in the grocery store in front of his favorite
soda and be stricken with so much sadness, she’d have to find a place to
sit down.
Compared to that, her own cancer diagnosis was manageable. ``Wade was dead
by the time an EMT came to the side of his car to help him... I had a chance
, which he didn't have,'' she wrote in Saving Graces.
Click image to see photos of Elizabeth Edwards
In what may be her final words, she says she’s been sustained through
difficult times “by three saving graces—my family, my friends, and a faith
in the power of resilience and hope."
And she would go on to endure intense hormone treatments to be able to have
two more children. The fate that befalls many couples who lose a child would
not be theirs.
• Elizabeth Edwards: Kids Will Go to John
Like so many political wives, she was much the better person of the two.
Without her buoying him, you wonder if he would have gotten where he did.
She was his equal in law school but quickly gave up her career to bolster
his. When John decided to give up his courtroom practice to run for the
Senate after their son’s death, she was all for it. During his vice
presidential run, she was by his side, as she was for his presidential race.
Every year on their anniversary, she recreated their first date at Wendy’s
with a burger and fries. Every time there seemed to be a Ken doll under her
husband’s Ken doll exterior, she would remind us how serious he was about
the “Two Americas.” Surely he couldn’t be a lout if she were traipsing
through New Hampshire snows with Stage 4 cancer.
Oh but he was a lout and one who would excuse his own conduct on Nightline
by saying he had his affair when his wife’s cancer was in remission.
Fortunately, there were many more people rooting for Elizabeth to get better
than were rooting for her husband to be president and he mercifully dropped
out of the presidential race in January of 2008.
But they didn’t return to domestic bliss in Chapel Hill. It is one more
tragedy that Edwards’ last few years were contaminated by her husband’s
tawdry melodrama, dragged out by so many vehement denials, he made Bill
Clinton look like a cooperating witness. Like Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth
Edwards suffered publicly for her philandering husband and suffered again
for an unforgiving press corps that thought she should have kept her dog on
the porch. Why didn’t Edwards stop her husband from running knowing that if
he won the nomination and word of his affair came out, he and the Democrats
would be toast? What’s wrong with her?
What’s wrong with us? Elizabeth Edwards lived the hand
she was dealt with unimaginable grace and humor. She did what was best for
her and her family, now gathered around her. In what may have been her final
words, she said she had been sustained through difficult times â€
;œby three saving graces—my family, my friends, and a
faith in the power of resilience and hope." Among the family at her side was
her husband John, the father of her now-motherless children, who will need
him to go on. It's called being human.
Margaret Carlson is a columnist for Bloomberg News. She was a columnist and
deputy Washington bureau chief for Time magazine.
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