I picked up on John Edwards around the same time that many average liberal citizens did, being attracted to candidates who publicly discuss the issues that matter to me- human rights, health care, the environment- for which Edwards has been a great spokesperson. As soon as I began to read about Edwards, I was reading about his wife Elizabeth, and the loss of their 16 year old son Wade in a car accident on a windy day by the beach. I watched the married couple rise together in the campaign for President, and came to an informal, casually knowledgeable opinion about Edwards, which is the description I would use for most of my opinions on politicians. I am not a passionate political follower, nor an in depth reader of political books or articles. I read a handful of articles through major media like the New York Times, and come up with an opinion.
What I was really interested in was his personal life; as a mother I was horrified and compelled to read about how a family survives after such a loss- I searched through their accounts of Wade's death as if there could possibly be such an inane thing as Tips on How To Survive The Greatest Tragedy of Your Life. There is not. There are only factors. John and Elizabeth entered their living hell with good mental health, money and support, which may or may not make it more likely for a person to survive such a loss without spiraling into addiction, mental illness or complete detachment. They also had other children to care for, and they did, and eventually crept into public consciousness, and my own, in the Presidential Election.
And then Elizabeth was diagnosed with breast cancer. I read the People headline, the updates on MSN on her exact diagnosis and prognosis, and hoped for her a total remission. I was old enough to know that life does not have a limit on suffering. And so it proved: Elizabeth's cancer came back, and her prognosis was 'hope for ten years'. I read her memoir, largely about the death of Wade, their firstborn, and found her voice and her story to be obvious: she was a woman who had lost a son she loved with her entire self, and she was carrying on with the strength of her spirit for her children and her husband. The memoir revealed little about the dynamics of her marriage. John worked, she worked, they parented, the loved. No depths revealed, the marriage kept private, for whatever reason- to keep it sacred, or to keep it hidden, or both.
When the headlines announced John Edward's affair, I felt the blow in my gut. After years of reading about John and Elizabeth and being a married mother of 3, I felt the blow as women feel for one another in our homes, our health, our children, our marriage, these things are the centrifugal life forces for many of us. I stopped to think of the emotional crisis unfolding before me, paper in hand. The private lives of these two people, revealed in strangely shaped chunks that the media, and it's consumers, myself, would try to put together, spinning them around until they came up with a shape that made the most sense. But the truth of the emotional life of these two adults? We can only guess. All that is clear and obvious is that both of them have suffered irrecovely from the death of their son Wade and Elizabeth's cancer diagnosis, and John Edwards was not able to cope in a way that did not humiliate and devastate his wife.
And now the final media reveal: He is the father. A book deal in the works with a man close to Edwards saying that Edwards planned on marrying his mistress, the mother of Frances who is looking assuredly to be Edward's daughter. Edwards told his lover that they would be married after Elizabeth died, says the story. John Edwards sits in virtual seclusion, his family hiding out, waiting, waiting for the next move. My mind circles around Elizabeth like water round a drain, going nowhere. And yet I cannot help but wonder how she is coping. How she is feeling. Does she have any emotions left, or is she numb with the continual heartbreak of life? Is John Edwards ashamed of himself, devastated, or is he empty, exhausted and angry at being caught and cornered in his greatest fault and failing? How will Elizabeth find a peaceful way to leave this life? I look to those who are suffering because I have failed, and I have suffered, and I want to see how we do it, us human beings, how do we make it through when we make it at all?
