Read Online Resilience by Elizabeth Edwards - Free Book Online

the Atlantic and eating steamed crabs and grilled corn and cold beer. But it is not that Rehoboth in my dream. In this Rehoboth, I felt out of place. I am drawn to something in the distance and, knowing only that I need whatever it is, I rush toward it, down the boardwalk to the south, past the DuPont houses, to a place I have never been, where I know somehow I am not allowed. Suddenly there is an older woman beside me, and she walks me to an apartment I seem to know. Another woman meets me at the door and invites me in. She introduces me to her husband, who has no face. I am the woman, she tells him, whose nephew died, and the nephew was the same age as their son Lucky. I can see Lucky behind her and her daughter behind him. I've met them all before. I corrected her: Wade is my son.
    I had been standing near the doorway in a narrow room with a linoleum table, and as we walked to the kitchen, my eyes were drawn at once to the handles on the cabinets and drawers. They were all broken in the middle and only the stumps of handles were still connected, too small to use to open the drawers. I continued to talk to the woman, and then Lucky and his sister were gone and Wade and Cate came in and stood by the linoleum table.
    We spoke a little more and then left, Wade by my side, Cate wandering behind us some, looking back at the couple standing at the door. We walked and talked, and when I talked to Cate I had to turn around. When I turned back to Wade, he was climbing the steps of a bright white porch. I can help you with that, son, I said. Cate walked up with him. I knew I was not to go. I know, he said, thanks, Mom. I stood outside. Alone.
    And I didn't look in drawers again. I seemed to have understood that even if there had been a time when I could have erased all that happened and have him, that time had passed and now he was going on without me.
    Maybe it should have scared me a year later that he was still this enormous presence in my life and in my dreams but I felt quite the opposite: I was more distressed when he was not with me. Drawers, beaches, thin sliced ham he liked, black Grand Cherokees, a blinking answering machine light, I knew these were irrational triggers, but I did not even ask myself not to respond when something pushed a button on Wade's memory. Without them, where was he in my life? And if, when it happened, I was alone, I fell willingly into the grief. I think I actually wanted it; I think I reacted to the song on the radio or the cola on the grocery shelf as a trigger precisely because I needed his company. It was not a hairshirt to me the way it might have seemed to someone outside my family; it was a warm enveloping comforter, it was as close as I could be in this life to my boy. But that comfort, I had to learn, was an impediment to being able to live as fully as possible after Wade's death. As long as I lived there, I wasn't living in the present, and part of Wade's legacy would be that in dying, he took with him part of his mother as well, leaving half a mother for Cate.
    Part of becoming functioning again was accepting what I could not do, much as my father had done as his body failed him. I could not bring him back, as much as I tried, as much as I prayed. I could not let him go, which is what people who cared about me wanted. So many people, thinking they were taking care of me, asked if I was over Wade's death yet. I will never be “over” it, I would tell them, and they would look back at me blankly. If I had lost a leg, I would tell them, instead of a boy, no one would ever ask me if I was “over” it. They would ask how I was doing learning to walk without my leg. I was learning to walk and to breathe and to live without Wade. And what I was learning is that it was never ever going to be the life I had before.
    Not too unlike the wives welcoming home their warrior husbands, I had to adjust to a new reality. Clinging to the old reality with a living Wade was paralyzingly unattainable, and