Read Online Resilience by Elizabeth Edwards - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Elizabeth Edwards
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as I did that, I was not going learn to walk. A hundred friends, at least, came by or 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, and they were innocent and invincible. 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 evening, Gwynn often with a dinner for us in her hands. Sally would come sit with me in Wade's room. Ellanwould find reasons why I should go out, walk with her, anything to leave the house to which I was so bound. Cate gave us reasons to leave, reasons to live. Her soccer games and then her softball games, all the life she had had before and was holding on to as hard as she could.
Those less close to us tried in their way to be there for us, but they seemed like foreigners who could not speak our language. We relied on their smiles and their hugs even when their words did not, could not relate to our pain. Looking back, their compassion and presence and their memories of Wade sustained me in a way honestly I did not then understand. All I thought then was that they did not know what I had not known: They could not really understand what it meant to place your child in a casket, to stand beside it in the church, to sit beside it at the cemetery. If they couldn't tell me anything about the death of my son, who could?
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. Yet some of us gravitate to the Internet, and there, with a little searching, we find one another. There we have no faces, no races, no houses, no cars, no jobs, no reputations. Our children were equal, no one was smarter or faster or better-looking, none were troublemakers or lawbreakers. And there we were all equal, in a fashion. There we were all parents who have done the impossible: We have placed our child in a box and the box in the ground and we do not know what to do next. And yet we were stronger when we were with one another. I mean “with” in the important figurative sense.
Around 1991, Wade had taught me how to use the Internet. Five years later I realized he had taught me how to reach a safety net that, in his permanent absence, I would sorely need. I went online sometime after his death not knowing what I would find, not really knowing what I was seeking. But there they were: a group, more than one, actually, with a safe place and a comforting if distant empathy, a group of the bereaved looking for one another. They weren't afraid, as some of my most preciousand well-meaning friends (who were helpful in different ways) were, to talk of Wade's death. Losing a child to disease or accident or an intentional act—their own or others—is a reality from which the blessedly uninitiated understandably turn away. I did it before Wade died. I am not proud now that I never asked about the birthday or death day of the long-deceased son of a good friend, but I didn't. And I understood why others circumscribed the conversations they had with me: no talk of dead children. Wouldn't I rather talk about living Cate anyway? And part of me wanted to fall wholly into that glorious child, but I could not shed Wade, didn't want to shed him.
In this odd Internet family, everyone had lost a loved one. No one stupidly believed that by not talking about it, it wouldn't happen to them. It had already happened to them. And now death and pain and
Those less close to us tried in their way to be there for us, but they seemed like foreigners who could not speak our language. We relied on their smiles and their hugs even when their words did not, could not relate to our pain. Looking back, their compassion and presence and their memories of Wade sustained me in a way honestly I did not then understand. All I thought then was that they did not know what I had not known: They could not really understand what it meant to place your child in a casket, to stand beside it in the church, to sit beside it at the cemetery. If they couldn't tell me anything about the death of my son, who could?
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. Yet some of us gravitate to the Internet, and there, with a little searching, we find one another. There we have no faces, no races, no houses, no cars, no jobs, no reputations. Our children were equal, no one was smarter or faster or better-looking, none were troublemakers or lawbreakers. And there we were all equal, in a fashion. There we were all parents who have done the impossible: We have placed our child in a box and the box in the ground and we do not know what to do next. And yet we were stronger when we were with one another. I mean “with” in the important figurative sense.
Around 1991, Wade had taught me how to use the Internet. Five years later I realized he had taught me how to reach a safety net that, in his permanent absence, I would sorely need. I went online sometime after his death not knowing what I would find, not really knowing what I was seeking. But there they were: a group, more than one, actually, with a safe place and a comforting if distant empathy, a group of the bereaved looking for one another. They weren't afraid, as some of my most preciousand well-meaning friends (who were helpful in different ways) were, to talk of Wade's death. Losing a child to disease or accident or an intentional act—their own or others—is a reality from which the blessedly uninitiated understandably turn away. I did it before Wade died. I am not proud now that I never asked about the birthday or death day of the long-deceased son of a good friend, but I didn't. And I understood why others circumscribed the conversations they had with me: no talk of dead children. Wouldn't I rather talk about living Cate anyway? And part of me wanted to fall wholly into that glorious child, but I could not shed Wade, didn't want to shed him.
In this odd Internet family, everyone had lost a loved one. No one stupidly believed that by not talking about it, it wouldn't happen to them. It had already happened to them. And now death and pain and
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