Elizabeth Edwards died in her Chapel Hill home on Tuesday at the age of 61. By the time this column is printed, news of her death will no doubt already have reached you—the brightest stars go out the hardest. Mrs. Edwards had that perfect mix of brains, beauty and spunk: a big no-no on Capitol Hill, where the candidate’s spouse must never outshine the candidate himself. She had a spark of life reminiscent of the late Princess Diana.
In a 2004 campaign interview with Time Magazine columnist Jay Newton-Small, John Edwards (then John Kerry’s vice presidential nominee) recounted his initial encounter with Mrs. Edwards in their first year of law school, which Newton-Small described after Mrs. Edwards’s death: “The teacher... launched into a complicated dissection of an obscure law code. ‘I was lost,’ Edwards said. The class was silent, when Elizabeth raised her hand. Edwards couldn’t believe she’d been following along: the woman must be a prodigy. ‘That was about as clear as mud,’ she admonished the professor. ‘Go over it again in plain English.’”
Mrs. Edwards first really came to my family’s attention after my mother underwent her first round of chemotherapy in late 2006. Mom was looking for heroes. Mrs. Edwards, who spoke openly about her battle with cancer in interviews, seemed to fit the mold. Cancer, as those familiar can attest, is a topic that can sometimes scare and shame a woman (or man) into silence. It happened to my mother.
Then Mrs. Edwards caught my eye. During an appearance at a kickoff event for the 2007 San Francisco Gay Pride Parade—almost a year into her husband’s own presidential campaign—she came out in support of gay marriage: “I don’t know why somebody else’s marriage has anything to do with me,” she said. “I’m completely comfortable with gay marriage.” Not exactly the safest opinion to throw around when campaigning for your husband. And yet, Mrs. Edwards kept her husband’s chances alive with many people opting to vote for him due to her irresistible charm.
Her obituaries will focus largely on her husband’s infidelities and the countless interviews in which she talked with unexpected honesty. The interview that sticks out most in my mind is the May 2009 meeting with Oprah Winfrey. Asked by Winfrey whether she still loved her husband, Elizabeth replied, “You know, that’s a complicated question.”
But these are not the things we should take from a life, much less a life like Mrs. Edwards’s—a life shattered not only by infidelity or cancer, but also the sudden death of her teenage son Wade in 1996. In the Sarah Polley-directed film “Away From Her,” Fiona—a woman with Alzheimer’s—reaches down and consoles her sitting husband, “I think all we can aspire to in this situation is a little bit of grace.” This silent prayer is what Mrs. Edwards embodied so well, what so many people turned to in their own moments of heartache and struggle.
Perhaps grace is something you can’t recognize or get a hold of until you’ve crossed a bridge of sorts. Some of us are spared the inevitable meeting until later in our adult life, but I’d venture to say that quite a few of us, at one point or another, have had to carry ourselves like Mrs. Edwards and cross that bridge far too soon.
How you will be remembered is out of your control, but almost always it is the least important thing. On Monday, Mrs. Edwards posted a final message to friends on Facebook: “The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered. We know that.” We do, and yet we continue to forget. As a community, we have come under intense media scrutiny this semester after a series of unfortunate mistakes. We have mourned the death of one of our fellow classmates.
At the end of Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Misfit, an escaped convict who has just murdered a family of characters, says of the dead grandmother, “…she would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” Were we to endure the constant presence of death, perhaps then we might remember how quickly life passes us by.
But, of course, this isn’t the way it works. So we must learn to carry with us forever the bits of sadness we come across, those moments of grace, and hold on to them more tightly than anything else we own. Because only then will we be able to look back on our lives and think “Well, it’s not so bad having it end like this.”
Thomas Gebremedhin is a Trinity senior. This is his final column of the semester.
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