Resilience (15 page)

It took me some time to realize that I was lucky, really. I did not need to intrude into someone else's life to have happiness. Seeing these people as pursuing something they cannot or will not build for themselves, that they are unlikely to ever have, made me feel a little sorry for them. Their focus on achieving a style of life deprived them of any opportunity to achieve a purpose in life. They hurt me, and it still hurts, but whatever momentary pleasure they got, they didn't get what they wanted, and that must hurt, too. My life, at some level, is tragic. Theirs is worse; theirs is pathetic. I was still upset with John for allowing either of them into our lives, for being vulnerable to obsequiousness, for not kicking them out the door when they refused to leave. It makes it easier, too, that John is upset with himself in both cases for not doing just that. It has made it easier to forgive him that he cannot forgive himself.

That leaves, unfortunately, the long process of rebuilding trust. He violated a trust and then he lied. And even when he told the truth, he left most of the truth out. My mother's mother used to say that the intent to deceive is the same as a lie. We have spent much too long in that purgatory, so long it feels like hell. If he lied for a year and told another lie for another year, does that mean it takes two years to re-earn trust? It is not as easy or formulaic. Our life now is a mixture of living each day as a family, making dinners, packing school lunches, basketball games and Girl Scouts, chorus and Cub Scout sleepovers. The stuff of real life, and here John has been all that it is possible to be. When I am sick or distracted, he is the caregiver I need, tender and attentive. John is not the photographer my father was, but these are his photographs, gifts of love. Like my mother unattractive in hair curlers, I lie in bed, circles under my eyes, my sparse hair sticking in too many directions, and he looks at me as if I am the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. It matters.

The harder part of the mixture is sorting out the truths and the diversions. Just as I don't want cancer to take over my life, I don't want this indiscretion, however long in duration, to take over my life either. But I need to deal with both; I need to find peace with both. It is hard for John, I can see, because it is something about which he is ashamed. But his willingness to open up is a statement that he trusts me, too. For quite a long time, I used whatever he admitted in the next argument and he was hesitant to say anything. That is, gratefully, behind us. There is still a great deal of sorting through to do—the lies went on for some time. And we both understand that there are no guarantees, but the road ahead looks clear enough, although from here it looks long. It helps that there are rest stops—building Legos with Jack, reading with Emma Claire, planning Cate's new house, hanging pictures of thirty years of memories—that remind us why we are together.

Forgiveness, I have been told, is the gift I give to him; trust he has to earn by himself. I am not going to suggest that that process is over. It is long from being over. I am still adjusting my sails to the new wind that has blown through my life. Nothing will be quite as I want it, but sometimes we eat the toast that is burned on one side anyway, don't we?

I also had the job of rebuilding myself. For so long I moved to a cadence set by someone else. While growing up, it had been my father's changes in duty stations. What was happening in my life really didn't, couldn't, matter. I moved for my senior year of high school, because that was his rotation schedule. When I married we both practiced law, but soon his career was on a rocket and he, not I, set the family cadence. It was fine with me. But now I needed a me. I needed the music in my head to be something for me. “Gray skies are going to clear up. Put on a happy face.” The self-doubt that had fueled a need to overprepare had exploded with the recent revelations. I was overwhelmed and lost. There had to be places where I felt that I had value. The children might have seemed a natural place, but that was complicated—they were part of the family that I feared had not been enough. I gave speeches, but I was still afraid that people heard what they expected to hear. If they expected exceptional, they heard exceptional, even when I thought I was mediocre. I overprepared some more, writing new speeches for every group before whom I spoke. I still felt mediocre. Unlike when I was grieving Wade's death and could not eat, in this grief I ate too much, which was followed by immense disappointment in myself.

I wanted something that was mine. If I spoke publicly, I was asked about John. If I was asked to be on a board, it was because they had come to know me through John. I needed to be independent of him, maybe because he had been independent of me. Whatever the reason, I was on a search. And I found something that not only was mine but that I honestly wanted to do. I went to High Point one late-summer day with B. A. Farrell, my friend and the architect of our new home. We talked, as we did, of a thousand things, and he told me of buying a whole showroom of furniture at an enviable discount. He had doled it out to his various customers, but, he said, if you had a store, we could do so much more. By the time of the trip home, a plan was born: I would open a furniture store. I cannot say I had not thought about this before. I love the craftspeople and salespeople in High Point. I am guessing that it has something to do with creating a home, the function at which I am pretty sure I managed to succeed. I had talked about a store plenty, but always in the abstract. During the campaign it was just a dream, but now I was on a search for retail space in Chapel Hill. Hargrave McElroy's son Will helped me close on a small space; Lane Davis, who built our house in Chapel Hill, did the upfit, and I finally started buying furniture for my store.

I remember one time when John and I lived in Nashville, Tennessee. The living room and dining room were painted a pale green that was too close to a color that the military had used in every set of quarters in which I lived growing up. I wanted to paint, and we talked of it and talked of it, but it never seemed to happen. One day we bought a quart of paint and painted a big “X” on the living room wall. Now we would have to paint. That's what I was doing when Cate and I went to High Point one day and I bought a whole showroom of Italian furniture. There were nineteen mosaic tables; I would need a store in which to sell them.

In this world, I am not John's wife. My name is not in a tabloid. I am Elizabeth buying for a small store in Chapel Hill. John likes going with me to High Point, where everyone knows my name. He helped me buy a used truck. Vincent helps me move the furniture from High Point to storage to the store. Vincent is his own story of resilience. He worked for Lane, the contractor who built our house, and still does when Lane needs him. Vincent struggled with alcoholism and couldn't be counted on to show up when he was needed. About the time our house was finished, Vincent hit bottom, but he decided not to stay there. As I write, he has been clean for a year and a half, he has gotten his own apartment and a driver's license, and he is the most reliable, hardworking man I know. But more than that, he has great joy. He loves his life. The past is not what he wishes it was, but that does not mean he cannot create for himself the future he wants. Working with Vincent has been an inspiration to me, especially in the last months. And having a business that is just mine, that rises or falls on what I do or fail to do, makes me feel more like I have a place. So many people have said that I should advertise that it is my store, using my name and the celebrity or notoriety that my name carries. I don't argue, but I cannot do that. I am just Elizabeth buying for a small store in Chapel Hill. My husband helps me out there now and again.

CHAPTER 9
In the End

n the end the way to view all that has happened is that I did my very best. I felt with every part of me. I loved with the whole of me. I ached in a way that reminded me that there had to be a corollary somewhere of incredible joy to balance the universe. And if I had loved less or doubted more or avoided the pains, I might not be assured as I am today that I have done in every circumstance what I would hope to do. Not every circumstance, surely. I have been angry beyond reason. I have been lost and unsure. But in every way I might have expected of myself, I have been true to that sense of what was true and right and clean. Maybe others had a better time, more intimacies, more skin pressed against skin, but this life is mine, these children are mine, this home is mine, and this imperfect man is like me. I am his and he is mine.

And in the end, what we want from life is too dear for words, for paper. Maybe that is why in every culture there is music that takes us places words cannot. So I sit here, the keyboard with letters in front of me, wondering how to say why I am able to breathe, why others I watch, whose breathing seems even more impossible, smile and laugh and live. And why I believe that I will smile and laugh and live. In the background I listen to Andrea Marcovicci sing “All the Things You Are.”
You are the angel glow that lights a star. The dearest things I know are what you are. Someday my happy arms will hold you and someday I'll know that moment divine when all the things you are are mine
. And then the tempo steps up and wraps around me like a long chiffon scarf at the end of Andrea's long arms. What cannot be possible. Someday.

But there comes a point when the music ends. The trick is to have someplace to go when it does. Not to sink back into the hole in which the music found you, from where it lifted you. The trick is to go someplace that belongs to you, that was the perfect medicine for what you needed.

I measure my pains just as I measured my joys. When Wade died, I was lost, more lost than I have ever felt. Will Henderson and Matt Nowell had sat in our house after a Carolina basketball game a few weeks before Wade died. “Wade,” one of them said, “in thirty years we can sit in your parents' seats at the games.” “No way,” I interjected, “when I am seventy-five Wade and I will be sitting there together.” I did not just expect to raise him; I expected him to be my friend and companion every day of my life. He was supposed to enjoy all the pleasures of life, and I was supposed to be able to see him marry and have children. I won't see those things happen, but I did get to see Crystal from the Wade Edwards Learning Lab apply to college, I did get to see Elise put together a Web page for herself, I did get to see Philip grow into a fine young man, a fireman he told me.

When I got breast cancer, it was just another hurdle. It was high and I skinned myself time and again as I battled over it. But it wasn't as tough as Wade's death, so I could do it. Then the breast cancer has spread to my bones, and after staying contained for more than a year, now it is growing again. I will do whatever the doctors tell me to do. I will take my medicines and get my chemotherapy infusions; I will avoid the foods I should not eat; and I will not do activities that could break my bones. Although I know that cancer now has the upper hand, it won't own me until it finally takes me. Until then, I will live as fully as I am able—absent horseback riding and skiing—and I will spend part of the time I have attacking cancer in a different way, by fighting for research dollars and an expansion of treatment to those like whispering Sheila who want to but cannot afford to fight the cancer in them.

We live not far from the country church in which John and I were married. I promised to love him for richer or poorer. We had nothing then. Really nothing, except debt from college loans. It is more than thirty-one years later, and we have more than we will need. I promised to love him in sickness and in health, and I have. And he has tended me in sickness; he has held me and fed me and taken care of me. I promised to love him for better or for worse. It has been, I have to admit, mostly for better. But there has been worse, and that worse has been tough on me. I turn sixty this year, and since I was fifty-seven, I have lived with that worse. But I choose to look forward, to the extent I am able, to make a place for myself and to make room for him to earn the trust he squandered.

A book of lists, the top ten, the worst scenarios. We seem bent on ranking all of our experiences. I have lost one child, but Gordon has lost two. I had Stage 2 cancer, but Sarah had Stage 4. I face whatever I must with a roof over my head and food on my table, and there are mothers and wives with nothing at all except my same griefs. The fact that I see someone surviving with a condition that sounds worse than my own or with fewer resources than I, well, it means I can survive, too, doesn't it? But what do I do with the lists in those moments when I don't feel like surviving, when the fight has left me? Have we failed, too, even at holding the short straw? I cannot even do this right? Gordon stands in the midst of the storm with his eyes so firmly on the horizon, and I cannot manage to lift my head.

When I looked at Gordon or Sarah, at any of those strong and miraculous survivors, I always looked for the tricks, the ways they managed to outwit the pain. They have to be there, don't they? It was hard to imagine, but I do accept that some people have looked at me the same way: What is the lesson that you know that I do not, the trick that I am somehow missing, the one that will take me through this experience?

I know now that I was always looking for the wrong thing. In the first place, Gordon and Sarah cannot have the answers for me. Just as I cannot have the answers for you. There are millions of tricks, as many tricks as there are fingerprints, each one belonging to just us. The answer wasn't in their lives; it was in mine. It is like going to the grave of a loved one: It is exactly right for some people and exactly wrong for others. In the second place, I kept looking for others to help me find the trick. God would make it right, would turn back time. The doctors would have the next medicine; maybe this one was a cure. John would say the right thing and make it all not so. Others could help me, so many have, but it was always in me—in me not just to find the answer but to make the changes I had the power to make.

Finally, it is not a book of lists, it is not a top ten. In a competitive world it is too easy to rank yourself against others. Gordon had to live through the deaths of his two sons; it is unimaginable. But the magnitude of his misery does not mean that I should have been able to handle more easily than I did the death of one son. The only contest we have is with ourselves. Wade wrote once, in an essay for a Latin exam, “The modern hero is a person who does something everyone thinks they could do if they were a little stronger, a little faster, a little smarter, or a little more generous. Heroes in ancient time were the link between man and perfect beings, gods. Heroes in modern times are the link between man as he is and man as he could be.” That is our test. The man—or woman—we are and the man—or woman—we could be. I cannot be as resilient as Gordon Livingston or Rose Kennedy, both of whom buried too many of their children. I cannot be as strong and healthy as Lance Armstrong, who pushed his body over mountains after cancer. I cannot be as beautiful as Christie Brinkley, who faced her husband's indiscretions, too. I can only be what I am capable of being.

I have said before that I do not know what the most important lesson is that I will ever teach my children, Cate and Emma Claire and Jack. I do know that when they are older and telling their own children about their grandmother, they will be able to say that she stood in the storm, and when the wind did not blow her way—and it surely has not—she adjusted her sails.