Resilience (4 page)

CHAPTER 5
1996

hen our son Wade died in 1996, I wrote a short essay about his life and his death.

Wade was 16 when he died. On April 4th, 1996, the wind blew across a North Carolina field and pushed his car slightly off the road. Slightly but enough. When he tried to bring it back on, the car flipped. The air bag came out, the seat belt held, but the roof collapsed on him. The other boy walked away. Some dishes he was taking to the beach for us were unbroken. Our boy was killed instantly. It wasn't speed, it wasn't inattention, it was a straight road on a clear afternoon, and it simply was.

And what that wind took at Easter was a cherished boy, a remarkable child with the character of a man. I try to find, in this narrow place, a way to explain his virtues. He was a loving son
and brother, holding our hands, hugging us, no matter who was around to see. He was a loyal friend, always there when his friends needed him, but never succumbing to peer pressure. He never drank or smoked. When a parent who came on the accident asked if drinking was involved, the boys there all answered, “Wade Edwards? No way.” He usually drove home those who did drink. He was intelligent and determined. His conversation in the car that day was about how he wanted to be a lawyer, but he didn't want to take anything from his parents, he wanted to do it all himself, like his father had. He was humble and shunned the spotlight. During the week before he died, his English class studied “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Ernest Hemingway. He participated in four days of discussion but never mentioned once that he had climbed Kilimanjaro with his father the previous summer. How many among us could have sat quietly? He went to Washington as one of ten national winners of an essay contest two weeks before he died. He did not even tell his closest friends, who only later saw him on television. He was fair-minded. When asked on Martin Luther King Day how we could
make the world a better place, he answered, “Look at the inside of people, not the outside.” He was seven years old when he wrote that. Though he had many gifts, he never thought of himself as the tiniest bit better than anyone else. And he chastised those who treated others poorly.

I have tried to think about the nature of the bond between us. I guess the fact of “bond” assumes we are two people, such as would need a bond to hold them together. And I never really felt that degree of separateness that lets you describe the existence of a bond between two different things. His joys were my joys, his pains were multiplied to be my pains. I woke to him and slept only after his lips grazed mine. As private as he held some details of his life, protecting those he cared about from my judgment, his broader life was open, bare before me. I was the witness to all things he valued, most of which were intangible. His weakness, his strength, his vulnerability (which had worried me so), his sense of who he was and what this living business was all about, he laid that open. The truth of life, I would have guessed, could not be found out in sixteen years, and we would be fortunate to have a glimpse in sixty.
Somehow, this child knew. Knew that we all fought too much over foolishness, that our vanity and our insecurities kept us from truly helping one another, that true love and friendship were marked by humility and loyalty that disregarded self-interest. And he more than knew these things, he lived this way. His mark will endure, because only these truths of life do endure. The good we do really is eternal, as we had told him, and now that axiom is a charge to us—not just to keep his memory, but to live his life message.

We know that we can never make sense of his loss. He had done it all right. Of all he wanted, he wanted most to be a father someday. And what an unbelievable father he could have been with his compassion, his warmth, his patience. He was a rare gift.

He wrote in a journal during Outward Bound when he was 15: “More than any other goal that I have set for myself I want to show my love and appreciation to my family for all that they have done for me. I know that I don't deserve all that I get but I hope that I will someday be able to say that I deserve it. I really want to do something great with my life. I want to start a family when
I grow up. I am going to be as good a parent to my kids as my parents are to me. But more than anything, when I die, I want to be able to say that I had a great life. So far I have had a wonderful life and I hope it keeps up.” Well, it didn't keep up as long as it should have, but we are thankful for what he left us. And he left everyone he touched the better for knowing him. We stand a little straighter in his shadow.

Nothing of any size or duration is as magical as our memory of it. The way my mother laughed once at something my father said when we were driving in the rain forest in Puerto Rico, first a deep, full, long laugh, then with remnants of the laughter low and hearty coming out in little bits for the minutes following. It was perfect and beautiful, sexy even I suppose, although that is harder to say about one's mother. The trip itself? Not so perfect. It was Christmas, and I wanted the smell of Douglas fir in the living room, not the absence of any smell from a fake miniature tree mother had packed in her suitcase and set up in the rented living room. My brother was dreadfully unhappy about traveling at Christmas and sulked the entire trip; the photographs of him now make us laugh because he was so committed to not smiling for a solid week. But when we tell the story of it, we tell of the funny trip through the rain forest and a clever mother who packed a tree in a suitcase and a focused teenager who, whatever delights we placed before him, never once smiled. And it seems perfect; at least the ten-minute version of the weeklong trip seems perfect.

Another family trip to the mountains of Pennsylvania was intended to be idyllic. A high school graduation trip for me—with family. My brother brought a friend, Tom Rief; my sister brought a friend, Harriet Windley. I, fortunately, did not bring anyone. The place my father had chosen, from a classified advertisement in the
Washington Post
, was a “serene three bedroom mountain cabin overlooking a meadow” for a mere $75 a week. Even in 1967, this low price should have been a warning. We loaded the girls in one car, with the food, and the boys in the other car, with the dog—who threw up the whole way, an omen of things to come. When we reached the serene cabin, it was just an old clapboard farmhouse in need of paint across from its burned-out barn, and the meadow was a pasture shared with loud, skittish cows (making the dog quite happy) that led down a slope to the visible and busy interstate highway. Look out the front door and there was the black carcass of the barn. Look out the back door and there was the interstate. We did every activity the town and the neighboring borough had to offer—dancing at the firehouse (the only male who approached us to dance had two abscessed front teeth), skating at the roller rink (the fellow with whom I skated thought California was closer to Virginia where we lived than Virginia was to Pennsylvania), and going to the movies (where the seven of us accounted for more than three-quarters of the audience). So we spent most of the vacation at the farmhouse, listening to “The Arkansas Traveler” from the farmhouse's old 78 RPM records—the only music—and watching the wheelchair in which my mother, who had broken her ankle the day before my high school graduation, sat roll uncontrollably down the uneven floor to crash into the sink. Upstairs our preoccupation was killing an unending stream of flies. Even this truly miserable vacation—we couldn't make it the whole week—takes on a luster. Far from perfect, perhaps, but solar systems better than the seemingly unending misery of the real thing.

So maybe it is not surprising that my sense of life before 1996 is radiant. Braiding Cate's hair or finding a Jams shirt for Wade, making mock science tests for them, cleaning the playroom with them to a silly song I made up, watching them wrap Christmas presents for each other and watching them enjoy seeing their brother or sister unwrap what they had chosen, the first time they got up on skis, the spelling bee. It is easy enough to think that those days must have been magical and perfect. The ten-minute version is undeniably perfect. We had a picture-postcard family in a picture-postcard house, and life had played out precisely as I had dreamed it would. And in my house, I literally walked around singing the songs of Jo Stafford and the Andrews Sisters.

We had enough money that we didn't have to worry so much about our mortgage or whether the car needed new wheel bearings, but we hadn't had enough money (or hadn't had it long enough) to think that hiring people to manage our lives made any sense, so it was just the four of us, at dinner, at basketball games, at soccer practice, trimming the tree. A beautiful foursome with a golden retriever to boot. A husband I adored, a life that I thought challenged him professionally and home that fed him emotionally, and these unspeakably marvelous children. It was perfect, and I was content in my memory of life before Wade died. But to let myself fall into that fiction is not fair to today. Today will always fall short of perfection, just as yesterday—we might not remember—did.

What was perfect then that cannot be replaced is that Wade was here, a six-foot, freckle-faced, living, breathing boy whose being was one of a handful of things that made my life make sense every single day. There is nothing in life I have done better than to parent my children. And even that is not particularly close to perfect. There is always someone who parents better, who does whatever you think you can do at least a little better than you, and maybe more than a little better. Isn't that always so? There is only one person at a time who holds a world record. There is one Miss Universe a year. One winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and one for the Scripps Spelling Bee. Only a handful of winners of the Fields Medals. And I want to be clear: I was not ever going to win as best parent. In my skewed memory everything is close to perfect, but even rose-colored-glasses me remembers some realities. My house, perennially piled high with half-finished projects, looked more like Fred Sanford's living room from
Sanford and Son
than like Bree Van De Kamp's from
Desperate Housewives.
I am lucky if my kitchen smells like Sara Foster's twice a year. My freezer has more food in it than my fresh vegetables bin. My children get cavities and my older daughter came home from camp once with a hair knot the size of a Bubba Burger. I have missed the sign-up deadline for sports teams and I have sent my daughter to auditions without the sheet music every other mother handed their child as they got out of the car. I always made dinner for the mother of a new baby, but I was never the one who thought to organize it.

And yet I am, more because I am the one who raised them than that I had some extraordinary skill, the very best mother for my children, and because they raised me, they are the very best children for me. I'd like to think, perhaps deceiving myself, that my imperfections actually taught them a few things, too. I do know that I happily built my days around them, working at my law office only until school was out and then coming home, being there for homework or car pools or sewing a button on a favorite shirt. Or just being there. So the days must have been perfect, right? And then the halcyon days came to an end. The fall is much farther if you think you have fallen all the way from heaven.

When Wade died, all that imperfectly remembered perfection came crashing down. Although it wasn't perfect, and so it wasn't some large perfect world that came crashing down. What did happen was bad enough.