Saving Graces (37 page)

We left John and the children on Saturday morning and went on with our schedule. Hargrave was continually asking me whether I didn’t want to stop altogether or just join John. The night before she had asked again, asking whether we should just join John. There would be less pressure on me. “No,” I said, “and since we have to drive to our event in the morning, we need to leave earlier, don’t we?” I couldn’t contemplate stopping. She said, “So we’re going to do the whole deal? Your schedule as originally planned?” Yep. I found out later she went to Karen and Ryan and said, and I can just hear her mother/teacher tone, “There will be no whining from any of us from here on out. I don’t want to hear it from anybody. If she can do this, we are not tired. Whatever she wants to do, we’re there.” Typical, wonderful Hargrave.

The next days weren’t difficult anyway. I thanked people in phone banks and rallied with get-out-the-vote workers. I appeared at a couple of events with the serenely lovely Annie Glenn, John Glenn’s wife. An extraordinary high school student, Molly Dickson, spoke at one. I went to two lovely Cleveland churches on Sunday. It was pleasant and easy. It was no longer about convincing; it was about making sure people voted. With forays into Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, I crisscrossed between Iowa and Ohio—two states we apparently lost, I have to point out, in case you are wondering about my effectiveness. Three places stay in my mind, Stephanie Tubb Jones’s extraordinarily beautiful and intimate church, Bethany Baptist in Cleveland; the well-loved and well-worn William McKinley Elementary School in Cedar Rapids, where we had a rally with Tipper Gore and Senator Harkin; and the Inn on Coventry in Cleveland Heights. It was there, on October 31st, the last day of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, that I met the two women who, fighting cancer themselves, gave me my pink ribbon pin and asked if I was a survivor and I didn’t know how to answer.

We got in the car, and I turned to Hargrave.
Did you see her?
Yes.
She gave me this pin
, I said, fastening the pin on my lapel.
She looked strong, didn’t she? I mean except for the hair, she looked strong
. Yes, Hargrave answered, she did. And then we were quiet.

The next day was even less pressure, except for being on Larry King’s show opposite Jeb Bush. That night the advance team, Jim McGreevy, Cooper Ray, and Henry Stern, brought champagne and bath soaks for us, and, although I don’t drink much, I drank a glass with them and our troop, and I was happy and tired, sitting there reliving the campaign in my flannel pajamas.

Then it was the end. The last day, the final get-out-the-vote effort in Cedar Rapids, the last television broadcast from Des Moines—after my meltdown in the stylist’s chair. The beginnings of a celebration as the first votes came in and we flew to Boston. And then, as soon as I arrived, it was a flurry, police cars with sirens—we never used them—leading us at breakneck speed to the Boston hotel, then straight up to the tiny studio the campaign had set up there. At first, I didn’t see Ted Koppel. He stood quietly in the corner until I took a breath, and then he said, “Just want to shake your hand,” and he wished me well. He was hearing the same numbers I was hearing.

When I knew it looked bad, I wanted John. I was exhausted from the day, ending as it did with several hours in the remote chair doing radio. No one knew when John would arrive. The Internet connection in our room wasn’t working; even the television was on the fritz. The world was changing quickly, and I was in an information-free zone. Ryan fixed everything in the room and then receded. I managed to hug him before he backed out of the room. He’d been there before, in 2000, when things started to fall apart in the Gore campaign. He went to his room, wanting to stay away from everyone, but Jack walked into the room, climbed up beside him, and watched television with him. He just sat there, the way Jack does, his hand on your arm, or his leg thrown across yours. I think Ryan knew then that John and I were going to be all right. Yes, we had to endure this final awful march, and yes, there was the cancer. But we also had this: this boy, these children. We’d be fine.

John finally came, exhausted but not yet empty. He wanted to fight. Hargrave got Nancy and Jay and my niece Laura and brought them to my room—they did not have the identification pins the Secret Service used to determine who was supposed to be on our closed floor. I talked to them and to Cate, who had gotten back to the hotel after representing us all afternoon at Boston events. As John talked on the speakerphone in the main room, I took Cate to the next room, a little dark room we didn’t use, but a good place to tell her what would happen the next day. At that point I didn’t know yet that there would be a concession speech. I only knew that tomorrow I would certainly be told that I had breast cancer. And then my brother and sister came in, with my niece Laura, and I told them too. I speak to my brother and sister once a week, maybe more—less, certainly, during the campaign—and though we are all in our fifties and live thousands of miles apart, I know when Jay quits smoking and I know when he starts again, I know when Nancy gets her hair cut or what the doctor said in her last visit. We cannot disconnect. And we don’t want to. They wanted to come with us to the hospital, to be there with us. I couldn’t let them; it would be too much. So we just held each other until we were so blasted tired we couldn’t, and Jay and Nancy went back to their rooms, each leaning down to hug John before they did, each whispering to him,
Take care of her
.

CHAPTER 14

WASHINGTON

The Hospital

“Y
OU HAVE BREAST
cancer.” Those are the words one in eight women will hear, but, trust me, knowing those odds doesn’t make it any easier to hear it. And those words were what Barbara Smith said to me, to us—Cate and John and me—on the afternoon of November 3rd, the day after the election of 2004.

Earlier that day, the three of us had arrived at Faneuil Hall in a motorcade past lines of well-wishers waving and cheering, reaching their hands toward the car, four and five deep on the sidewalks as we passed, just as if it were a victory celebration. As we’d done a hundred times before, we stepped out of the SUV and into a building, into a quiet space—this time a bookstore in a basement, I think—where we were to wait until the event—this time John Kerry’s concession speech—was ready to begin. His daughters, Vanessa and Alex Kerry, came in; it would be our last time with them, probably, certainly like this. On the campaign train ride through the Southwest in August, Emma Claire gave half of her dolphin-shaped best-friend bracelet to Alex, who, sweetly, had worn it, at least for a while. Alex got a lot of points with me for that. And I had grown especially fond of Vanessa—she had a spirit that would serve her well, one she had needed in the past and would need in the months to come. The room broke up into sexes and age groups, like rooms had been doing since junior high school dances. Cate talked to the Kerry girls. The two Johns talked. Then Teresa came in, hobbling toward me, her ankle thickly wrapped. Her shoe had broken and she had fallen, and as sorry as I was that she was hurt, I was just pleased to be able to listen to a conversation about something as trivial as a twisted ankle. It was probably really painful, but it was, after all, a twisted ankle. The election and the two tough years that preceded it. This awful unwanted speech now. The appointment with the breast surgeon to follow. A twisted ankle was actually just what I needed. I let myself concentrate on her every word.

Cate and I sat in the front row with the Kerry women as the men stepped up to the stage. My husband spoke first. We listened as he gave his speech, listened as he never used the words concede or lose or defeat. His defiance was a small gesture, but we had learned about how precious hope could be—and we had more lessons ahead—and somehow saying those words seemed to us the same as relinquishing hope, so even with the concession speech to follow, he would not say them. John finished to warm applause and left the stage, left John Kerry alone to receive the palpably extraordinary love of the people gathered there, left him to say the words that John would not.

He said them. And then it was over. We rode in the same car in which we had arrived, in the same seats, Cate and John and I again, now away from Faneuil Hall, still cheered on by the waiting crowds. No one else knew, but we were driving on to face our next fight.

If there was ever a day and a place where we would be identifiable, it was this day in Boston, so I was glad we had a little special treatment at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Someone met us at a back door, met us and a pared-down Secret Service group, their faces solemn for the present chore. Through back corridors and empty stairwells, we made our way to a bright examining room. There we first met Barbara Smith, who would later be my surgeon. It was impossible not to have immediate confidence in this serene, intelligent woman. She explained the needle biopsy and the process for getting results, and she asked if John and Cate wanted to stay for the procedure. I could have told her the answer. They hadn’t stayed in our bedroom as I gave myself hormone shots before Emma Claire and Jack were born, they weren’t likely to stay now.

When they left, she put the needle next to the lump and with a dull click pulled out the tiniest amount of tissue. She did the same thing under my arm, from a lymph node. She left to have the tissue examined, and my family came back in. Cate’s face was stained with tears. It was, for me, a worse moment than the moments I knew lay ahead. I so love this child, this young woman who had been through so very much, who had slept on two chairs and an ottoman in our room for two years after her brother’s death, who was now drained and exhausted from working for months as hard or harder than anyone else in the campaign, and I had promised myself that I would protect her from any more pain. Yet here we were. Though I knew I hadn’t the power to spare any of us this, it did not make it hurt less. Not for her, not for me.

Whatever she’d surmised from her conversations with John and me in Raleigh, on election night she’d heard directly from me that I was pretty sure I had breast cancer. She and I had stood alone in a small dark hotel room, arms resting on each other’s shoulders, bands playing below us in Copley Square. She’d already been weakened by the crush of the day, but it could not wait. I’d needed to tell her what would happen the next day, I needed to land the next blow here, alone, so that she would be ready. She hadn’t broken. This is the child who did not cry when the end of her finger had been accidentally cut off when she was seven—it regenerated, which can happen at that age—and she did not cry election night at my news. She stiffened then so we could tell my brother and my sister who waited a few steps away. But now she was here in the hospital room, held together only by years of practice at holding herself together. A friend, journalist Meryl Gordon, told me afterward that she wanted to speak to God on our behalf to say, “These people have had enough. Enough already with them. Leave them alone now.” And I surely felt that way about Cate.

Barbara Smith came back in the room to a huddled family, but when she said those words, that it was cancer, we rallied. In the next hours, we even laughed and teased one another. We now had a dragon we could slay. At other times it had been different. Wade had had no chance to save himself, and we had had no chance to save him. John had been unable to convince the Kerry campaign to continue to fight. His protestations were ignored. Nothing we could do would fix these things. But we could fight cancer. It was terrible and ominous, and for Cate, for John, and the younger children, I admit that I was afraid to lose this fight. But it wasn’t, by a sad and huge distance, the worst news we had ever heard. Wade’s death had spared us that and spared us some degree of fear as well.

I don’t want to misrepresent this. My reaction was to get ready for battle, but I wasn’t always strong. I wasn’t even strong all that first day. I had times along this path when I wanted to say I’ve had enough, I can’t keep dealing with the latest side effect, the latest setback, the latest scare. I’d be in great pain or just not be able to do things I’d always done, and I’d say I know I have to kill this dragon, but the killing it is killing me. How easy it would have been along this road to fall back into that fear, but there was always someone waiting to help. John bringing me a soda and a sandwich, my sister calling to cheer me up, Chris Downey coming by with flowers, John Auchard coming by with dinner. A letter from Cedar Rapids or a card from Harrison, New Jersey—I had met them or I hadn’t, but they reached out. Connective tissue that wouldn’t wither even when I wanted to, that held me up when I could not stand, that would not let go. And so I was nourished by strangers and friends. But at this moment, it was the three of us.

As we followed Barbara Smith on our way to the CAT scan, we teased the Secret Service detail, who were trying to be invisible in their dark suits in the white-walled halls, surrounded by white-coated hospital staff. It was hopeless; they stood out more than we did. They were probably glad to stand outside the room while I went in to be scanned. The CAT scan would look at my torso to determine whether the cancer had spread. We were still jovial, John and Cate perched on stools while the huge machine hovered over me. Jovial until Barbara said there was an “anomaly” in my liver. The news set us back, hard. There was a two-thirds likelihood it was not cancer, she told us—and a one-third likelihood that it was, which she didn’t say or have to say. A one-third likelihood of metastasis to the liver. The laughing stopped; even false cheerfulness was out of place. We left Dana-Farber at least as somberly as we had come in.

At midnight, Cinderella’s coach turns back into a pumpkin, and on the day after the election, the chartered plane that had carried John, a staff, and a press corps across the country for more than four months was gone, not even a pumpkin left. My smaller jet and my pilot Brett Karpy were carrying someone else where they needed to go, or maybe he was having a long-overdue vacation. And we were in Boston, Cate and John and I were leaving Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and stepping into an unknown future…with no way to get there. My good friend Gordon Livingston had once told me about a friend who was going helicopter skiing, whatever that is. He added, somewhat embarrassed I think, that he thought it was good to know people of all classes. So now I add that it was our great fortune that someone we knew owned a plane that would get us back to Washington, to the children who had left Boston earlier that morning, so we could contemplate, in our own home, alone, what we had been told that afternoon at Dana-Farber. There was a small staff with us on the plane ride home, a skeleton crew of John’s Secret Service detail and mine, Peter Scher, and Miles Lackey. We decided that we would release the news of the breast cancer to the press, that maybe other women would then get the timely mammograms I had missed and would not have to hear the news we had just heard. But we didn’t mention the possible metastasis, not to Miles or Peter, not to the public. We needed to deal with this news privately first. In some ways working with the press release was good. It gave us something to talk about, and when it was done, we all fell silent. There was a sad dignity to the silence.

It was dark by the time we got home, and the children were already asleep. We put our suitcases filled with dirty clothes down on top of the suitcases filled with dirty clothes that we had left the last time we had been home, and we went in and kissed the foreheads of our sleeping children. When I came back to our room from loading the first of twenty loads of laundry, John was sitting in the chair next to the bed. Sometime during the campaign he had taken one of the Elizabeth! buttons that Ryan had had made and clipped it into the upholstery on the back of his chair. Somehow it was too much to come home to such an uncertain tomorrow and see that gay button, the symbol of a time of promise. He had his head in his hands when I walked in. I have always believed that one of the things that makes a marriage work is the teeter-totter of it: when he is down, it is my turn to be up. When one of us is overwhelmed, the other has to tighten up and take the blows. It is never a one-way street. It surely wouldn’t be in the months ahead. He just needed a few minutes, and then we were ready for bed, but not, it turned out, ready for sleep.

All of what had happened in the previous twenty-four hours, which included the emotional weight of all that had happened in the last years, was heavy on us, but the heaviest of all was the one-third likelihood that the cancer had metastasized to my liver. John fretted that he hadn’t taken care of me, though the blame, if blame had been useful, was mine, not his. When he finally picked up a book from the night table, finally forced his mind to think of something, anything else, I got up and got onto the computer. I typed “metastasis liver cancer prognosis” into Google, and I pressed Search.

“If the surgery is not successful, the disease is often fatal within three to six months.” That’s what I read. And that’s when I decided I wasn’t searching for prognosis again.

The next morning we got up, and the first hours were so innocent and familiar: Jack climbing into our bed as soon as the sun came up, the dressing and breakfast making, and the storytelling as if we hadn’t seen them the morning before. John told the Secret Service agents, who were still there, that we wanted to take the children to school ourselves. Did they really need to go with us? Did we really need a motorcade? Weren’t they going to leave at some point? They said yes, they would be leaving, and John said, “Well, we’d rather just take the children to school without the motorcade, without the fuss.” So we all said goodbye. We shook hands and hugged on the street, outside the house with the children coming down the front stairs with their backpacks. Jack’s Secret Service agent came over to him.

“Well, Jack, I’m going to be leaving now.”

“So when are you coming back?”

“I’m not coming back.”

“Why?” said Jack. “We’re friends.”

“Well, since the campaign is over, I won’t be coming back.”

I don’t know which one was sadder. Jack said, “Oh,” and he gave him a hug.

Jack invited him and Joe Casey, who had been with Jack earlier in the campaign until he got a significant promotion to the President’s detail, to his fifth-birthday party the following May. After all, they were friends.

When we came home from delivering the children to school, we turned ourselves fully to this next battle. It was now Thursday, November 4th, and we didn’t know whether I had cancer somewhere other than my breast. We didn’t know who was going to do the testing I obviously needed. We didn’t even have a doctor in Washington, D.C. All we knew was that we needed to move on all these fronts right away. At the same time, it was still just two days after the election, one day since the campaign into which we had thrown ourselves for so long had closed its doors, although it was still weeks before the last vote would be counted. I was sapped; I had held on to the secret of the cancer so long that when it came out, almost all my energy went with it. Whatever little was left evaporated when I Googled “metastasis liver cancer prognosis.” But John was a cauldron—restless, wanting to fix it all, knowing he was blocked in every direction. In the next days while we waited for a call back from the doctor or while I read to the children or talked to Cate on the phone (she’d finally gone to New York to start the job she had put off for four months), he would slip upstairs and, in whispered phone conversations, continue the campaign battle. He did it until the doing of it was patently useless, trying all the while to protect me from his frustration and disappointment. I needed, he was certain—and he was certainly right—the power of his optimism. He had to turn himself entirely to the battle in which he could have some effect.