Of Pain and Campaigns

The Candidate's Wife Already Knew What It Means to Lose

Elizabeth Edwards, signing her book at Union Station, campaigned not knowing if she had breast cancer. (Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)

She found it in the shower, in one of those interchangeable hotel bathrooms that are a staple of campaign life. It was October 2004, and Elizabeth Edwards was in Kenosha, Wis., stumping for her husband, Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards. She felt the outline of a lump -- so large, how could she have missed it before? -- and, wrapping a towel around herself, called in her close friend Hargrave McElroy to feel it.

McElroy immediately asked how long it had been since Edwards's last mammogram.

"I hated to admit it," Edwards writes in her new memoir, "Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength From Friends and Strangers," "but it had been too long, much too long."

Thirteen days later, the day John Kerry conceded the presidency to George W. Bush -- much to the frustration, Edwards says, of her husband, who wanted to wait until all the votes were counted in Ohio -- Elizabeth's verdict came in as well. Cancer.

For most people, a cancer diagnosis is a life-defining moment, a point that will forever become the dividing line between before and after. It wasn't like that for Edwards. It couldn't be. Her before and after had been frozen, permanently, more than eight years earlier, the day her 16-year-old son, Wade, died in a car accident. Once you lose a child, nothing is ever the same.

* * *

Edwards arrives at Union Station for an interview -- and photographs -- with no makeup on and her hair undone. Her flight out of Raleigh, N.C. (she lives in Chapel Hill) was delayed by an hour. She was supposed to have gone straight to CNN for a taping, where she'd get professionally done up. But that's now postponed, so she's clutching the one see-through plastic bag of toiletries she'd been allowed to take onto the plane.

"Mind if I take this into the bathroom for a minute?" she says, laughing. She emerges moments later, hastily fixed.

Why does this matter? There's no escaping the fact that while Edwards, 57, is currently a woman on a book tour -- she has a book signing tonight at 7 at Olsson's Books & Records on Seventh Street NW -- she is also a woman who might be the first lady someday. And being a potential first lady means living a life of scrutiny. Will you be an asset or an appendage? Do you have your own political ambitions, like Hillary Rodham Clinton? Or are you more like Laura Bush, a consummate helpmate, someone who knowingly married into a political family?

John Edwards describes his wife of 29 years as approachable and smart. She's the kind of person who knows her mailman's life story, who can't check out at the grocery store without striking up a conversation with the person in line behind her. Trained as a lawyer, she's also an astute political wife and supportive partner in her husband's presumptive run for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

"It's exactly who she is," Edwards says, by phone from their home. "She loves people and loves interacting with people. And that, married to the fact that she's about as big a policy wonk as you're going to find. She loves the details. She loves all of it."

So she wants him to run?