Of Pain and Campaigns

"I think that's a fair statement," he says.

What kind of first lady would Edwards be? She says she'd make it a priority to work with military families -- she grew up in one herself, her father a Navy pilot. McElroy says she doesn't have political ambitions of her own -- "she wants it for John," she says -- but both Elizabeth and her husband acknowledge she actively participates in his policy planning discussions.

She also won't be someone who worries about whether the viewing public thinks she looks fat in a particular pair of pants.

This is the other thing to know about Edwards. After her son died, there were a lot of things she stopped worrying about. Like the makeup. Or the comments about her weight. ("People would say I weigh too much, and I weigh too much," she says. "So it's pretty much hard to argue with that!") Or the musings about how, exactly, her relationship with her youthful, handsome John Kennedyesque husband works.

"Oh, and of course, he must have someone on the side, because look at her !" she says, mimicking her critics. "You just have to let it go."

Once you lose a child, your world hinges on the relationships that keep you standing, keep you breathing, and -- eventually -- give you the strength to help someone else stand up and breathe.

Once you lose a child, the fat jokes are, well, a joke.

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"Saving Graces" is a memoir rich with the stories of a woman who has lived, loved and suffered more than any little girl born in Jacksonville, Fla., could ever have imagined. But the chapters Edwards writes about her grief over Wade's death eclipse all else in the book.

"By any unspeakably vast margin there is no part of my life, or any life, that speaks more to what this book is about," she writes. "I found a community that stood by me in the worst of times and allowed me to emerge, eventually, from a place of profound pain."

That community came largely from an online chat group for grief survivors that became Edwards's lifeline. She would stay up almost all night, leaning on others and allowing them to lean on her -- "naked," she writes, "and needing each other's warmth." She went to the cemetery every day for more than two years. She obtained what would have been Wade's school reading list, just as she had in previous years when they would read side by side until he fell asleep. She read every book, most at his graveside.

John admits he worried. His grief, too, was crippling. But he eventually went back to work as a victims' rights lawyer. Cate, their then-14-year-old daughter, slept on two chairs pulled together with an ottoman in her parents' room for two years, but went back to school. Elizabeth never went back to work in a law firm.