Of Pain and Campaigns
The Candidate's Wife Already Knew What It Means to Lose

By Jennifer Frey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 5, 2006

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?

"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.

* * *

"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.

"It's about surviving, I knew that," John says. "But I was concerned whether some of the things she was doing were helping her or hurting."

She emerged slowly. The birth of two more children, Emma Claire (now 8) and Jack (now 6), helped. John ran for the Senate and won. Cate graduated and went off to Princeton. And then came the presidential campaign, which Elizabeth threw herself into.

* * *

The current book tour is about Elizabeth's life, not her husband's. It wasn't timed or written for political purposes -- even the suggestion of that seems to take her aback -- but given that her husband is clearly planning to run in 2008, it does provide a public platform to reacquaint America with the Edwards name and values.

A family appearance (John, Elizabeth and Cate) on Oprah Winfrey's show last week helped bump her book temporarily to No. 2 on Amazon.com. And she confirms what her husband has said; she wants him to run.

"I have tremendous confidence in him," she says, "because I know this man, and I know how principled he is."

Charlie Cook, a political columnist for National Journal, sees John Edwards as the front-runner against Hillary Clinton in the race for the nomination: "He came out of 2004 about as unscathed as is possible for a nominee."

In her book, Edwards writes about the frustration felt in their Boston hotel room on election night, when the pattern of returns changed and her husband was pressed to speak to the mobs of supporters in Copley Square. He didn't want to say anything that made it easier for Bush to declare victory.

From the bedroom, exhausted, Elizabeth -- who had been campaigning with a possible breast cancer diagnosis hanging over her head for nearly two weeks and who had an appointment for a biopsy the next day -- called out to her husband. "We've waited this long; we can wait a little bit longer," she said.

It's the line he used.

* * *

John, Elizabeth says, is the one who took the lead when it came to figuring out her treatment. He took care of her. Of course, she also took care of him.

Back when she had found the lump in Kenosha, when the election was still 12 days away, Elizabeth had convinced herself that it was just a cyst. She'd had one a few years before.

So she told John nothing. "I really felt he didn't need that then," she says.

She did, however, schedule an appointment with her hometown doctor for a week later. At that ultrasound, Elizabeth knew the minute she saw the technician's face that "it was bad."

She immediately called John, who was just returning to Raleigh. There would be no confirmation of cancer until she had a needle biopsy. Should they drop everything? John received reassurances from the doctor that waiting a few more days wouldn't matter. They made plans to do it in Boston the day after the election, and pressed on.

"I looked straight at her -- we were sitting on her little front stoop -- and said, 'Can you really do this?' " McElroy says. " 'You've seen where you have to go and what you have to do in the next few days, can you do this?' And she paused, then said, 'Yeah, I can.' "

Immediately after the diagnosis, Edwards began treatment in Washington. Luckily, the cancer hadn't metastasized. She had chemotherapy, followed by a lumpectomy, followed by radiation. It all lasted seven brutal months, until the end of May 2005. Her joints swelled. She lost her hair. She admits some days she was knocked flat.

"She didn't complain," says former neighbor Chris Downey, who uses the term "life-changing" to describe her friendship with Edwards. Downey, who is the ex-wife of former congressman Tom Downey, says, "I guess if you have adversity, you grow. She's so strong."

* * *

Now happily describing herself as "cancer-free," Edwards recently accepted the Congressional Families Leadership Award at the 14th annual Action for Cancer Awareness Awards luncheon, held on the Hill last week.

"I had melanoma, and it looms large in your life, and it is what you make of it," says Marcelle Leahy, wife of Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).

As the lunch breaks up, Leahy is one of legions who come up to talk to Edwards. Though she has a plane to New Hampshire to catch, Edwards poses for picture after picture, not caring that her makeshift makeup job is fading fast.

Her upcoming schedule is going to be hectic. She isn't fazed in the least. New Hampshire? A chance to catch up with the families who invited her into their living rooms two years ago. Then a quick overnight to stay on Cate's couch in New York, where her daughter is now working. Then back to Chapel Hill to see the kids; then a book tour that takes her to Iowa and Illinois, Georgia, California -- the list goes on.

She's undaunted. Actually, she's happy. No, you never really move on, she explains. Once you lose a child, moving on sounds too much like leaving him behind. But, eventually, with difficulty, you find your way.

This is hers.