Resilience. Part 1

Resilience.

Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life's Adversities.

by Elizabeth Edwards.

To my parents, Vince and Elizabeth Anania

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The act of looking forward after a setback is a solitary act, as is writing. But it would be wrong to suggest that no one else played a role. In my case, the looking forward was possible-no, necessary-because of my children, Cate, Emma Claire, and Jack and the memory of Wade, I acknowledge not only their importance in writing this book but in allowing me the gift of looking forward in life. It is a gift, but also a learned skill, and I learned it from my parents, Vince and Liz Anania, to whom I dedicate this book.In the writing, I was encouraged and supported by my family, my brother Jay Anania and my sister Nancy Anania, and by my dear friend Glenn Bergenfield.It may seem obligatory to thank one's editor, but in this case it is accurate. Stacy Creamer was with me through a very difficult time and was supportive of every decision I made about writing, not writing, writing. I cannot imagine a finer, more understanding editor.

CHAPTER 1.

1990.

-stood at the sink in an impossibly bright hospital room was.h.i.+ng my face, was.h.i.+ng away the heat that, with the doctor's words, had come rus.h.i.+ng to my face and neck and chest to fill every pore, to gather in the corners of my eyes and to line my lips and thicken my tongue. "He will never walk, his brain is dead," the doctor had said. It still burned. How much cold water would it take to take the hot sting out of those words?

My father lay immobile behind me, a crisp sheet folded neatly across his chest, the crease apparently to be forever perfect above his forever-still form. I had not been able to bear to see him like that any longer, so I had turned away and instead watched my own warped reflection in the metal mirror that seemed to mimic the distortions within me. The doctor's words were all I could hear inside my head, but they were too immense, too life-changing to stay in my head. They spilled out and filled the room, bouncing back from the walls and the metal me in the mirror, and with every echo a new torment: He will not walk. His brain is dead. He will not walk. His brain is dead He will not walk. His brain is dead. He will not walk. His brain is dead. ... I kept cupping water to my face, unable to cool the heat but equally unable to stop trying.

The day before, this solid man who would be seventy in four days, who still had cannonb.a.l.l.s for shoulders and the calf muscles of a twenty-five-year-old fullback, had fallen over while eating a salad for dinner. He had played tennis in the morning and had gone biking in the afternoon. He came in to dinner after planting spring flowers in the yard. Every minute of his day was a test of his body, a test he pa.s.sed over and over again. And then, with no warning, a ma.s.sive stroke, and he could not move from the floor. I was forty years old, and I had never seen him fail at a single physical thing he had tried to do. Not once in forty years.

I closed my eyes as I cupped the water, and the images of my well father, strong and full of life, gathered on top of one another. Eating a hot pepper from his garden in Naples and thinking it a green pepper, his face goes flush, tears fill his eyes, his gla.s.ses fog up, but he chews on. And then, grinning at his astonished family, he gets up and picks another. The awestruck faces of the enlisted men he commanded in j.a.pan when he came out of the pool into which they had thrown him and, with his soaking wet fight suit clinging to him, they saw his supremely muscled form outlined. News that he had made captain had come in while he was on an early-morning fight, so when he stepped out of the jet in his fight suit, his squadron had rallied around him cheering and had thrown him into the pool in giddy celebration. I always suspected that the vision of him earned him a respect from those enlisted men that morning that the additional stripe on his sleeve would not have won him.

I had sat with him at Bethesda Naval Hospital when he had four discs in his spine fused, the final remedy two decades after his back was injured when the wheels on the jet he was getting ready to pilot collapsed beneath the plane on the tarmac. He should have been groggy and still in the hours after recovery, but he was smiling at everyone, and teasing the nurses by pretending to smoke an endless series of imaginary cigarettes. Within weeks, he was back on his bicycle, and within months, he was back on the tennis court. There was the time his nose was flattened in college in a football game. The doctors said it was so crushed that he could choose whatever shape he wanted since they were starting from scratch. So he chose the shape he had had before. And he took up lacrosse, and he was an all-American his first year. He used to lift women up-my mother and her friends-and twirl them head over heels like batons. Proper women in 1950s s.h.i.+rtwaists ignored the fact that their garter belts had been on display, and they giggled to be treated as girls again. He carried my brother, my sister, and me all at once on his wide shoulders upstairs to bed when we were youngsters as if we were stuffed animals. Now, impossibly, he lay dying behind me, unable to move, unable to speak.

The doctor had called us into the room to tell us. My sister sat with her arm around my mother. My brother sat holding our father's hand. I stood at the foot of the bed, my eyes on my father's still face, not on the doctor I had never seen before. Each of us cried, not in a wailing way, but in low, lonely moans. The doctor talked on about the effect of the stroke on the blood flow to his brain, and we each half-listened, for truthfully nothing after "his brain is dead" could penetrate. Tracks of silent tears covered all of our cheeks. When the doctor left, we all hugged one another, grieving our collective loss and our individual ones, then everyone else left the room. I had to tell my children, ten-year-old Wade and eight-year-old Cate, where they waited in the hall with their father. And I had to wash my face before I would tell them.

I could clean the tear tracks, but the heat would not go away. I gave up and turned to leave and face the children. As I turned, I looked again at my father, but now he was looking back. He was still immobile, his huge bulk still pinned beneath the tight sheets, but his eyes were open. Not just open but wide dishes of panic. He could not speak. And yet he did. We stood staring at one another-I haven't any idea how long-and he said, or his eyes said, I am here. I am not dead. I am here. I want to live. I am here. I am not dead. I am here. I want to live. I answered back in words. "Don't worry," I said. "We know. We are not giving up on you." And I marched past my family to the nurses' station and told them that that doctor was not allowed back into my father's room under any circ.u.mstances. I answered back in words. "Don't worry," I said. "We know. We are not giving up on you." And I marched past my family to the nurses' station and told them that that doctor was not allowed back into my father's room under any circ.u.mstances.

This was April 18, 1990. We buried my father in April of 2008. Oh, his body kept failing him, little by little until the last of him slipped away eighteen years later. But in between he learned to drive again (in a fairly frightening fas.h.i.+on), and drove until his response time was demonstrably too slow and we could not let him drive any longer. He talked again, in an odd and sometimes inappropriately scatalogical way-"the b.o.o.bs are boiling"-but still making people smile, until he no longer could talk easily, and losing confidence in his voice, he started talking again with his eyes. He danced with my mother for nearly a dozen more years. He never biked or played tennis again, but he traveled. He went to Poland and Spain, he took a cruise and watched the whales off the Alaskan coast. He voted for his son-in-law for vice president of the United States. And he was there to bury his oldest grandson-my first-born. But he was also there to hold four more grandchildren-Ty and Louis and Emma Claire and Jack-and even two great-grandchildren-Anna and Zachary-who were born after his stroke. In the end, he was surrounded by family-his wife of nearly sixty years, his children and grandchildren, his sister and her children-when finally, of his own will, he quit fighting and let go.

There were times in the eighteen years more that he lived when he wanted to give up, when he didn't want to keep fighting to drive or to dance or to live. I remember sitting with him once after my son Wade died. We were going through a workbook his rehabilitation therapist had a.s.signed him. I would read; he would answer questions. He got them right at first, and then he started to miss them, a few at first and then all of them. His frustration mounted, and he finally said with awkward resignation that he was a burden he promised himself he would never be and he would just as soon die. I was stunned and angry. I wanted him to live so badly; how could he not want it, too? If you could have Wade back, I asked, but only in your exact condition, no better, would you take him? He raised his head a little, and his deep brown eyes met mine. He nodded. Then you understand how we feel. We know it is not perfect, but nothing really ever is. I reached for his hand and told him you are here, and that is what I want. And, I added, if you think this is getting you out of finis.h.i.+ng this a.s.signment, you are wrong. He opened his mouth. It was not the wide smile I remembered, but the gap between his two front teeth showed, and that was smile enough for me.

There is nothing about resilience that I can say that my father did not first utter silently in eighteen years of living inside a two-dimensional cutout of himself. From the first moment when he forced open his eyes to tell me that he was alive, through all the setbacks of a body on which he had relied that subsequently failed him little by little, he held on to whatever he had, however meager it was. He managed somehow to turn whatever he held on to into precisely what he needed to survive. When in the first year he had the audacity to tell the rehabilitation counselor that he wanted to drive, or when in the eighth year he danced with my mother, or when in year sixteen he unabashedly flirted with the aide at the a.s.sisted-living center, he was saying to the world what he said to me in 1990: I understand that it will not be all I crave, but I want to live. And so he did. When he could no longer drive himself, he wanted to walk. When he could no longer walk himself, he wanted a wheelchair that he could manage himself. He kept narrowing his life and his expectations to what he had left, and in doing so-no matter how small his world-he always reflected the sheer majesty of living.

Too many times I have had to use my father's strength-or my mother's grace as she stood beside him-as a touchstone. I suspect we each have someone like him, someone whose personal courage in the face of impossible odds inspires us to do something we thought we could not do, who reminds us that what seems like a mountain in front of us can in fact be climbed. My father was an imperfect man in many ways, but maybe it was better that he was imperfect and that I knew he was, for I learned that perfection was not a requirement of resilience. This was Dad, and if he could decide to live, so could I.

CHAPTER 2.

Introduction.

-he culture of celebrity informs our lives in such a way that we seem to know much too much about someone's life until-pop!-we know nothing at all. Ultimately interest wanes, and the media's laser focus moves on to other subject-targets. It was not so long ago that Lee At.w.a.ter changed politics in America, and some-as I-would say not in a positive way. But ask his name on the street and you may not find a single person who knows it. A friend of mine asked his college cla.s.s how many knew something about Brigitte Bardot, and they had never heard of her at all. Some celebrities remain familiar through the decades. The appet.i.te for tales about John F. Kennedy, for example, never seems sated. And yet do we really understand who he was?

Judas Iscariot has remained infamous through the centuries for his betrayal of Jesus. Yet I am betting there is another biblical character, someone once almost as notorious as Judas, who is now much less widely known. Just as the words traitor traitor and and Judas Judas became synonymous, there was a time when became synonymous, there was a time when Ananias Ananias and and liar liar were near synonyms, too. In the Acts of the Apostles, Ananias lied to Jesus about his money so he would not have to give as much to the church. The story was once so renowned that, not so long ago, when someone wanted to brand President Theodore Roosevelt as a liar, he simply said he was a member of the Ananias Club. were near synonyms, too. In the Acts of the Apostles, Ananias lied to Jesus about his money so he would not have to give as much to the church. The story was once so renowned that, not so long ago, when someone wanted to brand President Theodore Roosevelt as a liar, he simply said he was a member of the Ananias Club.

Few today, except those who fill in Will Shortz's crossword puzzles, would know that Ananias Ananias is still a common clue for the four-letter entry is still a common clue for the four-letter entry liar. liar. (Since my maiden name is Anania, I do not consider this an entirely unfortunate lapse in our national attention span. My father appeared before the House Armed Services Committee in 1958, and South Carolina congressman Mendel Rivers asked him, since his last name was Anania, if his word was to be trusted.) But the ebb and flow of celebrity constantly remind me that whatever fortunes and calamities have blessed or befallen me, and however they have given me some notoriety, that notoriety will be-if I am lucky-fleeting. (Since my maiden name is Anania, I do not consider this an entirely unfortunate lapse in our national attention span. My father appeared before the House Armed Services Committee in 1958, and South Carolina congressman Mendel Rivers asked him, since his last name was Anania, if his word was to be trusted.) But the ebb and flow of celebrity constantly remind me that whatever fortunes and calamities have blessed or befallen me, and however they have given me some notoriety, that notoriety will be-if I am lucky-fleeting.

For those who know me well, I suppose you can skip forward, but for the rest of you, I am Elizabeth and I have lived an extraordinary life in nearly every sense of the word.

I was born in 1949, the daughter of a Navy pilot and his wife, who was also the daughter of a Navy pilot. My brother and my sister were born in 1950 and 1951, and the troop of us crossed the globe a half-dozen times following my father so he could fly and spy and fight in wars. I watched my friends bury their pilot fathers; I came perilously close to burying my own father; I watched some of my friends march off to wars in which they would die. I grew up largely without American television or the emergence of the shopping mall, and I listened, on Armed Forces Radio, more to Rosemary Clooney and Jeri Southern than to Ricky Nelson and Elvis Presley, all because I spent most of my growing-up years in j.a.pan.

Maybe it is because I remember those days with Nat King Cole in the background as so idyllic that I had a notion that a magical life was built around music that sounded like Armed Forces Radio. At ten, I could paint a fantasy life-and I did-based on the music to which I listened and on the books I read. And at sixteen, I did the same thing. The books changed, but the music did not. My internal world was set to song.

I lived beside a war, the Vietnam War, but even then I romanticized the soldiers, their girls back home, and I had the music of World War I and World War II from which to choose. I lived in j.a.pan at the time and Armed Forces Radio didn't play any antiwar songs. On my radio it was "I'll Be Seeing You" and "The White Cliffs of Dover" and "It's Been a Long, Long Time." They all turned out the same: Never thought that you would be standing here so close to me. There's so many things that I should say, but words can wait until some other day. Just kiss me once, then kiss me twice, then kiss me once again. It's been a long, long time Never thought that you would be standing here so close to me. There's so many things that I should say, but words can wait until some other day. Just kiss me once, then kiss me twice, then kiss me once again. It's been a long, long time.

And I thought I was living that magical life when I went to college at the end of an era when young men in suits picked up their dates at the train station and carried their suitcase to an approved house of a matronly hostess in charge, presumably, of the girl's chast.i.ty for the weekend, where witty men and clever women sat in smoky jazz bars and talked only of important things, where no one washed dishes alone or ate alone, where people sang around a piano at Christmas. I was living a life I had heard and read of, with Benny Goodman in the background, where handsome men caressed pretty women with a pa.s.sion that must be reserved for those who did not know if they would ever kiss again. The fact that it never was a reality did not mean it wasn't my chosen reality. I wanted that old-fas.h.i.+oned world of private pa.s.sion and unadorned beauty and a life constructed around things of purity and purpose. I wanted it in college and in law school and for most of my growing-up years. I hadn't grown up in a world in which these romantic images were corrupted in any way. Until they were. Even when I had to accept that the soldiers were not coming home to pigtailed sweethearts on country lanes, that the color of your skin gave you a whole different, less hospitable country, that there was real hards.h.i.+p and pain everywhere, I still wanted to escape to that fantasy when I could. My expectations for life were based on that fantasy.

When I was faced with a less pleasant reality, as when I read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood In Cold Blood at sixteen, I simply concluded it was an aberration, the ugliness of criminal minds imposed on the beauty of the idyllic home. John Updike's people, falling apart from lack of character, were a curiosity. My people belonged to Henry James, and they fell away from joy or grace because of the splendor of their characters. I thought in song. When I couldn't think in song, I could pull out the lyrics book I had been constructing since college. First a hundred songs, then a thousand, now five thousand, and there I could find the soundtrack I preferred for my life. In song, as in Henry James's novels, faults all turned out to be virtues, as if written by Sammy Cahn: at sixteen, I simply concluded it was an aberration, the ugliness of criminal minds imposed on the beauty of the idyllic home. John Updike's people, falling apart from lack of character, were a curiosity. My people belonged to Henry James, and they fell away from joy or grace because of the splendor of their characters. I thought in song. When I couldn't think in song, I could pull out the lyrics book I had been constructing since college. First a hundred songs, then a thousand, now five thousand, and there I could find the soundtrack I preferred for my life. In song, as in Henry James's novels, faults all turned out to be virtues, as if written by Sammy Cahn: I'm irresponsibly mad for you. I'm irresponsibly mad for you. I had, I have to say, a long, long way to fall when the fall finally came. I had, I have to say, a long, long way to fall when the fall finally came.

I married my law school sweetheart, John, on a hot summer day in North Carolina, and we walked through life in a carefree way. We really did have the two children, a picturesque two-story white frame house, the golden retriever, and the station wagon. My husband made a name for himself as a lawyer; I slipped back into a hybrid life of being the lawyer I was supposed to be and the mother I needed to be. When things were not right, well, we just fixed them, in our lives, in the lives of others. Sometimes money could fix a problem; sometimes it was simply a matter of being wise enough to know which string to pull. But we always fixed what needed to be fixed and our ride together had its own music. Our house became the place where life happened; there were young people gathered in the kitchen; there was a basketball game on the cement court behind the house. It seemed that whatever we had done, we had done right.

It would have been easy for life to have played itself out from that kitchen, and I don't know that, if it had, it would have occurred to me that I had never taken in the fullest breath I could. It had been diaphragmatic breathing, matching my inhaling and exhaling to some rhythm I wanted, some song that fit my life at the time, or I thought did. I had never had to find my own rhythm, never needed to search for my own cadence. If the music's cadence was drowned out, it was usually by John's or the children's, and I walked to that. When I needed my own, I would fall back into Jerome Kern. For all of the times that followed those carefree days in my kitchen, for all of the pain I endured, at least I learned in the years that followed what it meant to breathe for myself, and I learned, too, what it meant to scream.

Wade, my firstborn, died on April 4, 1996. An April wind crossed the tobacco fields of eastern North Carolina and pushed the car of which he was so very proud from the road. He was sixteen, and maybe it would not have mattered how old he was, but he did not know how to get it back on the road without flipping it. So it flipped. And flipped, and flipped, until all of the life of the boy was pressed from him. And from me.

I move on now, but I will be back. I always come back to Wade. But I cannot tell the rest of the story if I let myself fall into him now.

Our surviving family held together, or rather we were held together by an extraordinary fourteen-year-old girl, our daughter Cate, who managed to be what we needed and to allow us to look for new paths, paths that she knew would further upset her life, but she kept saying yes. Yes, go back to work, Dad. Yes, try to have another child. Yes, run for the U.S. Senate if that is what you want. It wasn't perfect; she was a teenage girl who had been feeling her budding wings. But given the loss of Wade, she knew it wasn't the time, so she placed her own dreams in a box and put them away for a time.

So we had that one new child, Emma Claire, and then another, Jack, and John did win the Senate seat, so soon it was sounds other than those of teenage boys in our Raleigh kitchen. Life was changing quickly. Wade died in 1996. John won the Senate seat in 1998, the year Emma Claire was born. Cate graduated from high school three weeks after Jack was born in 2000. By the fall of 2000, that kitchen in Raleigh was empty. Cate was off to college and to a life blessedly away from all the pain that had been-and from the turmoil that was to come. The remaining four of us were in a s.p.a.cious home in Was.h.i.+ngton. Since I had lived a life of being uprooted, I should have been used to it enough to move to Was.h.i.+ngton without a look back. But this time I was leaving the house in which I had expected to die, and I was leaving Wade's grave to live 250 miles away. And it wasn't so often our kitchen in Raleigh anymore in which we gathered but a more empty kitchen in Was.h.i.+ngton. We slept in the Raleigh house less and less often, and sometimes saw our dear friends back there only at Christmas. I had to make special trips to change the plantings at Wade's grave. It took me some time to get my bearings.

The younger children, the picture of resilience, grew and thrived in a series of homes in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., and then, when my husband decided to run for the nomination for president and then as the nominee for vice president, in a series of hotel rooms and in the homes of generous strangers.

And except for missing Wade and regretting what he had lost, life had a good cadence again, an odd public cadence but a rhythm we all learned.

If you really did not know me then, you would need to know only that I was moderately well-liked by the press for being unscripted (and unscriptable, if that can be b.a.s.t.a.r.dized into a word) and candid. I was reasonably well-liked by the Democrats for being well-informed and accessible, an actual mother and not a mother figure. I was even a favorite of opposing extremists because I was chubby enough to be made fun of and unschooled enough politically to say something now and again that they could take out of context and use as fodder. Then the election of 2004 ended, the Democrats, John Kerry and my husband, who should have won given all the issues, in fact lost, and on the very next day I confirmed a diagnosis I had suspected in the weeks before the election: I had breast cancer. Even the opposition laid down their arms.

The treatment was not easy, but, honestly, after Wade's death, I could do it. There were days when it was hard, but I could fight and that was all I needed. It is what I hadn't had with Wade: a chance to fight. I remember telling my father, his right hand clinched perpetually half-open, that if Wade was alive he would fight. I told myself the same thing, and everything after that was easier. John sat with me in chemotherapies, often reading as I slept or calling people to thank them for their help in the election. And he would bring me dinner in bed when I didn't want to climb the steps of our four-story Was.h.i.+ngton house again. And by the end of my treatments we had moved back to North Carolina, first to the house that had been Wade's home, and then to a rental house in Chapel Hill from which we watched our new home being built. Finally, we moved into that new family home on an old tobacco farm outside Chapel Hill, idyllic and peaceful with promises of a long life as an old couple with children who were still impossibly young.

That was the story from my side. John thought still about running for president again. He traveled, giving speeches, talking of poverty, about which he and I care deeply, raising money for efforts to increase the minimum wage and start antipoverty programs. I stayed home and wrote a book about the journey on which we had found ourselves over the previous decade. The children started public school. And, without my knowing, a woman who spotted my husband one afternoon in the restaurant bar of the hotel in which he was staying hung around outside the hotel for a couple of hours until he returned from a dinner and introduced herself by saying, "You are so hot."

There is a Dorothy Parker poem of which I am fond that captures the flow of my life.

The Red DressI always saw, I always saidIf I were grown and free,I'd have a gown of reddest redAs fine as you could see,To wear out walking, sleek and slow,Upon a Summer day,And there'd be one to see me soAnd flip the world away.And he would be a gallant one,With stars behind his eyes,And hair like metal in the sun,And lips too warm for lies.I always saw us, gay and good,High honored in the town.Now I am grown to womanhood....I have the silly gown.

CHAPTER 3.

1965.

-y father was wearing his greens, a foresty olive uniform with a sewn-down belt on the jacket. Like the music I loved, it was a throwback. In the Navy, only aviators wore the uniform. I loved the feel of it, and because it didn't wrinkle or stain like his dress whites, I could hug him hard and feel him. And this day, an early-fall day in 1965, I needed to touch him. I was sixteen years old and he was going to Vietnam. On the day he was to leave, he stood near the end of the low bleachers on the visitors' side of the Chofu High School football field, watching me cheer in my first game as a cheerleader.

And then his duffle bags were in the car, where my mother, my brother, and my sister waited for him. He would say good-bye to me at halftime, and they would drive him to Tachikawa Air Base, and he would fly to Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Vietnam. The rest of us would go home to our house at Camp Zama, j.a.pan, and wait until his tour of duty was over or until he was injured or until a chaplain knocked on our door and told us he had been killed. Then we could go back to the States, with him or without him. I was lucky; a year later, we went home with him.

He had been to war before-once, in World War II before he and my mother met, and again, in Korea when I was a youngster. I was in elementary school when he was a reconnaissance pilot during the Cold War, when his plane was shot at, likely by North Korean MiG fighter planes in a conflict a bit unreal for a nine-year-old. War was what the base children played to fill a summer-boys against girls-and the cold war cost some of those children their parents, but as real as the images are to me even today of the memorial services for lost pilots and crews, the real costs of that war were an abstraction.

But the Vietnam War wasn't an abstraction to me. We had no television in j.a.pan, where Dad was stationed before Vietnam, but the ways we did get news-the Stars and Stripes Stars and Stripes military newspaper and Armed Forces Radio-were blanketed in this war. No detail was too small for the most interested of audiences. The base on which we lived was the home base for a military hospital nearby to which the Army first brought wounded soldiers from Vietnam, and we would see them at the hospital and, sometimes as they readied to return to war, on base. A quiet, handsome young man, not much older than I, maneuvering in a wheelchair, his one remaining leg in a cast. The war. The bandaged fellow walking with him, with features too large for his face and raw meaty scars across his neck, who never stopped talking. The war. The boy across the table who looked a little like my lab partner in chemistry but who could not look you in the eye. Rows of beds, and a seemingly endless line of casualties, most of whom looked like my brother, my friends. military newspaper and Armed Forces Radio-were blanketed in this war. No detail was too small for the most interested of audiences. The base on which we lived was the home base for a military hospital nearby to which the Army first brought wounded soldiers from Vietnam, and we would see them at the hospital and, sometimes as they readied to return to war, on base. A quiet, handsome young man, not much older than I, maneuvering in a wheelchair, his one remaining leg in a cast. The war. The bandaged fellow walking with him, with features too large for his face and raw meaty scars across his neck, who never stopped talking. The war. The boy across the table who looked a little like my lab partner in chemistry but who could not look you in the eye. Rows of beds, and a seemingly endless line of casualties, most of whom looked like my brother, my friends.

We would see the wounded, at the Depot, the hospital at Sagami-Ono where the most physically able would sit with a teenage volunteer, or in my case a teenage cheerleader, intended to be a moment of normalcy in a life turned upside down. They might have talked to some of my cla.s.smates about what happened to them in the war, what they saw, but when I would see them across the table at the hospital, they all talked about the same thing: going home. Even if they knew they would be headed back to combat, all they wanted to talk about was home. And the home they talked about was the home they left-left when they had two legs, left without shrapnel scars across their chest and neck, left before the images of war that would scar the places where the doctors couldn't reach. That's the home they craved. The one before.

Men like my father have been going off to war for all of recorded time. And all of them have come back from war changed some, and some have come back almost different men. In the wars of early civilization it was called a trembling; later it was sh.e.l.l shock, then battle fatigue; finally, in the 1970s, we gave it a medical name-post-traumatic stress disorder. All were a form of war neuroses, but whatever the name, many of those men who went to war as courageous soldiers came home with the war still inside them. Courageous or cowardly, strong or weak, there was no predicting it. A solder blinded at the Battle of Marathon when he witnessed the warrior to his side struck dead. An infantryman who developed a facial tic after stabbing an enemy soldier in the face with a bayonet. Physical manifestations of a psychological wound. A Vietnam veteran awaking in a sweat with a half-remembered horror played out in the darkness. And it is repeated war after war. The Greatest Generation from World War II was not simply too humble to take credit for their accomplishments in battle (though they were often that), they were also good men too stunned that what they had seen was now part of their own life story. The son of a dairyman being asked to shoot young German boys, his own age, as they emerged wounded from a foxhole. They watched men with whom they had eaten dinner the night before be blown into unidentifiable pieces. Maybe if they never said it out loud, it would not be so. But it was so, and too many died years after the war with their stories silently eating at them from the inside. Life Life magazine described Tom Lea's painting of a tormented World War II marine as "the two thousand yard stare," looking out at nothing at all, unable to focus on the world that was close enough to touch. magazine described Tom Lea's painting of a tormented World War II marine as "the two thousand yard stare," looking out at nothing at all, unable to focus on the world that was close enough to touch.

Some from Vietnam tried to quiet the war within with drugs or alcohol. They had left for war as young men who made Mother's Day cards and helped their grandfathers bring in firewood, who tried three times to call that girl in their biology cla.s.s before getting the courage even to say h.e.l.lo. They had served because they were called or because they felt a duty or because they had nowhere else to go. They left as young men and came back as old men. They were, as are all soldiers from chess boards to desert battlefields, actors in a play gone awry, when all the ways in which we avoid unspeakable inhumanity to one another have failed. Only, it wasn't just knocking over someone's knight. It wasn't figurative at all. They witnessed and lived the worst horrors that man can perpetrate on man. It must be impossible to go back to the spirit of the boy making that Mother's Day card. And some did not, and the mothers and wives and brothers and fathers recognized only the physical man who returned from war.

Ajax went off to the Trojan War and came back a still man, half-empty. Near the end of this terrible war, Ajax expected an honor befitting his heroics, but the honor went elsewhere, and Ajax went mad. Perhaps the honor, had it come, might have forestalled the madness; perhaps nothing would have warded it off. But Ajax's madness played out as he committed atrocities against animals as if they were human enemies. His story is tragic, but the universality of it is made very clear by Tecmessa, the wife to whom he returns in Sophocles' play. He is forever changed by war and by his recognition of what he is capable of doing. She begs for help for him, "He used to grieve but never wail aloud-just a deep moan, like from a lowing bull. But now, overwhelmed, he takes no food, no drink, sprawled in silence." His body had returned to her. She wondered when the rest would return. The answer was never. Tecmessa begs for someone to lift this burden from her husband, but it does not happen, cannot happen. Ajax is someone else now, and despairing his new monstrous self, he eventually takes his own life.

Blame is not an issue here, except perhaps in some geopolitical sense. But in terms of these lives, Ajax has not failed, the marine with the two-thousand-yard stare is not too weak, and the son of the dairyman is not a monster. It is war-brutality beyond what we can reasonably absorb-that is to blame.

Wives from Tecmessa's day until now have wished that they could say the thing that would let their men go back to "before," that would put everything back where it belonged, where the men they loved were not sprawled in silence or off someplace two thousand yards away. I know, as these wives know, that wis.h.i.+ng will not return life to "before." "Before" is forever gone.

When my son Wade died, I spent so many days or weeks or months trying to find a way to make it not so, to have him live. The American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay writes of this desire in her lovely poem "Interim": "How easily could G.o.d, if He so willed, set back the world a little turn or two! Correct its griefs, and bring its joys again!" That's all we want. A little turn or two. And Wade is alive, and the cancer is gone, and my husband turns away from the ludicrous words "You are so hot." Just a turn and all these things can go away and we can go back to having a freckled son. Just a turn and the ninety-some years that my grandmothers lived will be mine, too. Just a turn and the misery of having your past and your future taken away by something so unpleasant as a woman with nothing but idle time to spend hanging around outside fancy hotels would be avoided.

But we cannot, they cannot turn back. This is the life we have now, and the only way to find peace, the only way to be resilient when these landmines explode beneath your foundation, is first to accept that there is a new reality. The life the army wife knew before her husband went to war, the life of the patient before the word "terminal" was said aloud, the life of the mother who sat reading by her son's bed and not his grave, these lives no longer exist and the more we cling to the hope that these old lives might come back, the more we set ourselves up for unending discontent.

Each time I fell into a chasm-my son's death or a tumor in my breast or an unwelcome woman in my life-I had to accept that the planet had taken a few turns and I could not turn it back. My life was and would always be different, and it would be less than I hoped it would be. Each time, there was a new life, a new story. And the less time I spent trying to pretend that Wade was alive or that my life would be just as long or that my marriage would be as magical, the longer I clung to the hope that my old life might come back, the more I set myself up for unending discontent. In time, I learned that I was starting a new story. I write these words as if that is the beginning and end of what I did, but it is only a small slice of the middle, a place that is hard to reach and, in reaching it, only a stepping-off place for finding or creating a new life with our new reality. Each time I got knocked down, it took me some time just to get to acceptance, and in each case, that was only part of the way home.

We all want a personal story line with a happy ending, understanding that in some abstract way it has to be punctuated periodically by some grief and heartache. Oh my goodness, did I want it. I was the heroine in every book; I was the poet; I was the singer or the one to whom every song was sung. I was, by any measure, ridiculous in the way I insisted that my life would be some idealized story, unachievable not only in life but in anything but the most saccharin of fiction. And in my story, the inevitable griefs could not be permanent and the unavoidable heartaches had to be curable by a corrected misunderstanding or by some perfect tenderness that thoroughly erases all pain. We so desperately want a map that lays out in serene pastels the paths our lives are supposed to take that we create them, we gravitate to them, we embrace and internalize them, all to no good end, for as my friend Gordon Livingston says, when the map does not comport with the ground, the map is wrong. In my life, the map has almost always been wrong.

We will each have hards.h.i.+ps that are more difficult than we imagined we could ever face. I have cancer. It consumes my life in ways I cannot control. Long after my initial treatments, my hands and feet are still numb, the general numbness disturbed only by a tight and constant tingling. My hair, once perhaps the most reliable of my features, is thin and spa.r.s.e, and I see no real prospect of that changing. My schedule is now and always will be determined by infusion appointments and MRIs. Every Christmas is my last well Christmas, or it could be.

- When the Maytag plant closed in Newton, Iowa, in October 2007, the last of the four thousand workers who had once worked for Maytag in Newton, whose parents and grandparents had worked for Maytag, left the plant that had been the center of life in Newton for 114 years. The plant was known as a place where everyone was family. When there was a death or a divorce, they all shared the pain. When someone's son went off to war, all their sons were leaving and they grieved and worried as one. And when there were good days, they would play softball or have water fights in the summer or work all night when they were snowed in, as they were in the winter of 1973. So ingrained was their job with their community and their sense of being that they called themselves Maytagers. It was who they were, and then, because of global economic forces or because of the notion of an executive who did not know them or the willingness of someone half a world away to work for wages that could not feed you in Newton, Iowa, it all ended. Some of them could see it coming, like a malignancy, but they didn't know when it would kill the Maytager in them. All they knew is that one day it would and there was nothing they could do about it.

That last day, some of the Maytagers unlaced their work boots, placed them neatly side by side, and walked to their cars in their socks, their boots symbolizing what they were leaving behind, the part that could not come with them on the next part of their journey. The boots would be now-and for as long as Maytag could stand the image-lined up together by the plant door as the Maytagers once had been. It was, in a sense, like they had left the map of what their life was supposed to be at the place where the map no longer comported with the ground. The gesture was sad and angry and beautiful. The Maytagers mostly got other jobs, some better, some worse, but maybe none with the magic of history and family they had once had. And Newton got a racetrack and other employers, and now living in Newton is still good, but it is different. The longer a Maytager sat pining for what he had lost, the more lost he became. Sometimes we have to give ourselves s.p.a.ce to grieve what we have lost: a person, a way of life, a dream. But at some point we have to stand up and say, this is my new life and in this life I need a new job.

I suppose that in real life, we have to distinguish between those catastrophes we can repair and those that require us to face a new reality. John and I used to be "fixers." If there was a problem, we would put all our energy behind fixing it, for ourselves or our families or friends, even for children who played on the sports teams we coached. No problem was too small or too large. If you work hard enough you can fix anything-or so we thought. And not just "could"-we had to. We were, we believed, obligated to right things, and so we did. And then Wade died, and we could not control the very most important thing in our lives. Accepting that this catastrophe was not vulnerable to our will was nearly impossible. Finding ways to make the erasure of this boy not so complete was all we could accomplish now. A new reality, considerably less good than the one we had before he died.

Eight years later, I had arranged my life around my new story. It would always be a central fact of my life that I was the mother of a dead boy, but it was not the only fact. My husband was in the United States Senate, my oldest daughter was in college, and I was sufficiently healthy to have had two more children. But not healthy enough. In 2004, I found out I had cancer. I determined to be a model patient so that breast cancer would just be a chapter in my new Wade-less life. And for a while it seemed to have worked; the treatments yielded what looked like a good result. But less than three years later, the cancer came back. This time it was incurable. No amount of being the obedient patient was going to change that. I could not control my own body. I still do what the doctors tell me to do. I still hope, perhaps without reason, that if I am very, very good, I will get to live and one day watch my youngest graduate from high school and one day hold my grandchild. Despite my hopes I understand that rogue cells inside my body have more control over my fate than I have. My new reality.

Last year my husband told me of an indiscretion, and my sense of what I meant to the people around me was, to put it lightly, shaken. We had, I believed, a great love story, bound as we were by triumph and defeat, by exhilarating achievement and shattering grief. We had walked side by side for three decades and in my foolish dreams would walk side by side, hand in hand, for three more. But even if my illness somehow allows me those days, it will by necessity be different because, at the very least, I am a different person now. I was not wounded, not afraid, not uncertain before, and now I always will be. He can try to treat the wound, and he has tried. He can try to make me less afraid, and he has tried. But I am now a different person. I am the Army wife, too, with a husband I don't quite know, and I have to accept him, if I can, with the new scars-many self-inflicted-which he now bears. The way we were is no longer the way we can be. A new reality. Maybe a new life.

Let's start with the unavoidable fact: If I had special knowledge about how to avoid adversities, about how to spot the pitfalls of life, I would spot them, I would avoid them, and I would share how it is I have managed that. I do not. I have a lot of experience in getting up after I have been knocked down, but clearly, I do not know anything at all about avoidance. We all tumble and fall. I certainly have, but in truth it is going to happen, in some degree, to all of us. Oh, maybe everyone we care about will live to attend our funerals. Maybe disease will never make you afraid of a curling iron burn. Maybe everyone whom you love and who loves you will be loyal to you in every way for every day of your life. Or maybe not.

CHAPTER 4.

Tos.h.i.+ko.

-os.h.i.+ko placed the samisen in front of me. My sister Nancy and I were kneeling on the floor of our quarters on the Marine Corps Air Facility at Iwakuni, j.a.pan. Tos.h.i.+ko was kneeling in front of us. Tos.h.i.+ko had promised that when I was ready I could learn to play the instrument. And here it was in front of me. The body was a little less wide than long, slightly larger than a banjo. The neck was polished sandalwood. Just three strings, one thicker than the next, stretched from the neck over a buffalo horn bridge to the catskin-covered body. It was simple and beautiful. Next to the samisen she placed a plectrum, or pick. It was sandalwood with ivory at the wide end, and nearly eight inches long. I reached to touch it, but Tos.h.i.+ko's hand reached mine before mine reached the plectrum. Her motion told me to be patient, and as if to show me how, she sat perfectly still for what seemed like five minutes to a nine-year-old girl.

Patience was something at which Tos.h.i.+ko excelled. She had left her home in Hiros.h.i.+ma when she was ten years old, about the age I was when she first placed the samisen before me. She traveled to Kyoto, to the narrow streets of the Gion Kobu district, to begin her training as a geisha. Someone, perhaps her mother, knew that the ten-year-old would grow to be a beautiful woman, with a serene face and delicate features. And knew, too, that these gifts of beauty, serenity, and delicacy could make her a sought-after geisha. The first months in training would be a disappointment, surely, as she served as a maid in the household in which she lived. The most tedious ch.o.r.es would be saved for her, a test of her determination, her work ethic. She studied dance and art and the samisen in the morning, worked in the household in the day, and attended to a geisha returning from a night's work sometimes into the early-morning hours. She would have to wait through these months before developing enough skill to become a maiko, an apprentice geisha. But patience was something at which Tos.h.i.+ko excelled.

Tos.h.i.+ko studied in the famous Fujima-Ryu system, one of the most rigorous courses of training, but one that would, with her beauty, allow her to be one of the top geishas. Over the years, she perfected her dance, her samisen playing, her conversational skills. She planned to leave Gion and join her sister in Tokyo as a full-fledged geisha, with the world in front of her, but first she would return home to her parents in Hiros.h.i.+ma. It was a mild August of 1945, an excellent time for travel.

Tos.h.i.+ko had been home for two days when, as she arose, she heard the sound of a general alarm throughout her hometown. There had been alarms before in the industrial city, warnings that American bombers might be approaching, but Hiros.h.i.+ma had largely been spared from any bombings. No one was surprised when shortly later the all-clear sounded. Tos.h.i.+ko had waited for the all-clear before leaving to go to the market. August was the month in which schools were not in session, and Tos.h.i.+ko walked past children working at their family store or playing in the alleyways. She was turned back to look at a stickball game in an alley she pa.s.sed when she was knocked to the ground. It was as if a huge, dense, overwhelming wall of heat had raced down the street and knocked her and everyone around her to the dirt. Or it seemed so, as those like her looked back on it. It was probably hours later that she regained consciousness. Her clothes had been ripped away and her chest and arms were covered with loose charred skin. Her hair was burned away in the back, since she had turned her head to watch the children when the force of the first atomic bomb used in warfare hit her body. She could see only a gray soup of soot and smoke around her, and she could hear the sounds of people moving, wailing, or calling for help. Weakly, she closed her eyes again.

After months of treatment, Tos.h.i.+ko was able to return to a somewhat normal life. But it could never be the life for which she had planned and trained for a decade. Her hair had grown back and her face was largely unscarred, but her chest had literally been blown off. The scars crept nearly up to her neck and would have shown in the open neckline of the fine kimonos she had acquired as a maiko. The burns made her arms look like the arms of a ninety-year-old woman, and the pattern of the kimono she was wearing that morning was, in places, burned into them. Keloids that looked like smooth boils grew in places on the scars. A geisha was the meeting of a beautiful woman with the skills of dance and the arts. A man in conversation with her was to be flattered, not only in words but by the mere presence of this exquisite creature. And Tos.h.i.+ko, to say the least, was no longer exquisite.

The life that she had expected, filled with luxuries, prestige, and stimulation, was not going to be. The skills she had so diligently acquired had little value in her new life. Tos.h.i.+ko did begin to teach dance, but there was not much demand in postwar Hiros.h.i.+ma. The American military base that opened on the site of the j.a.panese air station in Iwakuni provided a new opportunity in the mid-1950s. Young women from Hiros.h.i.+ma found work there as maids and seamstresses in the homes of military families. Tos.h.i.+ko let a friend who worked there tell her employer that she was available to teach j.a.panese dance to the American children who lived there.

My mother heard about Tos.h.i.+ko and contacted her. Would she be willing to teach a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old? Tos.h.i.+ko agreed and began coming each week to our house on the base. It was an hour trip from Tos.h.i.+ko's home in Hiros.h.i.+ma to our home in Iwakuni. She would walk to the train station in Hiros.h.i.+ma, ride to Iwakuni station, and take the bus to the gate near our quarters.

Hiros.h.i.+ma would now always be home to Tos.h.i.+ko. The people of Hiros.h.i.+ma had all been through the horrors of the atomic bomb, and they all wore scars, physical or emotional, as a result. It was, I suppose, the only place where she could now feel at home. In E. Annie Proulx's brilliant novel The s.h.i.+pping News The s.h.i.+pping News, the main character, Quoyle, is a "damp loaf of a body" who is out of place his whole life until he returns to his ancestral home in Killickclaw, Newfoundland, a community inhabited by people as rough around the edges as the harsh landscape. There, he is not out of place; there, the physical or emotional eccentricities that would make the people around him misfits elsewhere are almost unseen. What is visible is their basic decency. Quoyle has found a place where his abnormality is invisible. Tos.h.i.+ko had done the same.

For our first dance lesson, my sister and I dressed in silk kimonos my mother had bought. Mine was red with yellow and white chrysanthemums; Nancy's was orange with blue and white cherry blossoms on it. We each wore red b.u.t.terfly obi belts with pretied obi bows, and on our feet odori tabis, the white cotton socks with clasps and a hard sole worn by j.a.panese dancers, and our new vinyl getas. Mother put our hair up in buns so that we could wear these huge hairpins we had bought at a j.a.panese market. They had a cl.u.s.ter of colored umbrellas from which hung silver-colored spangles. Tos.h.i.+ko came in a blue and white yukata, a cotton kimono, and a simple datejime woven belt as her obi. Even we knew to feel a little foolish. In subsequent lessons, we still wore the silk kimonos and b.u.t.terfly obi belts, as they were all we had, but the hairpins did not reappear.

If our dress seemed outlandish to a woman who had done household ch.o.r.es in her first days of training in dance, she did not show it. In our living room, she showed little reaction or emotion at all. Perhaps it was her training, perhaps it was her nature, or perhaps it was her acceptance that this was now her life, teaching the children of an American military pilot in 1958 the skills she had learned and, because of another American military pilot in 1945, she could never use.

It was not, however, that she was simply gritting her teeth and doing what she needed to live. I have a letter she wrote to my mother, offering to take us to the Iwakuni Bon Odori festival so we could join with j.a.panese children in dance. She offered to teach me to play the samisen and for the first lesson brought her own samisen. And she sat behind me as I tried to play, putting her arms around me more gently than the drape of a robe on your shoulders and showing me where on the instrument my hand should be. In the pauses in the music she would place her hands over mine to still them. There was no written music for the samisen, so the only way to learn was for someone trained in the ancient art to share the music with you. And Tos.h.i.+ko, disfigured by an American bomb, was sharing it with me. It was a gift the value of which I only later understood when Tos.h.i.+ko taught me the notes she had learned in Gion.

Each week, she would share what she had spent a decade learning. She would position our legs so that two awkward American girls could appear, for a moment, graceful. We would fidget, we would fall off the sides of the heeled getas, we would try to make our sister laugh when Tos.h.i.+ko was showing her how to rise from a kneeled position or how to close a dance fan in a single motion. She would pretend she didn't notice when our eyes settled on the scars in the V of the yukata's neckline. She was in all things a picture of patience and dignity.

In the two years that I knew Tos.h.i.+ko, I remember her smiling slightly, her lips closed and the corners of her mouth turning up, while she nodded her head when we accomplished some skill she had been teaching. Aside from that, I do not remember any signs of joy. I never heard her laugh, but I never saw her frown.

After she left that first lesson, Nancy and I asked about the scars we had seen on her arms revealed by the yukata's wide sleeves and on her chest. Mother told us what they were. We had been to Hiros.h.i.+ma; we had seen the devastation. We were not allowed to go to the museum that showed the injuries and the dead, but we heard about it from our friends. And we saw on the streets of Hiros.h.i.+ma the scars of the living. Great keloid mountains of scarring across the face of a young man, an old woman whose wrinkles and scars formed a dense plaid of lines across her cheeks. The story of what really happened in Hiros.h.i.+ma had been kept quiet for a decade, so many of the injured had not gotten needed medical attention. And many of the children who had been born since that August were born with deformities. In some ways, the tale of the living on the streets was, I suspect, more moving than the tale of the dead in the museum.

We do what we can. We make plans and prepare for the life we dream could be. And maybe for some it happens, but it didn't happen for Tos.h.i.+ko. She, like I, salvaged the parts she could and put them together as well as she knew how. There is, I believe, a happy ending to Tos.h.i.+ko's story. She accepted her life as it was. If she bore resentment or hatred, she found a way to bury it, to not let it define the rest of her life. And she found the happiest ending now available to her in the pleasures of a simple life, the dignity of her remarkable civility and the absence of pain. There was a serenity to her acceptance that was n.o.ble and strong and heartbreaking.