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Resilience
Elizabeth Edwards: Song and Sorrows
Remembering the emotional life of this author, attorney and activist.
Posted June 19, 2011
With John Edwards indicted for campaign finance fraud, I find myself remembering his wife and tracing some of the psychological threads of her life.
Elizabeth Edwards (July 3, 1949-December 7, 2010) reports becoming a different person after her first-born son, Lucius Wade, died in 1996 on the way to the beach for spring break when a wind blew across eastern North Carolina and flipped over his Jeep. Edwards sat graveside every day for two years praying, conversing, reading aloud from the Bible, from Wade's SAT scores, and - when his class began their final year of high school - every book on his senior reading list.
The death of her 16-year-old was what Edwards calls the central event of her life. She developed online families at GriefNet.org and Alt.Support.Grief in which she cobbled together various ways to continue parenting her son and also come to terms with his passing. These virtual communities provided a web of emotional identification, one that sustained Edwards when Wade's absence "came crashing in on me" (Edwards, Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers, 2006). Carrying her son's memory was a task that echoed childhood fears for a father precariously situated in life.
Raised in a military family, Mary Elizabeth Anania's earliest years were saturated with trauma or the fantasized threat of it. Her father, a U.S. Navy pilot, routinely disappeared on reconnaissance flights over "Red China" or North Korea during the Cold War. As a little girl, she had no previous knowledge of when he was leaving or if he would return. She recalls sitting with her mother and siblings in pews of the base chapels in Iwakuni, Japan, for memorial services - watching her friends bury their fathers.
Elizabeth was the eldest child of three, born to a girl from Mississippi (Mary Elizabeth Thweatt, 1923-), and an All-American football player (Vincent Anania, 1920-2008) of Italian descent. She describes her father as a courageous hero with "cannonballs for shoulders... He used to lift women up - my mother and her friends - and twirl them head over heels like batons. Proper women in 1950s shirtwaists ignored the fact that their garter belts had been on display, and they giggled to be treated as girls again." She remembers "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" (Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life's Adversities, 2009).
The author opens her second memoir with such glorious stories about her father and the idealized conviction that he "always reflected the sheer majesty of living" (Resilience). She recaptured this larger-than-life image in the figure of John Edwards (1953-), a textiles major and, later, superstar trial lawyer, who took Elizabeth out dancing on a first date at the Holiday Inn and won her over with a fatherly kiss on the forehead at the end of the night. There was appeal in his sexual reserve: "In an era of fast-forward sexual relationships, I was used to the fight at the door, or worse, in my apartment" (Saving Graces). John Edwards became her idealized husband, until his public betrayals could no longer be ignored.
Mary Elizabeth Anania was president of her class at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and editor of the Law Review. As an undergraduate she experienced a "click" moment of political awakening when she protested the killings at Kent State and the Vietnam War. She declared, "I pushed aside my impotence" as she challenged her father's moral choices at a time when he headed up the local Navy ROTC unit (Saving Graces).
Edwards writes of the "flexibility" of her mother, a navy wife who denied much of herself to be with her spouse. The family was subordinate to the mission. Edwards moved her senior year of high school because her father's rotation schedule demanded it; "I moved to a cadence set by someone else," she says. (Resilience). This became the pattern of her marriage, including when her career as an attorney became secondary to the ambitions and needs of John and her family. At times, Edwards describes feeling outside herself, like a puppeteer to her own body.
In her late 40's, she underwent fertility treatments to replace her lost son and bore a daughter, and then son, while consciously disavowing "surrogate child syndrome" or the desire to have a child in place of one who has been buried. She felt a lump in her breast the size of a "slice of plum" just prior to her husband's 2004 vice presidential election, but campaigned for another week before obtaining treatment once he'd lost. Following John's acknowledged infidelity with a campaign videographer and his fathering of a child out-of-wedlock, she wrote, "I am sixty years of life that once made a picture... and I am trying to see what puzzle picture I can create from those pieces that remain" (Resilience).
Edwards debunked the Barbie-wife image of politicians and gave it a "smart-Lady" make-over. She strived to sublimate her disillusionments, the injury inflicted by her narcissistic husband into generative acts. While combating her own illness, she advocated for children's rights, health care reform and gay equality. In her second book, she says she learned to step toward others when they had lost a child, to embrace them, ask how they were doing, to inquire what their child's name was.
When the breast cancer spread to her lymph nodes in 2005, Edwards returned to a habit she had nurtured since Wade's birth: writing down songs that she knew. The lyrics were typed and alphabetized by her, then bound in a collection of over 5,000 scores of folk, bluegrass, country, swing, children's lullabies, and old rock-and-roll. Her homemade "Songbook" was kindly thrust into hands of supporters, friends, press - everyone on the bus for her husband's campaign across Iowa and New Hampshire. She orchestrated intergenerational harmonies and had X-generation staffers crooning "How'd You Like to Spoon with Me?" composed in 1905. Despite grave challenges, Edwards tried to remake her traumas - through music, politics, law - and continued to reaffirm life's joys.
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Above post contains excerpts from the upcoming "Clio's Psyche: Understanding the 'Why' of Culture, Current Events, History, and Society" 18, 2. For information on subscribing to the journal or joining the Psychohistory Forum, contact Paul at pelovitz@aol.com
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