Free Resilience by Elizabeth Edwards

won, and we moved to Washington. That must have been interesting; are you still there? I paused again. No, we are back in North Carolina. He ran for vice president instead of his Senate seat. He lost, and we are back home. Now the silence belonged to Astrid. Astrid told me later she went to Christian's grave and spoke to him. You will not believe, Christian, who Wade's father is. In our Internet community, he was Wade's father and I was Wade's mother. The world outside demands that we be lawyers or bus drivers or teachers or senators. Here all we needed to be was mothers and fathers.
    All I wanted to be was a mother. A mother to Wade and as much of a mother as I could manage being to Cate, who was then just fourteen. I stopped being a lawyer; I never went back after the accident and I have never looked back at that decision with any regret. It seemed to me that it had nothing whatever to do with Wade, so I left. But it meant that my days, once full, were pretty empty. People who cared about me tried to fill them, tried to provide solace, mostly in activities that had nothing to do with Wade—sweetly, they wanted me to move away from the grief, I suppose.
    There was a long time, though, when I would brush off solace. Maybe I didn't want to move away from the pain. Maybe it was not wanting to rewrite my life without him, or maybe it was what Edmund Wilson, the incomparable twentieth-century literary critic, said. Why should I have solace when he hasn't breath? Wilson wondered how he could be expected to enjoy what life offers when what life offers had been denied to one as substantial and serious and dear as his wife. That is how I felt about Wade. I get solace, a balm for me, and there is nothing whatever for him? I can understand on some rational level that the pleasure we take from life cannot diminish our children's pleasure, but there will always be with that logic an unstated reservation: that our children should have this pleasure as well, or instead of us. But our children weren't going to have pleasure, because they weren't going to live. And so I tried, as much as possible, not to live too much either. Or at least not live for me.
    I pressed my life, my hopes into a dogwood tree at his elementary school, a scholarship in his name, a bench at his high school, finally a whole computer lab. See it? See him? Don't let him pass unnoticed through this life. John went on to do things, back to the courtroom, back to work that made a difference for living people. I was still there, still at the cemetery, still at the computer lab, still in his bedroom.
    These gestures that kept his presence in the lives of those who knew him also did something else. Little by little, it became easier to accept Wade's death, because I had something to parent in his place. I had someplace else where he would be, in a sense.
    On the suggestion of a friend, Gene Hafer, John and I decided to start a computer lab for high school students in his name. It never occurred to us how ambitious the project was. If we had known, perhaps we would have shied away, but we didn't know and so we threw ourselves into it. Finding the location across from his high school, raising the money, doing the renovation, getting the computers and the staff, filled every day for months. And then I would go there, parent the children who were using the lab, tell them a search engine hint Wade had taught me, and it was as close to him as I could ever be again without my nose between the sheets of his now-empty bed or in the grass above his grave. The computer lab was more than a place, though; I was doing something, actively parenting his memory. You don't, I discovered, leave the need to parent the child just because the child has left you. So doing something meant I had a way to do that.
    I wasn't alone either, and knowing that was important. Among our online community Lana planted a garden for her daughter Brooke; Bill was father to Michael and guide to all newcomers at