Free Resilience by Elizabeth Edwards Page B

recognize, as much as it hurts, that it is but memory, that he is dead. As the mother of a living daughter, I want them to know that honoring his memory does not mean limiting their joys; they honor him most by valuing the fullness of life. It was a lesson I was having trouble applying to myself.
    In the moments when I felt at loose ends—the wedding of a close friend of Wade's, Christmas and birthdays, high school graduations, the death of another child—all the work I felt I had done to come to terms with Wade's absence seemed to evaporate. In those moments, I turned, as I did so often in those days, to my fellow travelers, those struggling with the same kinds of moments, trying to keep their balance now that the world around them was so disarranged. I turned to the Internet.
    It is hard to overstate what the online grief community meant to me. We helped one another with the smallest of things—do you buy a Christmas gift for the staff at the cemetery?—to how we were going to manage living at all after the death of one we cherished. In my first weeks in the community, I met Gordon Livingston, whose son Lucas had had leukemia. Gordon sent me his book, Only Spring , about Lucas's struggle against the disease and Gordon's attempt to save him. After I finished the book, I tried to write to Gordon to tell him what his book meant to me.
I turned the last page of Only Spring yesterday morning, my mind racing with your children and mine, with your despair and my own. I carried them with me yesterday, trying to imagine how to write you. And with me last night, and with me today. My fingers still, unable to write. And now, I write because I need to, not because I have matched words with my reaction to your words and to your children.
The closest I can come is to tell you how real Lucas seems to me. There was no mystery; I knew the end. I did not know, however, how I would feel about him as I read. If I could reach across time—oh, if that were only possible—I wanted to reach across and pull him over those last days to safety. I had thought how hard it was to never have the chance to say good-bye to Wade, to only think back on his last words, his last touch. I had thought how I wished I could have had that—except, of course, if it came at such a price as Lucas and you, and Clare and Emily paid. I don't know how you start the awful journey after death spent so much of you all.
The image of Lucas on the ride at Rehoboth Beach has stayed with me most persistently. I am certain it is because for so many years we went every summer to my parents' place there. The garden cart in which my father pushed Wade and his sister Cate and his cousin Jordan down the boardwalk sits empty in my garage now. A photograph of him running on the boardwalk, maybe at seven, and one of him in my father's arms on the benches in front of Playland a year earlier are special treasures. It may no longer be, but then it was a careless beach town, particularly at the end near Playland, that hadn't seemed to change or care about changing in all the years we vacationed there. And I can see Lucas, his hair blown back by the wind, on those rides.
As I read of your bargains with God, I thought of myself. Every day, I ask God to let me take Wade's place. And failing that, to hold my boy as I would hold him, to protect him from our grief, to give him every happiness to which a child of his righteousness would be entitled, and to let him experience ecstasy. I ask for John's health, and for Cate's health, safety and happiness. And I ask God to give me faith.
It is unfair—how often that word is right—that there should be only six years of memories of Lucas. How comforting that those six are so deeply embroidered. How privileged I am that you have shared that with us.
    I was privileged to be with Gordon and later Phil and Shelby and Astrid and Sue and Michael, and with their children or with their memories of their children. So often they said what I wished I had