Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life's Adversities by Elizabeth Edwards

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Interviews & Essays

An Interview with Elizabeth Edwards

How did you find the courage to write this book?

I am not certain courage is the right word. Maybe defiance is a more accurate description. When I first decided to write the book, I thought I had found my balance enough to write it. But between that time and the actual writing I was knocked off the beam again. I thought I could not write, but then it seemed that if I let obstacles take part of my life, or my voice away, I had lost the struggle I was trying to win. If there was courage in there somewhere, it was wrapped fully in defiance.

How did the experience of writing Resilience compare to the writing of Saving Graces?

Writing a chronological narrative was a much easier experience. Although there were certainly difficult subjects in Saving Graces, it was also almost joyful to write -- like a trip down memory lane. Resilience was much more difficult because I had to focus all my energies on those difficulties.

Is it a relief to be out of the political realm, or do you miss it? What advice would you have for the new president and first lady about being resilient?

I have only my own example as advice, which is an example I hope that the Obamas will never be in a position to follow. I do miss the opportunity to talk to people about their real-life problems. I still talk about health care as a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress, so I get my political "fix" that way.

How were you shaped by living abroad as a child? What did it teach you about the universal nature of resilience -- the common threads that transcend cultural differences?

Resilience is so much easier if what we are talking about is having a problem but getting to deal with that problem in our home or apartment in the United States, having clean water and public schools. Living abroad has given me both an appreciation of what we have here and a perspective on my own struggles, which, when viewed against all of life's struggles everywhere, are small indeed.

It was brave of you to write so candidly about the deep hurt you felt when you learned of your husband's indiscretion. Did you consider omitting those scenes from Resilience? What do you hope that readers (perhaps those who have been in your shoes) will take away from your experience?

I knew that it would be a form of dishonesty to omit those pains. I considered not writing the book at all -- in fact, I had decided not to write -- because I did not want to reopen the story. When I settled on writing only my part of the story, I felt I might try to write something with which others -- those who have experienced from my viewpoint or from my husband's -- might relate and from which they could derive some understanding or comfort.

You freely admit to being sensitive and sentimental, enjoying the beautiful lyrics of music from your parents' generation and savoring poignant lines of poetry. What would you say to those who think that being emotional interferes with resilience?

I am a believer in doing what you need to do to get through life's obstacles. If I wanted to sit and listen to This Shirt by Mary Chapin Carpenter, which I always had queued up on the CD player in the car when I picked Wade up from school (we didn't agree on much music, but we agreed on that song), then I should do that. It is only when someone gets stuck in the emotional, allowing the emotional escape to be a permanent denial, that a problem can arise. But not allowing your emotions to have their day is just as problematic.

In the book, you describe how your spiritual life has been transformed in recent years. How has your illness affected your fundamental outlook on life?

What my illness has taught me is less about my view of life (I learned all I needed to learn about the preciousness of life at Wade's death); it more about the incredible strength and humor and resilience of the women and men who share my disease. It has been a blessing to be part of this supportive, beautiful sisterhood.

You recall a luncheon at the Cleveland City Club, where a woman whispered to you that she had found a lump in her breast but had no insurance and therefore couldn't afford to get it checked. This inspired you to become more vocal in supporting healthcare for the uninsured. What do you recommend for readers who want to help with this cause and "fix the system"?

As Congress starts to consider health care reform, it is important to make our views known. The problem is that so many of those with inadequate care are the least likely to be in contact with their representatives. Write your senator, call your congressional representative, attend one of the town halls being held across the country, and tell them what problems you have faced and what you need from your health care system. Sometimes we think our own stories have no value, but anecdotal evidence of gaps and obstacles often have the most impact on the men and women who are trying to fashion a remedy.

You write, "I had to find a partner bigger and stronger and more important than my own cancer. I was lucky, for I had been dancing with that partner for years," a sentiment echoed in later scenes of your mother and father. How did your parents' marriage influence yours?

My parents were in so many ways pictures of resilience, each individually and as a marriage. My mother was a Navy daughter and twice a Navy wife. My father was a career Navy pilot. They each had a vision of service to our country, and in tough times they focused on doing that well, letting themselves heal in personal ways.

You describe what it was like to discover your mother's journals. What do you hope it will be like for your children to read Resilience later in their lives?

In a real sense I wrote this book for my children. There is now a myth about what their family has been through and I wanted, particularly because of my health, to write my own version where they see not salacious outlines but abiding love. They will also learn, I hope, that life is work. You cannot just walk through it, grabbing whatever you want. You have to decide what you want and what you want to accomplish, and then you have to get about the very hard work of putting that together.

Reading Group Guide

Broadway Books Readers’ Guide

Resilience
Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life’s Adversities
By Elizabeth Edwards

224 Pages • Hardcover • ISBN: 978-0-7679-3136-6
Also available as an e-book, ISBN 978-0-7679-3276-9

Introduction
One of the most beloved public figures in the country, Elizabeth Edwards is no stranger to adversity. Many remember the strength she showed after her son, Wade, was killed in a car accident when he was only sixteen years old. She would exhibit remarkable courage again in 2004 when her husband, John, was running for vice president; days before the election, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. After rounds of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, the cancer went away–only to reoccur in 2007. She was in the news most recently when the very private matter of her husband's infidelity became public fodder. At every turn, Elizabeth found grace in the face of anguish.

With inspiring words for all who struggle to find peace despite overwhelming challenges, Resilience is source of strength. Unsentimental yet heartfelt, Elizabeth’s words reveal the personal journey of a woman who has learned never to say never, and to face her worst fears with a combination of gentle soulfulness and steely willpower. In these powerful, pocket-sized pages, she provides moving testimony to healing in the wake of unspeakable grief. Whether you read Resilience with your book club, with your best friend, or in solitude, this little book is sure to bring great comfort. We hope that the following topics will enhance your experience of this stirring meditation onloss, and life.

Topics and Questions for Discussion
1. Elizabeth Edwards begins by recalling the day she was told her that her father was brain-dead and would never walk again. To what do you attribute his recovery? Throughout her life, what did he teach her about resilience?

2. Over a lifetime, how has Elizabeth’s view of the world changed? Did her childhood make her worldview realistic, or idealistic (or both)?

3. Discuss the story of Toshiko. How did she adapt to her tragic circumstances? What did she teach the Anania family, beyond music?

4. Elizabeth is a lifelong lover of literature and has included many meaningful quotations throughout the book. Which ones made you pause, or even earmark? Which literary works have comforted you throughout your life?

5. Elizabeth writes that in the aftermath of Wade’s death, she could not honor his memory until she first admitted that he had indeed become a memory. Her previous approach to adversity, steeped in logical solutions, no longer worked. What guidance does she offer for healing the heart when the mind cannot make sense of a terrible reality?

6. Elizabeth uses the metaphor of a blackboard to describe life and identity, recalling that after Wade’s death she felt as if her “blackboard” had been erased entirely. How does this metaphor apply to your life story? Which people, roles, and events are part of it right now? What has been erased over the years?

7. Elizabeth came to the conclusion that “God does not promise us protection and intervention. He promises only salvation and enlightenment.” How do you cope with the age-old struggle to understand God’s role in adversity?

8. The author describes being in Hiroshima in the aftermath of unprecedented destruction, and watching some of her friends bury their pilot fathers, or die in battle themselves. What did these experiences teach her about mortality? What is the best way to introduce a child to the impermanence of life?

9. Chapter five features a story written by Skip Smeiska in response to his family’s grief over the death of their son, Joshua. Revisit this story, considering the way the artist responds to being robbed. What does it take to go from wobbliness to “new invention,” as he did?

10. How did Elizabeth handle the transition from being a maternal caregiver to being a patient who needed care?

11. What was your reaction to the passages in Resilience that deal with John Edwards’s indiscretion? How would you respond if your spouse confessed to being unfaithful? How would you have fared with the added element of publicity?

12. Resilience concludes with a reference to cancer survivor Mark Gorman’s fortune cookie, which read, “You cannot change the wind, but you can adjust the sails.” What adjustments are described throughout this book? What does it take to become the kind of person who always finds a way to adjust?

14. Do you think there is much difference between the way men and women cope with adversity? Is one gender raised to be more resilient than the other?

15. Discuss the events in your life that have been the most challenging for you. What were the burdens and gifts of those experiences?

About the Author
Elizabeth Edwards is a graduate of the University of North Carolina School of Law. She has worked in the North Carolina Attorney General’s office and at the law firm Merriman, Nichols, and Crampton in Raleigh. She has also taught legal writing as an adjunct instructor at the law school of North Carolina University. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Read a Sample Chapter

chapter 1
1990
I stood at the sink in an impossibly bright hospital room washing my face, washing away the heat that, with the doctor's words, had come rushing 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. . . . 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 cannonballs for shoulders and the calf muscles of a twenty-fiveyear-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 passed over and over again. And then, with no warning, a massive 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 glasses 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 Japan when he came out of the pool into which they had thrown him and, with his soaking wet flight 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 flight, so when he stepped out of the jet in his flight 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 shirtwaists 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 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 circumstances.

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 fashion), 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 boobs 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 firstborn. 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 assigned 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 finishing this assignment, 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 assisted-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.

Excerpted from RESILIENCE: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life's Adversities by Elizabeth Edwards Published by Broadway Books Copyright © 2009 by Elizabeth Edwards