Telling it like it is
There is a passage in the memoir by Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of the Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, where she reflects on the peculiar etiquette of grieving in the modern age. She is describing her sense of devastation after the death of her son, Wade, who was just 16 years old when he was killed by a car crash, in 1996.
In the book, called Saving Graces, Mrs Edwards writes: “So there was this unwritten boundary. I could be sad, but I just couldn’t be too sad. If I played my part, I got enormous support, support that continues even now, ten years later. But I couldn’t ask too much or the deal we had implicitly forged might be broken.”
Mrs Edwards faces a similar unwritten code of conduct now, as she attempts to live a public life while undergoing treatment for cancer.
This is a recurrence of the disease for Mrs Edwards, whose breast cancer was discovered in November 2004. The initial onset of that illness, and its poignant timing – Mrs Edwards received the diagnosis a day after her husband and John Kerry lost the 2004 presidential elections – made her an enormously sympathetic figure for many Americans.
But now, here it is, barely two and a half years later: Mrs Edwards, who believed as recently as last autumn that she was free of the disease, must now deal instead with the cruel reality that it has spread to her bones, and that it is incurable.
And the sympathy now is grudging.
When the news first began to leak out that Mrs Edwards’ cancer had returned, the immediate assumption was that her husband, John, would suspend his run for the White House. Mrs Edwards would be considerate enough to go off somewhere and quietly die. A number of media outlets – the new insider knowledge Politico for example – even reported that Mr Edwards had called it quits, even as he was telling a news conference he would continue. Katie Couric, the normally sunny CBS anchor, whose own husband died of colon cancer, also seemed to think she would go into retreat.
America demands a cheerful stoicism of the ill, a can-do, conquer-all attitude. Living a reasonable life for a few more years is not enough. Being open about the prospect of one’s own imminent death is, at the very least ,in poor taste. America does not want vulnerability. This culture cannot admit that illness can beat even the cheeriest disposition, the most determined attempts at positive visualisation or modern medicine. It cannot readily acknowledge that, in the very end, we are not in control. That is not what America wants.
America wants champions. It wants Lance Armstrong, who went on to win the Tour de France seven times in a row after undergoing surgery and chemotherapy to treat the testicular cancer that had spread to his brain.
It is not clear yet that it wants Mrs Edwards. She has made it plain that she knows that it is exceedingly unlikely her cancer will allow for a triumphant ending. What she seems to be hoping, though, is that Americans will at least make room in the cancer mythology for another kind of survival story.
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