Resilience by Elizabeth Edwards Page A

the hospital door, when Dr. Warren was measuring the shrinking tumor, when my infusion nurse Mercedes was making that dreadful medicine seem tolerable, I never believed I would die from this disease. I certainly did not want breast cancer, but as diseases go breast cancer—when contained in my breast—was unlikely to kill me. This would be an obstacle in my story, an obstacle that would be hard to hurdle but one that would not change my course. Even if it was not easy, I could do it, knowing I would not have to accept a whole new life again. And when I had breast cancer in 2004 and 2005, it was just plain physically hard. It does not matter whether it was the idea of the disease or the reality of the medicine that made those months hard. My joints ached, every one of them. Depending on when it was in my chemotherapy cycle, I wouldn't want anything to eat or I would stand in front of the refrigerator famished. I would tire in a morning of meetings. My eyesight worsened. I felt empty-headed; I would look for a word and I could not find it; I would start a sentence and forget where I was headed. All of these limitations were good only for my younger children, then four and six, because child's play was the easiest activity to handle. I could play Chutes and Ladders for hours … as long as I was prone. I could read the large print of children's books. And when I was not sleeping or playing with the children, when I was not trying to write thank-you notes to well-wishers or attending a meeting about what came next for us, it was mostly sports on television. After two years of campaigning that kept me from watching sports, it was now ESPN all the time. I missed the 2004 Olympics, but it was the NFL playoffs and then the college bowl games and, taking me through the end of chemotherapy and recovery from my surgery, it was college basketball and spring baseball in the majors.
    So I watched television and read aloud to the children and read an astounding 65,000 e-mails that were sent to me. In the months that followed, I would also read 30,000 pieces of regular mail, some on homemade cards, some with gifts included. It might seem, given the numbers, that I would tire of reading them, but I did not. Each was a personal gift, packaged in a way that reflected the giver, letting me imagine them placing a cap they had knitted into a box or letting the youngest child in the family who had signed a card reach up to the post box to mail their card. For years John and I have played a game with the children in the car. When it is your turn, you choose a house you are passing and you make up a story about the people in the house. A well-kept garden or dead flowers in a window box; clothes hanging on the line; children's toys in the yard; an empty horse-trailer; all the details of life that give us clues about the people for whom that is home. You have to notice as many details as possible in the time it takes to pass the house. You then make up an elaborate story about the house and its inhabitants, filling in the spaces between the details with which you have been provided. A house with a newly constructed ramp was a soldier returning from battle; the now-untended vegetable garden the result of his wife's caring for him instead of it. I was doing that for the cards, e-mails, and gifts and their senders. It made it seem more like they were people I knew than the strangers almost every one of them really was. Sometimes on the cards or letters they would give me an outline to fill in; they would tell me about themselves: They had had breast cancer, they were a Republican, they had lost a child, their father had been in the military too. For quite a while, I was never lonely. My living room was filled with good-hearted strangers.
    Ensconced on the couch with prayer quilts they had sent tucked around me and my latest favorite knit cap over my head, I wondered how other women, less comforted, made it through these painful months. Well, for most, of