Resilience by Elizabeth Edwards Page B

course, the months were not as empty as mine. Many had to go back to work, achy and tired or not. I was lucky—I did not. Single mothers might not be able to rely on their children's father to take care of the children; I was lucky—after the election John was able to devote himself to me and the children. A stranger who had read of another woman's cancer was not sending them a prayer quilt or a get-well card. I was lucky—someone somewhere was thinking of me, praying for me. I sat reading their letters for hours, placing them back into boxes where they are still stored in my house. But I was lucky, too, in a frivolous way—how you simply spend these hours: I had young, resilient children, I had a husband who included me in his work, and I liked sports. So my days were filled with Chutes and Ladders and David Shannon's children's books, with meetings about what John was going to do now that the election was over (it turned out he started a poverty center in North Carolina), with my preliminary drawings of the house we would build when we returned home after my treatment, and with sports on television. Part of my recovery from this debilitating treatment was that I was busy in a fashion and I was not alone. But I cannot overestimate the importance of my belief that I would not die of this disease.
    So many times between November 2004 and now I have sat in a hospital room, waiting for the doctor to come in and tell me what the latest scans tell her and what changes there have been in the previous three months. There are some of these potentially life-changing conversations, frankly, that melt together: the same doctor, the same room, the same report—no appreciable change, which meant I would not die of breast cancer. But the ones when the report is not the same? Those I never forget; they never melt into another day or into another season. Those I remember what I was wearing, the weather, the words the doctor used, where John and Cate sat. From that first tiny hospital room, crisp and spartan and white at Massachusetts General, where we first heard the word “cancer” spoken aloud to the basement room with a bed and a sink where John and I sat for hours waiting for the results of the bone scan and the CT, to the latest room in Chapel Hill in the old Gravely Building that has stood there since I was in college, where we heard that it was no longer contained and had spread to a couple of new places, the quiet life-changing moments grow to an imposing size.
    There was a time, in 2005, when I was being treated for Stage 2 breast cancer and the news was almost always good. Doctors looking at ultrasound machines and smiling, a happy nurse handing me the gown into which I would change before the doctor came in, and finally the wave good-bye—the cancer was gone. Boy, it sounds so simple when months of basically happy reports fall over one another like that. Of course, the road to the smiles was more than bumpy. Like a Conestoga wagon crossing the far West, the whole of me shook for the entire ride—but now and again there was a beautiful sunset ahead that made it seem worth it and we were headed to good health again. The vision wasn't on the horizon, however; it was in a scan result or on an ultrasound screen or in the clean margins after the surgery. All beautiful, reassuring. I had determined not to let fear in, and it was easier when the reports all confirmed that I should not be afraid. But the reports only looked at my body that day; they could not see tomorrow.
    My grandmothers each died in their nineties. I knew one of my great-grandmothers, who must have been nearly a hundred when she died. Until 2004, I believed I might live longer than all of them. I had been hospitalized to have children, but that was all. I took no medicines, prescription or otherwise. I was always dieting, but my blood pressure and my cholesterol were both low. Living to ninety-five seemed entirely possible. I had had children late in life, Emma