This article is a rewrite of the original. I wrote it to reflect a different approach to reporting on the same event. Below is the “oppression story,” focusing on the death of Edwards’s father and the symbolism of this event in the rest of her life. The previous story that I wrote last week was the consensus story: it was from the official perspective and less opinionated than the one below.
“He will not walk, he is brain dead. He will not walk, he is brain dead,” Elizabeth Edwards said, lifting her eyes off the page of her new memoir that she read aloud to an audience of 300 people Thursday night at the Willard Hotel in downtown Washington, D.C.
Edwards chose to begin her book talk on Reflections, by focusing on the stroke that hospitalized her father in 1990. She emphasized the shock that she felt upon discovering her father’s mortality.
Edwards describes the picture of her father that forms in her mind from childhood: a man of extremely fit physique with rippled muscles that could do everything and be everywhere at once; a man who was a hero in everything that he did.
Of course this is the little girl in Edwards, creeping to the surface. The little girl who idolized her father and saw him in his outward perfection. As Edwards reads out loud from the pages of her book, the crack in her voice and the tears in her eyes are reminiscent of her years of innocence, but not just as a young girl. She is really nostalgic for something else she has lost. Yes, her tears are formed with the memory of her father’s limp body, as he lay in the hospital bed, immobile. But they are also shed for the fairy-tale life she no longer believes she is living.
“Sometimes when we face hurdles in our lives, we just want to turn around and go back to the life we were living before,” said Edwards, speaking from her experience. “Sometimes our lives are not the straight lines we expected.”
Although, in context, this quote is directly referring to Edwards’s struggle with her father’s illness and the doctors’ hopeless diagnosis, the words seem more relevant to Edwards’s present family life—something that she is hesitant to discuss and, quite frankly, avoids at all cost.
(Edwards refused to speak to several news outlets including the Associated Press while in Washington, due to the media’s refusal to comply with her request to avoid discussing her husband’s infidelity.)
The scene that Edwards reads, while waiting at her father’s bedside, is emotion packed with more feeling and meaning as she reads it now, than there ever was back in 1990 at the time of the event. Now, as Edwards describes her efforts to drench her face in cold water in order to rid her body of the heat that threatened to suffocate her, it is impossible not to see a parallel between her fear and disbelief at that time in the hospital and her similar disbelief and humiliation at the discovery of her husband’s indiscretions.
It is easy for an outsider to see why an event that would have a great affect on any daughter would have an even greater impact on Edwards, because of the intensity of her respect for her father. This respect that Edwards described over and over again was symbolic of her trust and stability in life that the stroke shattered. The mirage dissolved and in its place, a dying man lay sprawled out before her.
Edwards saw the failure of her father’s health as a way in which her faith had failed her. She described her religious beliefs before her father’s accident as strong and determined to believe in a god she could pray to and trust to provide for her needs and answer her prayers. She believed in a god who protected the innocent.
“My vision of my god was a god to whom I could pray. That was clearly not the case,” said Edwards.
Not anymore, anyway. After her father’s hospitalization, Edwards said that she really struggled with her faith and the cliché human question: why do bad things happen to good people? But it appears that after her long struggle, she simply threw in the towel.
“There was no one to blame but nature,” noted Edwards, saying that although she could have easily decided to peg her accusations on God, she chose not to. Instead, Edwards said that she had to readjust her idea of god. This is something that she continues to do as life changes and evolves. Therefore, she seems to think that God changes as well. It’s convenient.
Taking advice from Bill Moyer’s Genesis program, Edwards said that she found her own answers to her questions. Edwards said, “I realized that you don’t have the God you want, you have the God you have.
“I realized that I had a God, instead, who promised me salvation if I lived a good life,” said Edwards. She admitted that this may not synch with everyone’s set of religious beliefs, but they are hers.
So recently, when her fairy tale marriage lay before her in ruins, Edwards chose to find her own answers, just as she had back in 1990.
Her answer then was to fight for her father’s life, and it worked. Confident that her father’s “brain dead” diagnosis was incorrect, a surprising perspective considering her husband’s affiliation with the Democratic Party, Edwards told the doctors they were wrong and she refused to take her father off life support. He later went on to live 18 more years, regaining his ability to speak, walk, drive, and even dance again.
Her answer now, is perplexing. “You can’t just find out someone else’s recipe for change,” Edwards said. “You have to find your own answers.”
So she has decided to treat her husband’s affair with a level of professional resilience that borders on denial. She says that no situation is ever perfect, however, if you readjust your expectations, you can still live a “majestic life.”
“Until the day that I think I’m perfect I am not going to expect perfection from others,” Edwards said.
