For the many who are disconsolate after learning that Elizabeth Edwards' cancer is recrudescent, worry not — husband John assures that he shall continue to run for president.
Elizabeth Edwards' affliction is common enough; each of us can match a friend or colleague lost to cancer with a finger and thumb, even begin to count twice over. The decision reached by the couple — agreeing only to succumb to the disease involuntarily — was and is the same of two others from the clerisy, Cathy Seipp and Tony Snow, the former having recently passed on.
The difference between Edwards and others is in what she and the former senator each said in an interview at the start of the week with television host Katie Couric. Life on paper, secondhand, has an impression of sameness. Unless told more, when we hear that Mr. Smith goes to the store and Mr. Jones goes to the store, both men are assumed to act in parallel; when instead Mr. Smith could be the patron who walked a block and Mr. Jones, the larcenist arriving by bus. John and Elizabeth Edwards chose to explain, even defend the instance of a life ending on a campaign trail, and in self-confession one has either timeless éclat or an unrecoverable giveaway.
The response to Couric's seventh prompt elicited materialism: time is short, so, in John's words, "We have to live today the best way we know how." And that would be "what we're spending our lives doing," or politics. Prodded by Couric on the question of opportunism, John Edwards was at first open about the cold assessments of polling tragedy in Washington. "There's not a single person in America that should vote for me because Elizabeth has cancer," he said. But then his words were clever, and the frankness dissolved into preterition. "I think it is a fair evaluation for America to engage in to look at what kind of human beings each of us are, and what kind of president we'd make." His only prior object of "evaluation" had been himself.
Couric asked about the couple's children several times. The children are in early grade school, but then so are those of Tony Snow's, and Snow has not elected to leave his White House position. Yet in her persistence, in simply her need to persist, Couric contrasted Snow and Edwards. The youths' acquaintance with mortality — we are all going to die, Elizabeth repeated — was not, as the parents went on, about the precious time to be shared with their mother, but rather the hardening stricture on their mother's time, time which was already committed to Mother's own interests.
"I've often said," stated Elizabeth, "that the most important thing you can give your children (is) wings." And then — "they're gonna have to be able to fly by themselves."
Couric had already injected her opinion on spending final days with work over family. She answered in metaphor. "They're still baby birds."
Said John, "But they've got to start learning to fly. And they're not ready to fly on their own yet, but they've got to start learning."
Evidently, the Edwardses were getting at a relevant aphorism, avian variety. The English language has a lot. Early birds get worms, debutants spread their wings, old hens grieve over empty nests, so — why, yes, the Edwards' children must take flight because their mother may soon never return. One of the very few examples in undisturbed nature, however, wherein a baby bird must learn to fly before due time is when the chick has about two critical seconds aloft, from the moment a cuckoo stepsister pushes it out of the tree to the moment it hits the ground and dies.
Neither Edwards can reasonably be thought of as willing to jettison his or her children. But while taking refuge in an idiom the pair let the onlooker see a political intercalation in the nursery, a confrontation between offspring and career, consequences thereof, and easily retracted causes for the whole of it.
Prayers to the Almighty are best made not with demands but deference to providential will. Even so, there will be at least one request for the long life of Elizabeth and the swift death of Edwards 2008.