Resilience Read Free

the splendor of their characters. I thought in song. When I couldn't think in song, I could pull out the lyrics book I had been constructing since college. First a hundred songs, then a thousand, now five thousand, and there I could find the soundtrack I preferred for my life. In song, as in Henry James's novels, faults all turned out to be virtues, as if written by Sammy Cahn:
I'm irresponsibly mad for you.
I had, I have to say, a long, long way to fall when the fall finally came.
    I married my law school sweetheart, John, on a hot summer day in North Carolina, and we walked through life in a carefree way. We really did have the two children, a picturesque two-story white frame house, the golden retriever, and the station wagon. My husband made a name for himself as a lawyer; I slipped back into a hybrid life of being the lawyer I was supposed to be and the mother I needed to be. When things were not right, well, we just fixed them, in our lives, in the lives of others. Sometimes money could fix a problem; sometimes it was simply a matter of being wise enough to know which string to pull. But we always fixed what needed to be fixed and our ride together had its ownmusic. Our house became the place where life happened; there were young people gathered in the kitchen; there was a basketball game on the cement court behind the house. It seemed that whatever we had done, we had done right.
    It would have been easy for life to have played itself out from that kitchen, and I don't know that, if it had, it would have occurred to me that I had never taken in the fullest breath I could. It had been diaphragmatic breathing, matching my inhaling and exhaling to some rhythm I wanted, some song that fit my life at the time, or I thought did. I had never had to find my own rhythm, never needed to search for my own cadence. If the music's cadence was drowned out, it was usually by John's or the children's, and I walked to that. When I needed my own, I would fall back into Jerome Kern. For all of the times that followed those carefree days in my kitchen, for all of the pain I endured, at least I learned in the years that followed what it meant to breathe for myself, and I learned, too, what it meant to scream.
    Wade, my firstborn, died on April 4, 1996. An April wind crossed the tobacco fields of eastern North Carolina and pushed the car of which he was so very proud from the road. He was sixteen, andmaybe it would not have mattered how old he was, but he did not know how to get it back on the road without flipping it. So it flipped. And flipped, and flipped, until all of the life of the boy was pressed from him. And from me.
    I move on now, but I will be back. I always come back to Wade. But I cannot tell the rest of the story if I let myself fall into him now.
    Our surviving family held together, or rather we were held together by an extraordinary fourteen-year-old girl, our daughter Cate, who managed to be what we needed and to allow us to look for new paths, paths that she knew would further upset her life, but she kept saying yes. Yes, go back to work, Dad. Yes, try to have another child. Yes, run for the U.S. Senate if that is what you want. It wasn't perfect; she was a teenage girl who had been feeling her budding wings. But given the loss of Wade, she knew it wasn't the time, so she placed her own dreams in a box and put them away for a time.
    So we had that one new child, Emma Claire, and then another, Jack, and John did win the Senate seat, so soon it was sounds other than those of teenage boys in our Raleigh kitchen. Life was changing quickly. Wade died in 1996. John won the Senateseat in 1998, the year Emma Claire was born. Cate graduated from high school three weeks after Jack was born in 2000. By the fall of 2000, that kitchen in Raleigh was empty. Cate was off to college and to a life blessedly away from all the pain that had been—and from the turmoil that was to come. The remaining four of us were in a spacious home in