Resilience Read Free Page A

Washington. Since I had lived a life of being uprooted, I should have been used to it enough to move to Washington without a look back. But this time I was leaving the house in which I had expected to die, and I was leaving Wade's grave to live 250 miles away. And it wasn't so often our kitchen in Raleigh anymore in which we gathered but a more empty kitchen in Washington. We slept in the Raleigh house less and less often, and sometimes saw our dear friends back there only at Christmas. I had to make special trips to change the plantings at Wade's grave. It took me some time to get my bearings.
    The younger children, the picture of resilience, grew and thrived in a series of homes in Washington, D.C., and then, when my husband decided to run for the nomination for president and then as the nominee for vice president, in a series of hotel rooms and in the homes of generous strangers.
    And except for missing Wade and regretting what he had lost, life had a good cadence again, an odd public cadence but a rhythm we all learned.
    If you really did not know me then, you would need to know only that I was moderately well-liked by the press for being unscripted (and unscriptable, if that can be bastardized into a word) and candid. I was reasonably well-liked by the Democrats for being well-informed and accessible, an actual mother and not a mother figure. I was even a favorite of opposing extremists because I was chubby enough to be made fun of and unschooled enough politically to say something now and again that they could take out of context and use as fodder. Then the election of 2004 ended, the Democrats, John Kerry and my husband, who should have won given all the issues, in fact lost, and on the very next day I confirmed a diagnosis I had suspected in the weeks before the election: I had breast cancer. Even the opposition laid down their arms.
    The treatment was not easy, but, honestly, after Wade's death, I could do it. There were days when it was hard, but I could fight and that was all I needed. It is what I hadn't had with Wade: a chance to fight. I remember telling my father, his righthand clinched perpetually half-open, that if Wade was alive he would fight. I told myself the same thing, and everything after that was easier. John sat with me in chemotherapies, often reading as I slept or calling people to thank them for their help in the election. And he would bring me dinner in bed when I didn't want to climb the steps of our four-story Washington house again. And by the end of my treatments we had moved back to North Carolina, first to the house that had been Wade's home, and then to a rental house in Chapel Hill from which we watched our new home being built. Finally, we moved into that new family home on an old tobacco farm outside Chapel Hill, idyllic and peaceful with promises of a long life as an old couple with children who were still impossibly young.
    That was the story from my side. John thought still about running for president again. He traveled, giving speeches, talking of poverty, about which he and I care deeply, raising money for efforts to increase the minimum wage and start antipoverty programs. I stayed home and wrote a book about the journey on which we had found ourselves over the previous decade. The children started public school. And, without my knowing, a woman whospotted my husband one afternoon in the restaurant bar of the hotel in which he was staying hung around outside the hotel for a couple of hours until he returned from a dinner and introduced herself by saying, “You are so hot.”
    There is a Dorothy Parker poem of which I am fond that captures the flow of my life.
    The Red Dress
    I always saw, I always said
    If I were grown and free
,
    I'd have a gown of reddest red
    As fine as you could see
,
    To wear out walking, sleek and slow
,
    Upon a Summer day
,
    And there'd be one to see me so
    And flip the world away.
    And he would be a gallant one
,
    With stars behind his eyes
,
    And hair