Saving Graces Read Free

day all melted away. We held on and made the pact we wish we could have made to save Wade. “Nothing can happen to you,” he whispered in my ear. “Nothing is going to happen to you.”
    “It will be fine. I will be fine.”
    John had called Wells on the way to the house, and he didn’t think it would be fine. Wells had told him what he hadn’t told me, that it was likely breast cancer. When John asked if we should stop campaigning and take care of this right away, Wells had responded, “I don’t think that will help.” John was stricken. His good friend had just told him that nothing could help, that the cancer was too advanced to save me. Though John didn’t know it at the time, it wasn’t what Wells had meant at all. He simply meant that a few more days didn’t matter. John had to talk to another doctor—Cliff Hudis, a specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York who had been recommended by Peter Scher, his chief of staff—before he could be convinced that he had misunderstood. As he waited to speak to the specialist, he told me that he wanted to stop campaigning and immediately do whatever was needed to make me well. “I’ll cancel my schedule,” he said to me.
    We couldn’t let that happen. Without talking to a doctor, I believed it would do no harm if I chose to wait the four days until the election to do the biopsy and begin treatment—whatever that was going to mean. I had already waited more than a week.
    But there was another reason.
    During the months I spent campaigning, I had gotten to know so many people around the county, and I don’t mean “know” them like I spent twenty minutes talking to them from a stage. I mean that they shared their deepest fears with me. A day didn’t pass that someone didn’t cry in my arms: their son was getting ready to leave for Iraq and they were trying to buy him body armor from the Internet, their company was moving to Korea and the place they had worked for thirty years was closing, their health insurance company had increased their premiums so much that insurance was now out of reach, Medicare premiums, gas prices, college costs, all going up when their wages were going down, and the list went on and on. I couldn’t even think about stopping or letting John stop. Those faces—the parents in Manchester, the wife in Sandusky, the father in Detroit—were with me, and they were why John and I got up each morning, week after week, month after month. We couldn’t stop. Lump or no lump, cancer or not, I had to continue to talk to as many people as possible, debate whatever issue needed debating, and do what I could for those people, and more importantly, John had to do the same. The rest we’d take care of after the election.
    We could do it. It was only four more days. We had to do it. We only had four more days.
    But first, there were people to tell. Cate was coming home for the concert, but before she got there, John called John Kerry, who, like my husband, was terrific. Whatever you need to do, he said. He said it to John, then he said it to me. We told him that we’d decided to keep going. John Kerry can be a great cheerleader, arm around your shoulder, flattering you and urging you on, and that is what he was that day, a sincere and compassionate cheerleader. We won’t ever forget it.
    Cate was the hard one. I had called my parents and told my mother—my father had a stroke in 1990 and doesn’t talk on the phone much—that I had found a lump but that I wasn’t worried and neither should she be. I tried the same nonchalance on Cate, but—unbeknownst to me—John later told her that it was more serious than I was letting on, which was as hard for her to hear as I had feared. I didn’t know he’d done that or I wouldn’t have let her leave my side for the rest of the campaign. But she did leave. By the next morning we were in West Virginia, about to scatter across the country for the last push.
    A day or two later, I was in Cincinnati. We