Farewell Elizabeth Edwards

My heart is truly heavy learning of the passing of Elizabeth Edwards. Reading the headline last night made me gasp out loud and left me with such a sadness that I couldn't escape.


It wasn't the shock felt when Princess Diana died, for that was unexpected and tragic. This, sadly, was expected, but not so soon, and the depths of her character touch me as if I knew her personally.

I "got to know her" when I read her book, Saving Graces. She was incredibly real, down to earth, and gracious. She was graceful, passionate, and optimistic. She was funny, smart and forgiving.  And somehow, you knew all these things without her ever puffing up her chest and telling you. You could just see it.

She survived so much heartbreak in her lifetime, starting with the loss of her 16 year old son, Wade, in a car accident. Her grief from that loss was so palpable that you felt the words reach out of the book and squeeze your heart until you felt you couldn't breathe. In one passage, she explains how the grief of losing a child can come and hit you like a sledgehammer when you least expected it. She recounted a shopping trip to Target, where simply passing through the pop aisle and seeing his favorite kind wracked her with such unexpected grief she slumped to the floor in the aisle and sobbed. You cried right along with her.
And though certainly politics were a big part of her life being married to John Edwards, and sometimes the details in those parts of the book became a bit tedious and I started to skim, she as a whole really wasn't about all of that.
I didn't even vote for that ticket.

But it doesn't matter.

Her reality wasn't about politics.{Though, if she herself were on the ticket, I would have voted for her.}

It was about grace, love and forgiveness.

I mourn this loss as if she were my friend, for she had that power to speak to you as if she knew you.

If positive thoughts and optimism could have ever saved a soul, it would have been her, so I know she fought the best fight that could be fought and sadly, at only 61 years old, she lost the battle.

But I'm sure it was easier for her to go knowing she'd see that son she had lost waiting for her.