Resilience by Elizabeth Edwards Page A

I cannot change the hall or his room unless I am willing to risk missing his sweet eyes kissing me from the door. That feeling—that you are waiting for him, that you need only wait and he will call or come—will not easily recede. What we know is apparently no match for what we need. All of my being said to accept my son's death, and some days I suppose I almost did. I'd seen his face, still and cold in the small morgue; I knew he was dead. And yet, it must not be true, it could not be true; love and justice have only to find a way to pry open death's fingers, I thought.
    The truth, of course, is that the carousel ride—first forward in fits, then backward, only makes the ground spin and leaves us unable to walk even when the whirling stops. It is like the mocking, disturbing,contortions of the carousel in Ray Bradbury's
Sometimes Evil This Way Comes
, which Wade (and I, for I read what he read) was assigned in freshman English. And all the starts and fits and love and wishes and prayers are for naught, as no one gets what they want. In the end, every day was the same: The house was still quiet and the soil above his coffin undisturbed. The most I could wish for was the respite of sleep where logic had no dominion. I wanted him back so badly that the reasoning part of me, the part that had dominated my life until April 1996—the debater, the lawyer, the logic puzzle addict—laid down its arms, even in the daylight. I wanted my boy, and no amount of logic would stand in the way.
    A friend, Phil Lister, whose lovely, brave daughter Liza finally lost her battle with leukemia, wrote:
    Death Plus Time
    how old is she
    I don't know what to say
    don't know how to add
    six years alive and one year dead
    six plus one
    is usually seven but not now
    six maybe
    six plus one is six
    in a year six plus two will be six
    or six plus one is none
    Everything on which we had counted had been turned upside down, even elementary addition, so who could say that our physics was not wrong or our biology was not wrong? I didn't need a new story line without him. He could return to us. And when he did return I wanted him to know we were waiting for him; we hadn't moved on without him. The warrior's wife not moving while he is away, not changing the setting so their story could be unchanged by war, just as mine could be unchanged by physics and biology and Phil's could be unchanged by mathematics.
    I knew enough to know, though, that Phil's addition and my biology would seem unbalanced outside our sad world. So I used another logic to explain to others why I didn't move a single thing in his room. His room is what he put together, I wrote. We had gone to Washington, D.C., and looked for furniture together—an odd place to travel from North Carolina in search of furniture, but it was hischoice and his room. I let him pick what he wanted. Since he was only sixteen when he died, he had had the chance to put so little together, I could not bear to take any of it apart. There was already too little of him here on earth. People who might have thought I was unbalanced if I said it was waiting for him to return so I wasn't changing his room could understand that he had made the room and I wanted to save what he had made. So no one argued when I left his room alone. I did wonder how I would ever get the strength to change it. Would it be the closed door on the second floor for as long as I lived? I was spared the test of whether I could move anything of Wade's: a food in the laundry room next to his room started to spread a mildew throughout his room, and I rushed to save the things he loved by taking that room apart. His books, his papers, his sports cards and trophies, his signed Michael Jordan Wings poster—which later a dreadful someone tried to steal, an incomprehensible violation of Wade.
    It was my job to protect his things—and I did and do—since he could not. I got his belongings away from the mildew, I recovered the poster. But change