Jim Kershner: There’s no reason to quit the race of their lives
At our house, we’ve been following the John and Elizabeth Edwards debate with interest – appalled interest.
Appalled, because of the suggestion from some observers that John Edwards should drop out of the presidential campaign. And do what? Sit around and worry about his wife’s cancer?
We have first-hand experience with this issue, because my wife Carol went through her own cancer ordeal in 1994. Her situation wasn’t as dire as Elizabeth Edwards’, although, at the time, it certainly seemed that way. Carol’s breast cancer was detected late. The tumor was fairly large, fairly aggressive and had spread into her lymph nodes.
This was, without a doubt, the biggest trauma our family had ever endured. Yes, I did take a week or two off of work to help out after the surgery. But after that, I went back to work – and what a relief that was, for both of us.
For me, work was a refuge. It was one place where I could get my mind off chemotherapy, lymph nodes and recurrence rates. Sure, work had a whole new set of aggravations – deadlines, staff meetings, bosses and my own nagging inability to distinguish “its” from “it’s.” Yet, after what we were going through at home, these aggravations were refreshingly trivial.
Nothing like a life-threatening disease to make small problems seem – almost – cute by comparison.
But what about Carol? I must admit, she ended up quitting a job, which she had wanted to quit anyway. She decided that being on chemotherapy and raising two kids was job enough for her, at least for a while. She had some bad days during chemo – actually, some bad months – but she ended up taking a new job a lot sooner than she expected.
Elizabeth Edwards will have some bad days, too, and probably some bad months. Yet as the wife of the candidate and not the candidate herself, she surely will have the flexibility to adjust her schedule as needed. On the weeks she can campaign, she will. On the weeks she can’t, she won’t.
But that still begs the question: What does she want her husband to do?
I asked Carol what she would have thought if I had proposed to take a year off work when she got sick. Her aghast expression was answer enough.
Besides the fact that the entire notion was outside the realm of possibility, this would have been a supremely lousy idea for two reasons.
First of all, on top of everything else, she did not want me hanging around the house all day, staring at her and asking every 10 minutes, “How you feeling? You feeling OK?”
Nothing like obsessive, oppressive spousal anxiety to increase your own anxiety levels.
Second, her most fervent wish was that her cancer would not disrupt every part of our lives. I think this is what well-meaning people most often get wrong. They think that cancer patients want to change everything about their lives so they can spend every waking moment “fighting” cancer. They think cancer patients want to have new, tumor-beating Cancer Lives and they want to their families to mobilize into supersupportive Cancer Families.
Maybe some do. Carol certainly did not. She felt lousy enough about having cancer without the added guilt and responsibility of making everyone else in the family revamp their entire lives.
She wanted our kids to enjoy school, have fun with their friends, go on school trips and do everything else they would do under normal circumstances. She wanted us all to have our old lives back.
And she wanted me to get my derriere back to work.
So the thought that John Edwards would be showing his devotion to his wife by abandoning what is clearly his – and their – plans for the future strikes our household as either naïve or willfully obtuse.
Circumstances may change. Sometime in the next year, developments may demand that the Edwards change their plans, or even abandon their plans.
But to imagine that it will be somehow “healing” for the Edwards family to stop in their tracks right now and cower to cancer?
Well, it makes sense only if your relationship with cancer is strictly, and safely, theoretical.