Just last week, doctors told Elizabeth Edwards that she had eight weeks to live. So it came as a shock when less than 24 hours after she posted a Facebook message on Monday about her prognosis, the wife of 2004 Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards was dead.
She knew that day was coming — as did most of us who had followed her valiant fight since she first announced that she had breast cancer the day after John Kerry conceded the presidential election to George W. Bush six years ago.
Still, I felt unprepared for the news.
Even though Edwards had told Facebook friends that she stopped taking treatment, I mistakenly thought that meant she had at least several more weeks of life. But as she eloquently wrote, "The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered. We know that. And, yes, there are certainly times when we aren't able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It's called being human."
Even though the odds were long, Edwards seemed indomitable. She had handled her illness with spirit and grace — perhaps a bit more publicly than some people would have liked. But that was her way.
Edwards was not one to keep quiet. She spoke out loudly and eloquently about the need for universal health care and the fight to end poverty, influencing her husband to take on those issues in his second unsuccessful run for the presidency in 2008 and driving the topics to the forefront of discussion so that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had to address them as well.
She discussed her illness in mind-numbing detail, lessening the stigma with her frank talk and blunt assessments of the challenges she faced.
And when news that her supposedly squeaky-clean husband had an affair and fathered a child became public, she spoke out about that, too. She didn't hide her feelings like some Stepford Political Wife. She was angry and she showed it.
While her pronouncements often bordered on TMI, I found it refreshing that a public figure displayed her emotions and grappled with the hurt in an honest way.
She also realized that he was the father of their children, so while she filed for divorce, she didn't push him out of her life. He was among family members at her bedside when she passed away.
A book about the 2008 presidential election,
Game Change, portrayed a different woman from the "St. Elizabeth" that had previously been portrayed in the media. Authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann depicted her as a heartless shrew who belittled her husband, launched profanity-laced tirades at the staff and became unhinged at times. She seemed like a character out of an Edward Albee play. Tellingly, no one who peddled such stories to the authors spoke for attribution; the unflattering portrayals were credited to "insiders."
Oddly enough, after Edwards' death was announced Tuesday, Halperin appeared as a guest on Chris Matthews' Hardball to talk about her. To his credit, Halperin didn't trot out any of these sordid tales, but why he would want to appear on the program says a whole lot more about his ruthless ambition that hers.
I imagine Elizabeth Edwards wasn't nearly as saintly as some accounts portrayed her nor as crazy as Halperin and Heilemann depicted her. The truth was likely somewhere in between, just as it is with most people.
She was a smart and ambitious woman who had the common touch with everyday people. They were drawn to her because she handled some major knocks in life — the death of son, the onset of cancer, a philandering husband — with her head held high and her strength intact. The public can spot a phony a mile away; they knew Elizabeth Edwards was real.
Plus, by most accounts, she was a lot of fun to be around. On TV, a friend of hers by the name of Mutcat Sanders said that he liked to tease her by calling her a "chick," even though she rolled her eyes when he did.
"All I can say about my departed friend who I loved so much is she was a full-tilt, go get 'em, never look back chick," Sanders said.
I imagine she was.
