After you have cancer, people both do and do not want to know how you are. It isn't that they don't care, exactly. But often, it is hard for them to hear anything other than one word: Great! If you said the truer thing -- I hope I'm OK, but none of us really knows, do we? -- it would clear the room. That's how we are about death.
Which is why the single most important thing Elizabeth Edwards said on 60 Minutes the other night was "We're all going to die." And it's this unflinching acknowledgment of mortality that, paradoxically, makes her so fully available for swing-for-the-fences living.
Yes, we Americans are an optimistic bunch -- or like to think of ourselves as such, anyway. But real optimism, real faith, is the opposite of a Hallmark-card denial of death and other inconvenient facts of life. It's the opposite of play dumb, keep moving, and for God's sake keep the body bags off camera.
Oh, you didn't think I was going to get political? There is no daylight between the personal and the political for Elizabeth Edwards, which is what people mean when they rave, rightly, about how "real" she is.
It's what we respond to in her, and why her recurrence has hit the country so hard.
One of my friends had to pull the car over after hearing the news last week on the radio. A few of us who have had breast cancer, too, called each other -- to curse, mostly, and offer up an "amen" to her decision, their decision.
We'd amen anything she'd decided, of course, anything at all. But if that were me, we all agreed, we'd hope to be right where she is, saying, "Baby, don't you DARE drop out and put that on me."
She believes in her husband, with everything she's got. "We've got the guy," is how she put it to me in an interview during his first presidential campaign. So for her to be the reason he had to quit and go home? Not a chance, because that really would be a death sentence.