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By Susan Page, Mimi Hall, Liz Szabo and Fredreka Schouten, USA TODAY
Elizabeth Edwards relished the rough-and-tumble of politics, but in the end it was her personal struggles — with the death of a teenage son, with the humiliation of an unfaithful husband and with a diagnosis of incurable cancer — that forged a connection with millions of Americans.
The estranged wife of John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator and 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee, died Tuesday at her home in Chapel Hill, N.C. She was 61.
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The title of her memoir couldn't have been more apt: Resilience.
"The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered," she wrote in a note posted Monday on Facebook, after doctors told her she had at best weeks to live. "We know that. But I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that I am grateful."
She was never a stereotypical political spouse. She called herself an "anti-Barbie" and acknowledged her struggles with her weight, and she let her role in her husband's political ambitions show. When Edwards began arranging dinners with national political reporters before launching his bid for the 2004 Democratic nomination, she was at the table, chiming in. When USA TODAY had an interview with Edwards at a diner during his first trip to New Hampshire as a candidate in 2003, she automatically slid into the seat next to him.
After the primaries in that campaign, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry had won the nomination, but he picked Edwards as his running mate.
The day after Election Day 2004, however, she discovered she had breast cancer. In 2007, as John Edwards was preparing for a second bid for the presidency, the cancer recurred. Then he acknowledged an affair with a campaign videographer, at first denying and then admitting he had fathered her child.
"It's incredibly difficult to go through the death of a child, cancer and the infidelity of a husband — that would be trying to any human being," says Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. "To then have to do it with the kind of a scrutiny of being a public figure and not misstep while doing it is pretty extraordinary. She went through this in the public eye with a good deal of grace. I suppose graceful would be the word I would use if I had to boil down Elizabeth Edwards into a single word."
"There was a lot of sympathy for her, but I don't think anyone ever looked on her particularly as a victim," says Myra Gutin, a professor at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., who has studied first ladies.
Defiance amid diagnosis
Elizabeth Edwards' candor about her cancer and her defiance in the face of its grim diagnosis made her something of a hero to breast-cancer survivors who would mob her at book signings and as she campaigned in 2008.
"Something she told me is so true: When she meets another breast cancer survivor, she instantly knows her better than she knows some of her best friends," says Brenda Coffee of Boerne, Texas. Coffee wrote a book titled Breast Cancer Sisterhood, and Elizabeth Edwards contributed an essay for it. "I agree. We're total strangers who become instant sisters who understand and mirror one another's deepest hopes and fears before we've even said hello."
President Obama, Vice President Biden, senators and others offered tributes Tuesday night.
"I came to know and admire Elizabeth over the course of the presidential campaign," said Obama, whose mother died of breast cancer. "In her life, Elizabeth Edwards knew tragedy and pain. Many others would have turned inward; many others in the face of such adversity would have given up. But through all that she endured, Elizabeth revealed a kind of fortitude and grace that will long remain a source of inspiration."
Like many military brats, Mary Elizabeth Anania grew up moving from place to place. Her father was a Navy pilot, her mother a stay-at-home mom.
She was born in Jacksonville, Fla., on July 3, 1949. At one point, the family lived in Japan. Last summer, she took her children there to show them where she had spent part of her childhood.
She graduated from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and stayed on to study English and then law. It was in law school that she met John Edwards. They married in 1977.
Elizabeth Edwards practiced law until 1996, when her son Wade lost control of his Jeep while driving to the family's beach house. It was swept off the highway and rolled over. He was killed.
In a long season of grieving, she would go to her son's grave every day and read to him.
The Edwardses decided to have more children, a process that required difficult hormone treatments. At age 48, she had Emma Claire, and when she turned 50 in 2000, she had Jack. The towheaded children were seen frequently on the campaign trail in 2004 and 2008, often being minded by older sister Cate.
Throughout the 2004 race and during her husband's 2008 presidential bid, she was known as his toughest and closest adviser and political strategist.
Campaign focus groups discovered that her presence was a considerable asset for him: Her down-to-earth manner and wholesome looks helped counter the impression among some in focus groups run by his campaign that he was too young and too slick to be president.
And she was an indefatigable campaigner. In Game Change, an insiders' account of the 2008 campaign, authors John Heilemann and Mark Halperin portray her as mercurial and demanding, at odds with the serene and warm presence that she conveyed on camera.
Behind the scenes, their marriage was strained by allegations in The National Enquirer that John Edwards was having an affair with his campaign videographer, Rielle Hunter.
In 2010, long after the last campaign ended, he finally admitted what he had denied for two years: that he not only had an affair with Hunter but also had a child, Frances Quinn Hunter, with her.
Edwards already had been battling her cancer for years. She and her husband had wowed the political establishment and the electorate with what seemed like an uncommonly brave showing in the face of a grim diagnosis. The couple said John Edwards' campaign would go on.
At the time, Republican pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick told USA TODAY that the family's challenge "serves as a stark reminder that these are not simply candidates with issues, platforms, but people with families and struggles. It reminds people of the personal factor."
On Tuesday, Biden noted Edwards' gift for connecting with the public.
"She was an inspiration to all who knew her," he said in a statement after learning of her death, "and to those who felt they knew her."
Her battle with cancer
She first found a lump in her breast in 2004 while her husband was campaigning for the vice presidency.
After a cancer diagnosis was confirmed, she announced that she would undergo chemotherapy, followed by surgery and radiation. When doctors administer chemotherapy before surgery, it is typically in the hope of shrinking the tumor so they can perform a less-invasive surgery — a lumpectomy — instead of a full mastectomy.
"The same day our campaign ended at Faneuil Hall" in Boston, Kerry said in a statement issued Tuesday night, "we saw Elizabeth head off to Mass General to confront this terrible disease. America came to know her in a different and even more personal way as she fought back with enormous grace and dignity."
Three years later, Edwards made an even more somber announcement, revealing that the cancer had returned in her bones.
In a televised news conference with her husband by her side, she matter-of-factly described how the recurrence was discovered.
She had tried to pick up a chest of drawers and hurt her back. Then her husband came home and hugged her. It hurt, and when she pulled away from him, they both heard a pop from her rib cage. An X-ray showed a fracture and a suspicous area on a rib on her right side.
Tests found a malignant tumor on the bone.
"I consider all of those circumstances unbelievably fortuitous," she told reporters, because it allowed doctors to spot the cancer at an early stage and begin the treatments that would allow her to live 3½ more years.
Edwards' battle with cancer shows both the successes and the limitations of the latest cancer therapies that patients endure.
Advanced breast cancer is treatable, but it is not curable, says Hal Burstein of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institutein Boston. Doctors can use a number of relatively new drugs — including hormone treatments, conventional chemotherapy and an antibody called Herceptin — to keep tumors under control and buy patients more time while keeping a relatively good quality of life.
When one drug regimen fails, doctors can try another, Burstein says. Most women with advanced breast cancers undergo five or six different lines of chemotherapy, stretching out survival to a median of three or four years, he says.
Even when cancer spreads to the liver, as it did with Edwards, doctors can opt to treat the metastases with chemotherapy, which can keep cancer under control for some time, says breast cancer expert Sandra Swain, medical director of the Washington Cancer Institute at Washington Hospital Center.
Eventually, however, patients may become so weakened by disease that chemotherapy is no longer useful, says Ira Byock, director of palliative medicine at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
No additional therapies
On Monday, Edwards announced that her doctors had recommended no additional anti-cancer therapies.
"There are lots of chemotherapies and late-stage treatments," Byock says. "But people have to be strong enough to benefit from them. If a person is just weak from the ravages of an illness, it makes no sense to put them through those invasive procedures."
Pam Schmid, a fellow breast cancer survivor from Edwards' home state of North Carolina, struggles to keep from crying when talking about Edwards, whom she met briefly at a meeting of LIVESTRONG, Lance Armstrong's cancer advocacy group.
"It breaks our hearts," Schmid says, "because it could be us."
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Saturday, October 13, 2012
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