Elizabeth Edwards is Dying: Memories of Her Last Stop in Iowa in 2004 and of Her Last Stop in Life

Sixty-one year old Elizabeth Edwards is dying. The cancer treatments have stopped. The doctors say they would be unproductive. Her family---including husband John---have said, bluntly, "She is dying." They have gathered by her bedside. One wonders how awkward that may be for the group.

The cancer had invaded Elizabeth's legs, her spine, her skull, her bones. Now it has invaded her liver. On December 6, 2010, treatment was discontinued, in the wake of that news. The invading army of cancer cells that are now totally out-of-control.

I know what liver cancer means. So does Elizabeth Edwards and so do her doctors. It killed my father.

Many thoughts flood my mind. Like most people who are not complete monsters, I am impressed by the grace and dignity of Elizabeth Edwards' final words. This was a woman who was accomplished in her own right: an attorney, a writer, a mother, a tireless campaigner in two unsuccessful presidential campaigns. She suffered through the death of her teen-aged son, the infidelity of her husband, and the news that her husband had fathered a child with "the other woman." She bore two children late in life, very probably with the aid of hormonal therapy. Since estrogen has long been implicated in feeding cancer cells, one wonders if giving birth to Emma Claire when she was 48, in 1998, and to Jack in 2000, when she was 50, could have been a mitigating factor in developing the breast cancer that is now claiming her life?

In April, 2007, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a campaign stop at which I was present, Elizabeth bravely announced that doctors felt anti-estrogen drugs might help her condition and said, "I consider that a good sign. It means there are more medications to which I can expect to be responsive." But, of course, the Grim Reaper cannot be cheated forever. Sixty-one years of life seems to be Elizabeth Edwards' allotted time on this planet.

As she lies dying, news reports say estranged husband John is present. The couple is legally separated and has been since January 21, 2010. North Carolina law says that you must be legally separated for one year before you can file for divorce. Elizabeth Edwards had said she planned to file for divorce following the mandatory one-year period. She had also announced plans to open a furniture store in 2009. Now, neither of those plans will happen, because life is what happens when you're making other plans, as the old saying goes.

Writing on her Facebook page the woman who was once the wife of a front-running Vice Presidential and Presidential candidate (John Edwards) wrote: "The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered -- You all know that I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces---my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope. These graces have carried me through difficult times and they have brought more joy to the good times than I ever could have imagined -- It isn't possible to put into words the love and gratitude I feel to everyone who has and continues to support and inspire me every day. To you I simply say: you know."

"You know." That is what she wrote on the note she placed in her son, Wade's coffin, dead at 16 in a tragic car accident and a catalyst for the couple's decision to have 2 more children to join older sister Cate (Catherine). As Elizabeth Edwards said in one of her two best-selling books (Saving Graces: Finding Strength from Friends and Strangers, Aug. 4, 2007), of the phrase "You know": "It is the note I send to each of you who helped me and touched me and laughed with me or cried, who climbed or fell with me," said Elizabeth in her book.

Elizabeth Edwards wrote a less-successful sequel to her 2007 book entitled Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life's Adversities (June 29, 2010). It was less successful, in part, because it didn't "dish" on the split with husband John after his infidelity and the fathering of a child with Reilly Hunter. Elizabeth couldn't even bring herself to utter the other woman's name during a television interview with Oprah, and she repeatedly used the term "John's indiscretion" in her second book, as a euphemism for the knife to the heart his affair must have been. One wonders what will happen now. While Elizabeth had advised President Obama on healthcare issues, John Edwards has slipped from public view and one does not wonder why that has happened.

I flash back to a wintry day in Davenport, Iowa (Nov. 1, 2004, Monday) at 1416 West 16th Street and a small renovated elementary school being used as Democratic headquarters there during the 2004 presidential campaign. As a member of the press corps, I stand on the steps to the conference room, waiting for Mrs. Edwards' arrival in the building. The announcement had gone out that Elizabeth Edwards is to "rally" the troops the night before the 2004 election.She must know she has breast cancer now, because she will announce it to the world only 2 days later.

Behind me, a few steps down the staircase, I see various dignitaries, including the political reporter for the Quad City Times and some local Democratic office-holders. Elizabeth Edwards arrives. Her handlers only allow local television personnel entry into the small room where she will be interviewed, leading them in one at a time. Mrs. Edwards passes quite close to me. She looks haggard and gray. She is not smiling. Earlier in the campaign, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Elizabeth Edwards discovered a lump in her breast.

On November 3, 2004, the day after the Democratic candidates lose the election to George W. Bush, Elizabeth officially announces she has breast cancer. All of the scandal of the "Inquirer" story revealing John Edwards' affair is in the distance. That will happen during the 2008 campaign, when her husband will again run, attempting to become the next President of the United States. Right now, in 2004, as her life begins to unravel, leading towards a mere final 6 years of life, she is a wife campaigning with her husband to win the election as the Vice Presidential nominee,a man who is playing second fiddle to Presidential nominee John Kerry.

I think back to 2008 and Invesco Field in Denver, four years after Elizabeth Edwards' diagnosis. This day is long after her husband has left the 2008 race amidst the Reilly Hunter scandal and many months after I shared an elevator in Des Moines with John's parents while they talked of how they would leave for New Hampshire in the morning.

We all wait in the stadium for Barack Obama to take the stage. I am seated next to a delegation from North Carolina. Directly behind me is the German ambassador to the United Nations. Across the aisle from me is "Daily Show" comedian Mo Rocca. Above me, in the press box, I can see Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States, through the glass windows of the VIP seating area.

I ask the Democrats from North Carolina seated next to me about John Edwards' run for the nomination, now that we know about Reilly Hunter and all the other sordid details of the disintegration of the Edwards' marriage. The North Carolina natives are not sympathetic to Elizabeth Edwards, declaring that she had to know that her husband's candidacy, had it been successful, would have been catastrophic for the Democratic Party. They are unforgiving, cold-hearted. They just want her to go away.

Elizabeth Edwards is going away, but not in the way the disgruntled North Carolinians meant that day in the stadium where the Denver Broncos play.

I flash back to a hospital room at the Mayo Clinic. My mother, my father and me. My father is terminally ill with colon cancer that has spread to his liver. It is Labor Day, 1987.

"Just take him home and make him comfortable," they tell me, their youngest daughter who has driven them to Rochester, Minnesota from Independence, Iowa.

"There's nothing we can do." They give us Halcyon for his night sleeping and other strong drugs for pain.

He hallucinates now, the cancer having spread to his brain. He tries to rise in the night, his early-stage Alzheimer's turning him into not only a terminally ill cancer patient but a "Sundowner," as the medicos term those who roam the halls at night, their minds afflicted by dementia.

"How long does he have?" I ask the experts.

"We can't say. Maybe weeks. Probably days."

I drive my father and mother home, a long drive. In the days that follow I tell my father, "I love you very much. I can't tell you how proud I am that you were my dad."

I cry as I think of those final days with my father less than a month later.

I cry today for the Edwards family, especially for Elizabeth, but also for Cate and Emma Claire and Jack and -- yes --for John.

The circumstances of Elizabeth Edwards' life encompassed great triumph and great tragedy. I can think of only one Elizabeth with more drama in life; both were great beauties in their day.

Who do I mean? "You know."