Elizabeth Edwards, Rest in Peace

Great Tribute from a reporter, Melinda Henneberger, who traveled with Elizabeth on the campaigns.

The most disarming, beloved and beleaguered woman in the American political arena died of cancer Tuesday, at age 61, at the Chapel Hill estate that Mary Elizabeth Anania Edwards once told me she’d built in part to compensate for the succession of modest homes she’d lived in as a Navy brat.

“From years of living in military housing, I like a big room,” the wife of then-presidential hopeful John Edwards said in an interview in front of her hotel lobby-sized Christmas tree three years ago. Because some of the bedrooms she’d had as a kid were so dinky you couldn’t fit the bed in and still close the door, “my dream was to turn in circles if you wanted to.” The 28,000-square-foot result was just one of the ambitions Elizabeth willed to life, brick by brick, along with a few heartfelt myths and the clear understanding that she did not want to be remembered as anybody’s cuckold, or some modern-day female Job.

Before their 16-year-old son Wade’s Jeep was blown off the road in a freak storm in 1996, John and Elizabeth “had the storybook life and the storybook marriage,” his former law partner David Kirby told me as Edwards was preparing for his second presidential run. But like most pre-Disney fairy tales, it also included some dark and confusing turns in the woods. On the campaign trail, Edwards’ favorite fallback phrase was “It’s not complicated!” — but the years they lived in public certainly were. For most of us, her story really only began on the worst day of her life, when the state troopers came to the door to say Wade had been killed and she promised herself that if her husband ever had to hear bad news again, it wouldn’t be from her. I’ve often wondered if any of what followed — his political career, the birth of their two younger children, her breast cancer, which was advanced even when she discovered an egg-sized lump six years ago, and his affair with Rielle Hunter, who bore him a daughter — would ever have happened if Wade had stopped for a Coke instead of being where he was, when he was.

Link to complete Article:  Elizabeth Edwards, Rest in Peace.