Judging is different than asking tough questions. Katie Couric’s interview with John and Elizabeth Edwards on “Sixty Minutes” was, as the couple themselves said this week, entirely in-bounds. Couric was simply airing the issues, which any good journalist must do. This was not “inappropriately harsh,” as one critic on CBSNews.com put it, but an extremely useful contribution to the de-stigmatizing of cancer and the healthy national dialogue now taking place.
But parts of that conversation have been offensive—even appalling—to anyone who has actually grappled with a deadly diagnosis firsthand. I don’t mean to pick on Jane Ridley, a New York Daily News columnist. She was simply expressing publicly what a lot of people have been thinking and saying in private. Here is what she wrote about John and Elizabeth Edwards on Tuesday: “Driven by ego, this wealthy man who indeed has everything—including a second, designer family started when his wife was 48 and 50—stands firm, no matter the cost. Ambition has blinded his judgment and Elizabeth’s, too…Someone has to be the adult and say ‘your health comes first.’”
It’s hard to know where to begin with this tripe. Maybe Ridley or someone close to her has had cancer, but I seriously doubt it. No one who has been in that awful club would write this.
First, she suggests that John Edwards was stubborn about staying in the race, when it’s clear he would have left it instantly had his wife said she needed him to. (Should her condition deteriorate, this may yet happen). Second, Ridley implies that Elizabeth Edwards’s in vitro fertilization treatments—driven by her husband’s ambition for a “designer” family—caused her cancer. While the odds of cancer rise with late pregnancies, there is no evidence that it was causal in this case. Ridley adds that Edwards was “desperate” to have more children because of the death of their son, Wade, in a 1996 car accident—as if, in some way, she should have known she might have this coming.
This fits a familiar pattern of thought among people who have not suffered from cancer: there must be some explanation, some cosmic justice at work. That’s a common way to make sense of cancer—blame the victim. This is not nice, not nice at all, even in the case of smokers (a group to which Edwards does not belong, to the best of my knowledge). Cancer patients do it to themselves all the time, which is not helpful. But when an outsider indulges in this spurious logic, the effect is doubly cruel. No one can make sense of cancer because cancer makes no sense. It is random and non-logical, whether genetic or environmental in origin.
Ridley’s core argument—a fairly common reaction—is that the Edwards’s invocation of service “rings hollow to every mother in the land.” Every mother? This isn’t about ambition trumping love of children and it takes a lot of nerve to suggest that it is. It’s about how to cope with the worst news imaginable. Ridley and the other know-it-alls around the water cooler are essentially telling Elizabeth to give up. “If I had given up everything that my life was about, I’d let cancer win before it needed to,” Elizabeth told Couric. She said she wasn’t ready to “start dying.”
That’s not ego speaking, but a genuine reaction to her predicament. No one can say how you—or anyone else—will react until actually faced with a devastating diagnosis. In my case—and Tony Snow’s, Laura Ingraham’s, Jay Monahan’s (the late husband of Katie Couric) Elizabeth Edward’s and hundreds of thousands of others—the choice was to try to hold onto as much of our old life as humanly possible. Don’t judge that.
