Elizabeth Edwards

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Elizabeth Edwards bigraphy, stories - deceased wife of John Edwards

Elizabeth Edwards : biography

03 July 1949 – 07 December 2010

Elizabeth Anania Edwards Mary Elizabeth Anania

Edwards lived a private life until her husband’s rise as senator and ultimately unsuccessful vice presidential and presidential campaigns. She was his chief policy advisor during his presidential bid, and was instrumental in pushing him towards more liberal stances on subjects such as universal health care. She was also an advocate of gay marriage and was against the war in Iraq, both topics about which she and her husband disagreed.

In the final years of her life, Edwards publicly dealt with her husband’s admission of an extramarital affair and her breast cancer, writing two books and making numerous media appearances. She separated from John Edwards in early 2010. On December 6, 2010, her family announced that her cancer had spread and her doctors had recommended that further treatment would be unproductive. She died the following day.

Personal life

Edwards met John Edwards when they were both law students, and they married on July 30, 1977.Saving Graces, p. 342.

Early in their marriage, the couple had two children: Lucius Wade (known as Wade) (born 1979) and Cate (born 1982). Wade was killed on April 4, 1996, when he lost control of his Jeep while driving from their home in Raleigh to the family’s beach house near Wilmington. Three weeks before his death, Wade Edwards was honored by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton at the White House as one of ten finalists in an essay contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Voice of America. Wade, accompanied by his parents and his sister, met North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. After Wade died, Helms entered his essay and his obituary into the Congressional Record.

Following Wade’s death, the Edwardses decided to have more children, and Elizabeth underwent fertility treatments. They had a daughter, Emma Claire (born 1998), and a son, Jack (born 2000). After John’s January 21, 2010, public admission that he fathered a child with another woman, Elizabeth legally separated from him, intending to file for divorce after North Carolina’s mandatory one-year separation policy, though she later stated that they had no intent to divorce unless one of them would want to remarry.

Professional life

Edwards began her career as a law clerk for a federal judge, then moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in 1978 to become an associate at the law firm of Harwell Barr Martin & Sloan. In 1981, she and her husband moved their family to Raleigh, where she worked in the Office of the Attorney General, and at the law firm Merriman, Nicholls, and Crampton. She used her maiden name professionally until 1996, when she retired from legal practice upon the death of her son and changed her name to Elizabeth Edwards. Much of her time after leaving legal practice was devoted to the administration of the Wade Edwards Foundation. She taught legal writing as an adjunct instructor at the University of North Carolina School of Law and worked as a substitute teacher in the Wake County Public Schools. In August 2009, she opened a furniture store in Chapel Hill.

In September 2006, Random House published her first book, Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength from Friends and Strangers, focusing on the ways in which various communities have helped her through the trials of her life, from her itinerant military childhood to the death of her son and her early bout with breast cancer. In May 2009, they published her second book, Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life’s Adversities, further discussing the return of her illness, the deaths of her father and son, the effect of these events on her marriage, her husband’s infidelity, and the general state of health care in America. Both books are best-sellers.

Early life

Mary Elizabeth Anania, the daughter of Mary Elizabeth Thweatt Anania (1923–2012) and Vincent Anania (1920–2008), grew up in a military family, moving many times and never having a hometown. Her father, a United States Navy pilot, was transferred from military base to military base during her childhood and adolescence; for part of her childhood, she lived in Japan, where her father was stationed. She relates in her book Saving Graces that one of the difficult relocations that she went through was moving during her senior year of high school.Saving Graces, pp. 165–166. Some of her childhood friends’ fathers were killed in war and Edwards relates childhood memories of attending their funerals.Resilience, p. 13. She also relates the stress of living at a military base with hospital facilities that handled a constant stream of wounded soldiers while her father was away fighting in Vietnam.Resilience, p. 25.