“You don’t see me anymore,” Elizabeth Edwards screamed as she tore off her blouse and bra, revealing breasts deformed by the grueling treatment inflicted on breast cancer victims. John Edwards “didn’t have much of a reaction,” testified Christina Reynolds, a former Edwards communications adviser and friend of his wife.
Her agony was on full display for all to see at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina in October, 2007. She’d first stormed away and collapsed in an anguished heap in front of a private hangar after learning the National Enquirer published the disturbing details of John’s affair with Rielle Hunter. Reynolds and other female staffers coaxed her into the bathroom to calm down, but, still filled with grief, she returned to confront her husband with her bare breasts. Reynolds and other staffers rushed to cover her naked body, then convinced her to get back in the waiting car where they huddled with her, offering what comfort they could.
John’s stoic reaction was to call her doctor and demand he deal with his wife, then he boarded his private jet, and the door was locked behind him. The pilot taxied away, flying John to a scheduled appearance in South Carolina.
Elizabeth was told in March of that year her cancer had returned, was spreading and was untreatable. By summer, John had confessed his affair with Hunter. Classified as asymptomatic, Elizabeth gamely continued campaigning on his behalf when he promised it was over. Despite her valiant effort to help her husband, he chose to return to his mistress and devastate his wife.
This testimony brought back memories of my mother. She returned from the hospital after her mastectomy, only to find her beloved had disappeared from her life forever. He took the gifts he’d given her and kept the much more expensive gifts she’d given him.
I could still hear her distress across the decades as Reynolds testified in John’s campaign fraud trial. Like John, Mom’s beloved soon had another in his bed. Unfortunately, thousands of women are abandoned just when they need support the most. An MSNBC article revealed 21 percent of women are deserted after receiving a serious diagnosis, while only 3 percent of men find themselves left alone after receiving a life-threatening diagnosis.
Similar results were found for all diagnosis types, in which divorce was much more likely if the woman was the patient.
The researchers suggest men are less able to commit, on the spot, to being caregivers to a sick partner, while women are better at assuming such home and family responsibilities.
“Part of it is a sense of self-preservation,” said study researcher Dr. Marc Chamberlain, director of the neuro-oncology program at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (SCCA). “In men that seems to operate very highly and they don’t feel this codependence, this requirement to nurture their significant other who has this life-threatening illness, but rather decide what’s best for me is to find an alternative mate and abandon my fatally flawed spouse.”
Codependence? Caring enough to stay with an afflicted spouse is codependence? Perhaps women should cure their “codependence” and stop being caretakers to the men in their lives, especially when they become seriously ill. Perhaps they too should learn to be so coldhearted they can simply walk away from their “fatally flawed spouse” and “find an alternative mate.”
An Uncommon Scold 