“Crumbs” — by Eric Marcus

No doubt about it, there were breadcrumbs on my dinner companion’s chin. As we discussed the unusually mild late fall evening that made it possible for us to sit under an open sky in the garden of a New York City restaurant, I hoped the crumbs would dislodge themselves. But they didn’t. So although we had only just met, I mentioned the crumbs in the nicest way possible. Given that my dinner companion was the reason that two dozen of us had gathered together to break bread, I thought she would want to know sooner rather than later about the food on her face.

Her two attempts to discreetly wipe away the errant crumbs with her fingers failed to do the job, so I volunteered and used my napkin. “It’s the neuropathy,” she explained. “I can’t always feel things with my fingertips.”

Elizabeth Edwards mentioned her neuropathy in the same offhand way that my friend Suzy, who also suffered from stage IV breast cancer, would have referred to it. It was the same way that my friends who had AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s talked about the side effects of the various toxic AIDS treatments then used to suppress the destructiveness of the disease. It was just a fact of life.

From a distance I had long admired Elizabeth Edwards, although this was my first occasion meeting her. Given that she’s incredibly articulate, smart, and passionate about issues that are important to me, I expected to be impressed. And I was. But up close she’s also warm and artifice-free. Elizabeth seemed like one of us, except that she started her day in North Carolina with another round of chemotherapy. And when the evening ended my partner and I would walk home and Elizabeth would go to a hotel, sleep for a few hours, and fly out (on a commercial airline) early the next morning to another campaign stop, just one more in a long series scheduled through the end of the year.

Elizabeth Edwards is not running for president. But as we all know, the person we choose to spend our life with says a lot about us. Elizabeth and John chose each other decades ago and now Elizabeth is spending some of the precious time she has left working with John to see that he’s elected president. We can only hope that when the time comes for the American people to choose a new president that we choose as wisely as John Edwards did when he chose Elizabeth.