Campaign a shared mission for the Edwardses

A dark day: April 4, 1996
Politics did not interest the two young lawyers at the start of their careers. Mr. Edwards did not even vote in some elections, and they had intended to raise children and make a good living practicing law.

They embraced parenthood with near professionalism. They held weekly meetings with Wade and Cate, two years younger. Every year they invited hundreds of friends to a Christmas party at their house in Raleigh, with Mrs. Edwards cooking and dozens of children playing upstairs.

Mr. Edwards coached soccer, and his wife assisted, making sure every player had enough time on the field. She arranged her schedule as a bankruptcy lawyer to spend more time with her children in the afternoons. She sewed Halloween costumes for them and their friends.

Everything changed on April 4, 1996.

Mr. and Mrs. Edwards and Cate were packing to spend Easter at their beach house on the North Carolina shore. Wade, a high school junior, had driven ahead with some friends. When Mrs. Edwards saw the trooper at the door, she knew instantly something was wrong.

“Tell me he’s alive,” she pleaded. But her son was dead.

His Jeep Grand Cherokee had fishtailed, then flipped, on a wind-whipped stretch of Interstate 40. He had not been drinking or speeding, and had been wearing a seat belt. The crash killed him instantly. The boy in the car with him escaped with minor injuries.

Wade was an honor student and an athlete, recalled as the boy other parents relied on to drive their children home from parties, the kid who left the popular table to eat lunch with someone sitting alone. And in the quiet after the funeral, his parents despaired.

Mrs. Edwards collapsed in a grocery aisle at the sight of his favorite soda, so her friends took over shopping for a while. Mr. Edwards stopped running because all his routes passed places that reminded him of Wade; friends finally found a forest where father and son had never gone. Both stopped working, and Cate pushed two chairs together in her parents’ bedroom and slept there for two years, until she was 16.

Mr. and Mrs. Edwards grieved in different ways. She read the books on Wade’s senior year reading list aloud at his grave. She spent sleepless hours in online bereavement groups, seeking and offering solace. Feeling overwhelmed at restaurants, she would retreat to the restroom to run her fingers over a photograph of her boy. When she met strangers, she would tell them about him.

Mr. Edwards was quieter, friends recalled. The accident had shaken his guiding belief that if you worked hard and did things right, everything would work out. Such faith did not account for the unexpected death of a child.

Many marriages do not endure such a loss, but their ordeal drew the Edwardses closer.

“I often say two wet noodles can’t hold each other up, but John and Elizabeth were really able to grieve very personally and yet together,” Ms. Winstead said. “While each of them struggled, I don’t think their relationship ever struggled.”

Mr. Edwards said, “We clung to each other, and we got through it together.”

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And together, they pushed forward, as they described it, “to parent Wade’s memory.”

They began planning a computer lab next to Wade’s high school. It seemed a fitting tribute; Wade had thought it unfair that many students did not have computers, when teachers gave extra points for papers that were typed instead of handwritten. Six months later — after hiring staff members, raising money and buying and renovating a building — the Wade Edwards Learning Lab opened.

Mr. Edwards went back to work. And, after asking Cate’s blessing to have more children, Mrs. Edwards, then 46, began giving herself hormone shots. The birth of Emma Claire Edwards, almost exactly two years after Wade’s death, would be a turning point. “That was really good for my parents, to be able to have love for another child again,” Cate said.

Mr. Edwards had just won the Democratic primary for the Senate. A few weeks before Wade’s death, the boy and his parents went to Washington because he had won a Voice of America essay contest. They had been given a tour of the White House by Mrs. Clinton and had met Senator Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican. Wade had remarked how good his father would be as a senator.

Friends say Mr. Edwards probably would have gone into politics even if Wade had lived. But his death provided a catalyst.

“When Wade died, I think John examined life and came to the conclusion that he wanted to try to paint with a broader brush and try to change the world not one family at a time, not one person at a time, but in bigger ways that would have more permanent and lasting effects,” said David Kirby, Mr. Edwards’s former law partner. “He sees what he does in his political career as a way to honor his son.”

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