Hope for life than survival

It will be nine years this December that Geraldine Ferraro, who came from 1148 Longfellow Ave. in the South Bronx to be a woman running for vice president of the United States, was diagnosed with a blood cancer known as multiple myeloma.

Ferraro had just made her last big run in politics, trying to beat out Charles Schumer and be the Democratic nominee from New York for the Senate. She couldn’t get out of bed when it was over and thought it was the campaign that had laid her out. It was cancer instead. She was 63, six years older than Elizabeth Edwards is today.

All Geraldine Ferraro has done since then is what Edwards, wife of a man now running for President, says she plans to do: Ferraro has lived her life. She has done this without asking anybody except the doctors and the people who love her how to do it.

“I don’t stop,” Ferraro was saying yesterday from her office at Blank Rome, a national law firm where she works full time in public affairs. “I’ve kept my day job here, I’ve kept my television job [with Fox News]. I’ve kept my job as a wife, as a mother, as a grandmother.”

She is as she has always been, a smart, tough woman out of New York, the second-grade teacher who made it through Fordham Law at night, who made it to Congress after that and finally to a spot on Walter Mondale’s ticket in 1984. Nine years for her now living with cancer and chemotherapy and all the other drugs and a stem-cell transplant two years ago. She will be 72 in August. Here she is.

And smart with Gerry Ferraro means smart enough to know that she is not Elizabeth Edwards and that Edwards is not her. Ferraro doesn’t tell anybody else what the rules are, how they should do it. It doesn’t mean she can’t stand on the sidelines of this presidential race and root for one of the candidates’ wives. They are in the same club. Famous American women trying to beat cancer.

“When I first found out,” Ferraro said, “I thought short-term. I think everybody does. But I don’t think that way anymore. I’ve found out that a disease that’s incurable but treatable doesn’t have to be a death sentence. When I was first diagnosed, my doctor kept telling me I’d live long enough to see my grandchildren go to college.” She laughed here and said, “Now he says I’m going to live long enough to pay for them to go.”

Elizabeth Edwards, though, is told toquit, mostly by people who know asmuch about her situation as they know about flying jets. Edwards is told by Rush Limbaugh, that phony, thatmost people turn to God when faced with cancer, but John Edwards and his wife turn to the campaign. When Limbaugh was in pain, ofcourse, he turned to his maid andtold her to go find some Vicodin.

It is fascinating watching people, especially ones from Limbaugh’s side of the field, come after John and Elizabeth Edwards, talk about their marriage and their values and their ambition. You wonder how these people would see things if Edwards were some big Republican front-runner from the far right. Or how they would come after Rudy Giuliani - six weddings in his marriage that we know about - and the frisky Newt Gingrich, another phony, if Giuliani and Gingrich were Democrats.

The President tells his press secretary Tony Snow, another whose cancer has returned, to “stay strong.” Elizabeth Edwards is supposed to stay home.

“You know what the worst part would be for her?” Geraldine Ferraro said. “And what would have been the worst part for me? Sitting at home and having my husband sitting there staring at me.”

Ferraro paused then and said, “You know what I believe hurts you as much as anything when you’re trying to live with cancer? Stress. You know what I believe can cause stress? Giving up something you believe in. Or asking somebody you love to give up something they believe in.”

“I will tell you this,” she said. “If I didn’t carry on with my life, I wouldn’t feel as good as I do now. I would not be as good as I am now.”

Maybe Elizabeth Edwards is one of those fighting a fight she cannot win. Maybe she loses, no matter how brave she is, and her husband loses, whether she is at his side or not.

You don’t have to cheer for him to cheer for her.

“There is no question she is doing the right thing,” Gerry Ferraro said yesterday. “I see people who find out they have what I have and decide they’re going to die. And you know what? They die. She wants to live, with cancer, on her own terms. And she will.”

Ferraro is no more heroic than any other cancer patient. Neither is Elizabeth Edwards. They both can afford medicine not everybody in this country can. But you read and hear that this issue, about whether John Edwards should quit the campaign or not, has divided the country. It hasn’t. If there is a division, it is here:

Those who celebrate Elizabeth Edwards for choosing to live her life with cancer as she sees fit, and those who try to live it for her. She absolutely should get on with things. The ones who think she shouldn’t should just get lost.

Source : www.nydailynews.com