Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and. . . – Book Summary

Patricia Morgan Resiliency Books book summary, self-care 0

Quote by Elizabeth Edwards: I am his and he is mine.

In 2009, Elizabeth Edwards published Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life’s Adversities. It is a quick 213-page read, written in a frank but intimate style.

Overview:

Edwards attracted a significant and fond following in 2004 when her husband, John Edwards, ran for Vice-President of the United States. Her three main stories of adversity involve her sixteen-year-old son’s death, her battle with breast cancer and her husband’s infidelity. She shares these painful life events with clear integrity, gritty rawness, and uncommon graciousness.

Basic Concepts:

Life includes pain and joy, light and dark, tragedy and blessings.
Doing our best is all that is required.
There are circumstances that trigger self-doubt.
We demonstrate resilience when we make changes to help us take the next step through difficult times.
Self-love and self-compassion are part of grieving, recovery from loss and trauma, and coping with significant emotional pain.

Elizabeth Edwards Quotes:

“I thought of the people who had written me in 2001 – and many were writing again — who had said that you are alive today and that is a victory. The only answer was to live, as long and as well as I could.”
“There, on Democratic Underground, I read a comment someone had posted under a thread offering me support. The comment included lines from a Leonard Cohen song, Anthem: Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
“I was holding on to the life I wanted, even if the life I had was clearly less than what I wanted it to be. I adjusted my sails, but as little as possible.”
“There is a dignity that comes with resisting the word victim and all that it means.”
“Just as I don’t want cancer to take over my life, I don’t want this indiscretion (husband’s affair), however long in duration, to take over my life either. But I need to deal with both; I need to find peace with both.”
“Forgiveness, I have been told, is the gift I give to him; trust he has to earn by himself.”
“Maybe others had a better time, more intimacies, more skin pressed against skin, but this life is mine, these children are mine, this home is mine, and this imperfect man is like me. I am his and he is mine.”
“Nothing will be quite as I want it, but sometimes we eat the toast that is burned on one side anyway, don’t we?”
“I can only be what I am capable of being.”