Page 186 of Jackie

They map a course of treatment.

“We think it’s curable,” the doctor says.

Define think, I almost say.

“I still want to work,” I tell Maurice quietly as we wait to take the elevator down.

—

He is next to me in the living room when I tell John and Caroline. I brace myself for the sudden devastation in their faces but can’t bear it when it comes. They cry and hug me, their arms as tight around my body as they were when they were small—these two extraordinary beings, each the split half of my heart, and for a moment I feel the careful walls I’ve made weaken as my children’s grief and fear wash into mine.

…

“I’ve decided it’s just something else to get through,” I tell Arthur Schlesinger on the phone. “I’ll wear a turban and start a new trend. The nurses are good to us. When I have scans, Maurice and I sneak in before seven in the morning. I wear a hooded cape and wait outside in the car. He checks to make sure the waiting room is clear before he walks me in.”

I listen to my voice recounting this, like it’s happening to someone else. I think suddenly of Clint Hill. Where is he now?

“What do the doctors say?” Arthur asks.

“I’ve been through hard things before, as you know. Now I just need to get through this.”

Hanging up the phone, I go into Caroline’s old room, the one I use for yoga. The walls are as Caroline left them, one filled with black-and-white photographs of Jack. Everything is as she left it, the school notebooks and horse-show ribbons, every knickknack on the bureau and the shelves, as if my daughter, fifteen again, might walk in, throw herself down on the bed with a question and her father’s eyes and that mane of dark-blond hair.

“Why should I be a public figure?” I overheard her complain to a friend once. It was not the question I found thrilling but the defiance in my daughter’s voice—an anger I recognized that she would sharpen to carve her own life. I roll my yoga mat out, leave the overhead off. I lie down and pull my knees into my chest, the curve of my spine pressing into the floor, feeling vertebra by vertebra, those slight interlocking knobs of bone with just enough space between them.

—

I never quite did what they wanted, did I? I wasn’t who they thought or who they needed me to be. I chose to fail them. Even during those four days, I was not brave….

—

I listen to the tiny pop of vertebrae as they release. My legs rise, lifting over my head, the long exhale as the bones of my cervical spine shift.

—

I was not strong. I did not hold the country together. In a way, I was barely there. To me, it was not about dignity or majesty or theater. It was never the way they told it. I only did what I thought was right, and I did the best I could. I did what anyone would have done to honor the integrity of someone they loved.

—

I never loved anyone the way that I loved you.

…

Doris Kearns Goodwin once mentioned to me how remarkable it was that I’d been able to raise my children in such a way that each developed as a free, independent spirit even as the three of us shared such a deep bond.

I smiled and said, “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”

I could have added, I’ve often felt it was the only thing.

—

I talk with my friend Nancy Tuckerman about how to present my illness to the press.

“You don’t think we should say anything about the stage, do you?” Tucky asks.

“You could say early stage.”

“Is it?”

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