She is dying and she knows it. When I spent the afternoon with her two years ago, she was exhausted. Just having been re-diagnosed, she faced the cameras with her husband and said she absolutely encouraged him to stay in the race, and that, further, she would be with him every step of the way even if it meant taking the children out of school and traveling full time as the fight wore on. The night before I arrived, she had stayed up late to talk to him about a speech he’d given in California (California!), then had gotten up early to take the younger children, Jack and Emma Claire, to school. The next day we were both flying to Washington for a breast cancer fund-raiser where she was the featured speaker. She had circles under her eyes and I could tell she didn’t feel good (she’d already started an oral chemo regimen) but she was warm and real and in the moment, and so thoroughly gracious I thought I’d cry. When we looked off the huge back porch to the wooded acres beyond, she told me about the paths she had hoped to create over a number of years, even decades, and then both of us did cry.

A less moving moment occurred a few days later when John Edwards returned from the road for the photo shoot. Elizabeth, as always, was self-effacing and made a minimum of fuss over her hair and makeup. Her husband – he of the $400 haircuts and the famous YouTube video in which he primps to the tune of “I Feel Pretty” – was a different story. One of the shots, which featured him driving his family around the property in an all-terrain vehicle, took forever – he insisted on stopping repeatedly in order to touch up his perfect coif. When I mentioned this to a stylist friend of mine who does Elizabeth’s hair when she is in New York – adding that if I had been universally ridiculed for being so obsessed with my appearance, I might have toned it down a bit in front of a battalion of Vogue staffers – he told me a far worse story.

Just a week or so before my interview, Elizabeth Edwards was honored at the Time 100 gala in New York (to celebrate the magazine’s annual roundup of the most influential people in the world), and my friend went over to her suite at the Regency hotel with a manicurist and a makeup artist to help her get ready. Midway through the process, John Edwards storms in, barely speaks and goes into another room. Five minutes later he comes back out, announces he needs the room and throws them all out in front of a speechless Elizabeth. Her hair had been done, but her makeup wasn’t finished and neither were her nails.

I can only imagine that at least part of such a scene had to do with the fact that the night’s event was about her and not him. This is a guy who lost his cool on the trail when someone had the temerity to interrupt his stock speech with a question; I saw him go ballistic on a heckler dressed like a giant waffle who had followed him and Kerry to a series of train stops. (Kerry, wisely, made a joke of the guy, while at one point Edwards – in a bit of after-the-fact irony – stuck his finger in the man’s face and shouted, “My wife and children are on this train, it’s time you showed them some respect.”) When I interviewed his father, Rocky, he told me that the first thing he’d taught his son was how to effectively punch someone in the nose. I believe him – an alarming self-righteousness and anger bristles just beneath Edwards’s “Breck Girl” (the moniker assigned him by Maureen Dowd) surface.