Everybody Has Their Burdens

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Between harried campaign stops in Colorado last Friday, Teresa Heinz Kerry and Elizabeth Edwards sat down and spoke with TIME's Karen Tumulty for nearly an hour. Heinz Kerry grew up in Africa, married a Senator who was also heir to the Heinz-condiment fortune, then saw her life shattered when he died in a 1991 plane crash. Her second marriage, in 1995, was to another Senator named John--this one aiming for the White House. Edwards, a Navy brat, is an accomplished bankruptcy lawyer who married her law school classmate before he made millions dazzling juries across North Carolina. Their 16-year-old son's 1996 death in an auto accident sent them in other directions: him, into a meteoric rise in politics; her, into a second round of motherhood, having one baby at 48 and another at 50. Heinz Kerry and Edwards had a lot to say about where life has brought them--and where they hope it will still take them.

TIME: As different as your lives have been, one thing you share is that your lives were once blown apart by tragedy and you both built entirely different ones after that. Have you talked about that much?

EDWARDS: Not too much. You recognize a survivor when you see one. You recognize a fighter when you see one.

HEINZ KERRY: Actually, when I first met you and I was told you lost your son, I think I told you that I had also lost my sister at about the same age.

EDWARDS: That's right.

HEINZ KERRY: Common experiences tell people a lot. You know what you managed to go through, and you might know what still might hurt. So it's kind of an unspoken language about a reality that is always there even if you're doing well. You never stop loving the people that died. Never ever ever ever ever. And the best way to remember them is by doing great things.

EDWARDS: That's exactly right.

HEINZ KERRY: You live their memory by creating the things they would be doing.

TIME: How long does it take to reach a day when you don't cry?

EDWARDS: Never. You never know when something's going to hit you in a particular way and just knock you loose. On the other hand, I take great strength from the gifts I got from my relationship with my son, as I know Teresa does both from her relationship with her sister and her relationship with her first husband.

HEINZ KERRY: There are moments. The other day I was doing a fund raiser in New York in the house of people I didn't know, and all of a sudden he's diagnosed with very bad cancer and so neither of them could be there. And so she spoke over the phone. Then I thought of her not being there and why, and I started to speak and I burst out crying in front of a whole bunch of people I didn't know. I don't do that very often, hardly ever. But I did.

EDWARDS: Sometimes you can get through that and be the strength for [others who have suffered hardship], and then other times there's no gauging it. Everybody who's been through it will tell you exactly the same thing. This is not unique to us. There's a great Chinese proverb about a woman who loses her son. She goes to the priest and says, "You have to do something about this. You can't let this be." The priest says, "I can help you. You have to go to a house and get mustard seed, but you have to get it from a house that has no grief." And she went from house to house, and they had mustard seed but they also had grief. Everybody has their burdens, their grief that they carry with them.

TIME: What is the best single piece of advice you've ever given your husbands?

EDWARDS: My guess is our advice is the same, which is be true to yourself. They'll get advice to do something or say something that's not natural to them, and I'll pull them aside and say, "This doesn't sound like you. Don't do it."

HEINZ KERRY: They make the policy. They're the people who have to vote on things now. But also I had experiences and expertise, just as Elizabeth does in her fields, so of course they ask for advice, at least points of view, on things that we've done. [There is] value in a spouse who is intelligent and curious and challenging--in the good sense of the word challenging. But I have never pushed for a piece of legislation myself, [not] to my late husband or to John Kerry, this husband. And eventually they and their staffs end up doing what they're going to do.

EDWARDS: We are married to strong men who are willing to be married to strong women. They expect a certain degree of honesty. And they should get what they expect from the two of us.

See pictures of John Edwards' Road to One America tour.

See pictures of the Democratic National Convention.