In life Elizabeth Edwards was at first a loyal political wife urging her husband to pursue his White House ambitions despite her illness with cancer, then a woman betrayed by his infidelity.
In death she exacted a measure of retribution by writing John Edwards out of her will.
In her last will and testament, Elizabeth names her eldest child, the lawyer Cate Edwards, as the executor of her estate, but there is no mention of her husband. Elizabeth died of cancer on 7 December six days after she signed the will, filed at the Orange County superior court in North Carolina.
"All of my furniture, furnishings, household goods, jewellery, china, silverware and personal effects, and any automobiles owned by me at the time of my death, I give and bequeath to my children," the will states.
Elizabeth Edwards announced last January that after 32 years of marriage she had separated from her husband, a former US senator. During his runs for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and 2008 she proved herself a powerful campaigner for his cause.
Although later accounts would reveal a fierce temper that could irritate aides, she became a popular figure with the general public and the media, especially after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004, a day after her husband and John Kerry were defeated by George Bush and Dick Cheney in their bid for the White House.
She became an activist on healthcare and cancer, especially for women, and once said fighting cancer was like dancing with a partner that kept changing.
When the disease flared once more in 2007, as John Edwards was again vying for the Democratic nomination, the pair decided to keep going with his political career. They said the cancer was "no longer curable but is completely treatable" and that they planned to continue campaigning together with an occasional break when she needed treatment. The decision was seen as heroic and a ringing endorsement of her husband's career.
That story of personal bravery and marital loyalty turned out to be a charade and unravelled in the most humiliating circumstances when the tabloid press – led by the National Enquirer – exposed Edwards as having fathered a child during an affair with a former documentary maker tracking his campaign, Rielle Hunter. The revelation destroyed his career when he finally admitted it and eventually his marriage.
In her book, Resilience: Reflections on the Burdens and Gifts of Facing Life's Adversities, Edwards said it was soon after he had announced that he was running for president that he told her that "on only one night had he violated his vows to me". She said she wanted him to withdraw from the race but he refused.
"I wanted him to drop out of the race, protect our family from this woman, from his act," she wrote. "It would only raise questions, he said, he had just gotten in the race; the most pointed questions would come if he dropped out days after he had gotten in the race. And I knew that was right, but I was afraid of her. And now he knows I was right to be afraid, that once he had made this dreadful mistake, he should not have run. But just then he was doing, I believe, what I was trying to do: hold on to our lives despite this awful error in judgment."
John Edwards pulled out of the race in January 2008 after failing to make much of an impression in the early Democratic primaries. He later admitted on ABC News to an affair with Hunter but denied being the father of her child. He said it happened while his wife's cancer was in remission.
The couple, sweethearts during law school, married a few days after they took the bar exam together in the summer of 1977. They had four children together, including a son who died at age 16. Although the couple had separated John Edwards was at her side constantly as her health deteriorated. He did not speak at her funeral. She was buried next to her son Wade.