ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching
Book Two, Chapter 292: This Dance of Dysfunction
Three of us stay on after our Al-Anon meeting and its half-hour of fellowship for further discussion. Most of the time there are six of us in this study group, but tonight we are three.
Pat, sitting across from me at the end of a long table, speaks of a plan he set in motion almost five years ago to make himself financially independent. Then came the stock-market crash and real-estate bust to topple his plans.
Joe, sitting to my right, talks of losing customers and of money owed him because of this same financial debacle, causing his own financial meltdown. Both of them explain how their thinking has changed because they’re now in Recovery.
I grow a little bored. I don’t really want to talk of business or money. But I hang on. I’ve learned that whatever is going on at these meetings, with these friends, has value. In fact, I realize I have a financial debacle story of my own, so I begin to talk.
“Just a few weeks before the stock-market collapse, Ernie and I turned in our CDs to buy a regional bank stock, then that stock began to tumble along with so many other bank stocks. Day after day I kept saying: ‘We’re in it for the dividends,’ until the day came when our on-paper capital sank so low that we both got really scared, sold out, and took a big loss.
“For the first time in my life, I felt suicidal. I thought: How could we be so stupid, watching our money disappear and not selling sooner? I didn’t want to get up in the morning or to brush my teeth at night. When I went out the door to walk to the grocery, Ernie said: ‘Watch yourself crossing streets.’ I said: ‘Let a car hit me. I don’t care.’ And I thought: Ernie doesn’t want me dead because then no one’s here to fix his breakfast . . . or, maybe Ernie wants me dead so he can collect on that term-insurance policy he took out on me.
“Stinking thinking, I realize now, all of it. And Ernie, I realize now, felt like a failure. When the market collapsed and a big percentage of our money disappeared, something inside him also weakened and collapsed. This is when the bladder tumors came back, I’m sure of it. ‘Stress is a big killer,’ he’d say to me, but I didn’t feel the weight of worry Ernie carried, that this weight was doubling him over.”
“Stress is a big killer,” Pat said.
“Have I told you about Ernie’s major trauma?” I ask them. “In his childhood?”
Pat and Joe shake their heads, and I begin to tell them of it. Pat’s face drops into a look of shock, and Joe’s head falls back, as if he’s been hit.
“He was put to bed for a year?” Pat says.
I nod. “His bed was brought down to the parlor from his second-floor bedroom.”
“He was taken out of school for a year?” Joe says. “He couldn’t go outside to play with his friends?”
“He could only look out the window. Sometimes, when no one else was around, he climbed the stairs, which he was forbidden to do, to be in his old room for a while.”
“And his parents didn’t know to get a second opinion,” Pat says. “And Ernie never told them he overheard the doctor’s pronouncement that their son would probably die before he reached age thirty. It’s the worst hurt imaginable.”
“My heart goes out to him,” Joe says. “He was in such pain and never had a release. I don’t see how he took it.”
“And I didn’t realize how keeping this pain inside him set him up for keeping all pain inside him. That was his way. He spared his parents the knowledge that he’d heard the doctor’s diagnosis. Yet in sparing them, he hurt himself even more.” My voice grows loud. I bang my open palm on the table. Tears come. “He is my true love, and I didn’t know him. I didn’t know how to love him.”
Joe draws closer to me. He puts his hand on my arm. Softly, with the tenderest of touches, he brushes a tear from my cheek. I keep on talking. I brush away tears, too.
“Both of you were emotionally neglected,” Joe says. “Neither of you knew how to speak of your pain. You met and began this dance of dysfunction and never stopped the dance.”
“Ernie never cried. I never cried.” I brushed away more tears.
“You are hurting, but you are healing,” Pat says. “You will find yourself, and you will heal.”
