ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter 245: Thinking Straight

C. S. Lewis, in A Grief Observed, written in the months after the death of his wife, American-born poet Joy Davidman, compares losing her to losing a leg. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it.

My grief observed? The loss of Ernie has changed me completely and entirely, both within and without.

From without, my walk is slower, my voice is deeper, my eyes are duller, my mouth is . . . down.

From within, the change is more drastic. Ernie’s death was like a bolt of lightning that struck my mind and my heart. I am the Frankenstein monster suddenly electrified to life. My mind is becoming nimble. My heart is softening. But oh, the thoughts I have and the feelings these thoughts engender. As Ernie said of his pain: “I don’t wish this on my worst enemy.”

Yet, this pain is leading me to emotional literacy. Before, I didn’t possess a language of the heart because I rarely heard it spoken. When Ernie spoke it, so literate with his thoughts and feelings, I didn’t understand him. He was speaking a foreign language to me. Now, I’m learning this language. I’m striving for fluency. I want to speak it like a native.

Ernie was a genius at saying a great deal in a few words. He said to me: “Because you don’t have feelings, you don’t think anyone else does.”

Now that I’ve typed these words, I think this: Ernie, omit the last three words, and this would also have been true. I didn’t think. I was thoughtless. I didn’t think what I didn’t want to think so I wouldn’t feel what I didn’t want to feel.

I guess it’s as simple as that. I swept so much under the rug that the rug grew lumpy. Eventually I tripped over the lumps and fell down hard.

This reminds me of the Wizard of Oz story. The scarecrow wants a brain. The tin man wants a heart. The lion wants courage. Hey, I want all three.

What a mix. C. S. Lewis. Frankenstein. The Wizard of Oz. I feel mixed up a lot of the time, yet maybe I’m thinking straight for the first time in my life. Perhaps straight thinking requires a mix of thoughts, these thoughts bringing on a mix of feelings.

What a mix of feelings I do feel — but mainly fear. For forty years Ernie made my fear disappear, or so I thought. Yet that wasn’t straight thinking, was it? The fear was always there. It’s what brought us together, and it’s what tore us apart.

Fear will always be with me. But what’s changing is that I’m acknowledging this fear.

I only hope fear will not win out when I need to act.