ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter 84: Unreal

Jene and I begin another therapy session.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

Ernie’s final surgeon asked Ernie this same question in the opening moments of their first consultation. Ernie said to him: “I’m a mess.” I didn’t know Ernie was feeling this way, but then I never asked him how he was feeling, not once in the whole time of our marriage.

Today I say to Jene: “I feel unreal. My life feels unreal. All that I think, feel, and do is related to Ernie’s death. I ask myself: Is this my life? How can this be my life? How can Ernie not be here? It feels so unreal.”

I feel hollowed out in the very center of me. My center, my core, is missing.

I remember what Joshua said in the hospital chapel, as Ernie lay dying: “Daddy’s the core of our family,” and he bent his head to cry.