ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife

Book One, Part Two, Chapter 134: Iris Murdoch Speaks

Ten months Ernie’s been gone.

I sleep long into the afternoon and read and write long into the night. It’s my way of not facing the day. I know I’m depressed, and of course I know why.

The English novelist Iris Murdoch said love was the sudden realization that someone else absolutely exists. If that’s true, then I didn’t start to love Ernie until after he died. Now that he’s no more, when I feel the emptiness, the loss, the hurt, the guilt, it’s now I realize he truly existed. He’s more real to me now, this minute, than he ever was in life.

What good does that do either of us?