ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife
Book One, Part Two, Chapter 13: Two Memorials
I must do something positive, something outside myself — at least, this is what Ernie would tell me — so I’ve become a zoo volunteer, tending a garden plot just outside the zoo’s admission gate.
When I first came to this garden, it was so early in the season that the three tulip poplars centering the small plot were bare. Now, their leaves show. At first, hundreds of thin green shoots spiked the ground under the tree. Now, these shoots have unfurled into lilies of the valley.
I’ve gone inside the zoo only once — even though, as a volunteer, I’m given free admission — and that day I ventured only a few hundred yards, sitting on a bench near the tortoises only briefly before I turned back. It’s too sad, without Ernie. He liked the zoo. He liked the animals — especially the camels — and he liked to walk the grounds. Even when we didn’t have much leftover money, he purchased a zoo membership. But the zoo’s no longer a fun place for me. Even this volunteer work is not for me. I’ll see the season through, then I won’t be back.
I weed around the daffodils and pink hyacinths and mulch around a small wooden sign that reads: In Memory of Ernie. Zoo management provides signs for any volunteer wishing to honor a friend. But Ernie wanted his name on novels, not on a piece of wood stuck in the middle of a zoo plot. I will work on getting his fiction published . . . but not just yet. I need to work on myself first.
The only time Ernie mentioned a memorial — and this was a year or so before he died — he asked that his name be scored on stone in a cemetery we often visited, with its gentle hills and silver lakes and specimen trees and layers of rock. That day he said: “I want my name on stone. Underneath my name, put The Writer.”
But after Ernie died, I planned to ignore his wishes, to forego the stone; rather, to scatter his gray ash and chips of bone beside a cemetery path he and I also favored, alongside hemlocks and pines and a mossy brick wall. When I told Joshua of all this, he said: “No. We will do what Daddy wanted. When Christy flew in to visit Daddy in the hospital, she and I took an afternoon off. We went to that cemetery. I saw the stone wall above the lake. I circled it. That’s where Daddy’s name will be.”
On one of our last cemetery walks, Ernie circled this same wall. He didn’t speak, but he circled the wall. He marked his spot . . . and Joshua found it.
