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

Book One, Part Two, Chapter 15: The Russian Man in the Moon

You are most present to me on my walks, when I imagine you beside me. Now that it’s warmer, you’re in your faded top and khaki shorts and battered tennis shoes and wearing the Yankees cap Joshua gave you. When it was colder, you wore the olive green Army coat.

Only now do I realize why you so liked that Army coat, why you took it on every hospital or doctor visit, even in the summer. With its triangular shoulder patch, it put you in a fighting mode, didn’t it? It helped you defend yourself, if only in your mind — and your mind, you always thought, was your strength. “Mind over body,” you said.

I beg to differ. Both your mind and your heart were your strengths. Even your body was strong, although you didn’t think it. How many other people would have lived as long as you, given the life you lived? You are one of a kind, Ernie.

On our walks at night, you and I looked for the moon. One full-moon night, you gazed at it through your binoculars, then handed the binos to me. “There’s a man in the moon, and it’s not the clown face people usually see. Look, Ernestina.”

I focused the binos on the moon.

“Do you see him? He’s in profile, wearing a Russian fur hat. He has dark, intense eyes and a benign smile. Do you see him, Ernestina?”

“Yes, I see him, Ernie. I see the Russian man in the moon.”

What I didn’t see, not then, was how much the Russian man in the moon looks like you.