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

Book One, Part Two, Prologue: The Writing Begins

Just after Ernie died, to help me in my sadness and pain and confusion, I began writing in a journal — a small leather-bound book Joshua gave his father during one of Ernie’s last hospital stays. But Ernie never wrote in it. The reality facing him was too dire for him even to talk of, and he didn’t have the energy or motivation to write of it.

To fit all I needed to say on the pages of this journal, my handwriting turned small. Still, the pages could not contain my pain; I needed a larger canvas. That’s when I began, in mid-March, three months after Ernie died, to write in chapters of my days without him. Words flowed from me like blood from a wound. I kept bleeding, and the words kept flowing. I couldn’t stop them.

The weather turned warm and my rooms grew even messier, so I took my bag of papers and pencils to a park, sat under a tree, and wrote. It became a hot summer, but I didn’t feel the heat. I felt too hot from within to feel the heat from without.

In writing of my life without Ernie, I came to realize I needed to write of my life with Ernie. I needed to present him the way he was . . . or as close as I could get to the way he was, filtered through my lens. I wanted to make him real to me. I wanted to be with him again. So I began writing Ernie and Ernestina on two fronts — one that was the past, and one that was the present.

In writing of the past, I lived our life, in a way, for the first time because, when I was living it in real time, it escaped me. Also, I became aware of the flow in our life. I never made the connections before that this re-living of it was offering up. There was a rhyme and reason to our life I’d never recognized before.

Ernie’s life changed my life. Ernie’s death changed my life. Is changing it still.

This, then, begins our Afterlife.