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

Book One, Part Two, Chapter 50: A Husband’s Last Gift

Jeanette — a friend from my bereavement support group — and I are lunching on the Gilda’s Club deck. She imagines being married again — to another man — and says: “I pity the poor sucker. He cannot compare to Jim. No one can. I can’t put someone through that.”

“Ernie and I were together forty years, two-thirds of my life and half of his. I can’t imagine living by myself for the rest of my life, yet I can’t imagine living with anyone but Ernie, either.”

She nods. “Jim was my teacher, and he’s still teaching me. I never did yard work before, but now I’m designing a garden, and I seem to know what I’m doing. I never drove his truck before, but now I even diagnosed a problem with it. I couldn’t fix it, but I knew what it was. This is the Jim in me. He is within me. What he had is mine now. He’s given it to me. It’s his last gift.”

“Joshua says this, too. He tells me: ‘He’s still with us, little mama. I feel him.’ But I don’t feel Ernie within me.”

“You’re too full of pain now to feel him. When the pain subsides, there will be room for Ernie. He will come to you.”

Or maybe Ernie has come to me. Maybe he is within me, and that’ s why this writing is coming. I know I’m not doing this by myself. I couldn’t.