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

Book One, Part Two, Chapter 103: Folie a Deux

I come across the French phrase folie a deux in Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s novel Rough Strife. It means: the presence of the same or similar delusional idea in two persons closely associated with one another. Its literal translation: double madness.

Ernie was being attacked in the last four years of his life by a bladder tumor that was cancerous and growing. My thinking, which I kept to myself, was that Ernie was getting older, he was dying, and there was nothing we could do to stop it.

I didn’t think bladder cancer was back, but why wouldn’t I? His symptoms — urinary-tract infections and bloody urine and frequency and urgency of urination and finally, the pain, — were the same as before.

So what if his urologist didn’t make the call? Did we really need a doctor to tell us what was going on? Hadn’t we been through this before?

Yes. But we didn’t make the call. We were both delusional. Folie a deux. In fact, make this folie a trois because Ernie’s urologist was in on the madness, too.

Ernie said to me: “I don’t feel like fighting anymore, and that’s not a good thing.”

“Who wants to fight all the time?” I said to him. “It’s good to relax.”

“You don’t know how bad I feel,” he said.

I began to think of us as Siamese twins, and I knew that one Siamese twin couldn’t move without the other, often didn’t survive without the other. I didn’t want to be a Siamese twin, so I began to distance myself from Ernie. When he needed my help the most, I was the farthest away.

“Don’t give up on me, Ernestina,” he said in the hospital.

Our biggest delusion was that we were soul mates and best friends. Or maybe this wasn’t a folie a deux. Maybe Ernie knew the truth. And maybe I did, too, at the last.

“No one else could live with you, Ernestina,” he said to me.

“No one else could live with you,” I shot back.

“I am not your enemy, Ernestina. Why do you fight me? I can’t fight you and everyone else, too.”

No, Ernie was not my enemy. I was my enemy. My delusional thinking was my enemy.

That Ernie was my daddy? Delusional.

That he was dying and there was nothing to be done about it? Delusional.

That I loved him? Delusional.

That I knew how to love? Delusional.

That I wouldn’t feel tremendous pain and guilt when he died? Delusional.

“You need psychiatric help,” Ernie said to me in the hospital. “A priest. A counselor. Get help.”

He said this only once, and this time he was not delusional.