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

Book One, Part Two, Chapter 12: Two Wives, Two Widows

My grief-support group meets at Gilda’s Club twice a month. I’ve been coming here since early January. Tonight, ten of us gather in a circle in a white second-floor room. Judy, a Gilda’s staff member for years, leads us.

“Who wants to start?” she asks softly.

I’m seated to her right, so I start.

“I’m feeling the usual deep sadness. But I’m more than sad. I blame my husband’s doctor and Ernie and me for not realizing his bladder cancer was back. I can’t change what I said and did or didn’t say and didn’t do to and for Ernie, but I feel a deep shame. It’s a heat that comes over me. I feel it on my neck, my back, my face. Eventually, it burns itself out.”

“You did the best you could at the time,” Judy says.

“But all along, I knew something was wrong. I even thought bladder cancer. I just didn’t say the words. I was too scared to. How stupid is that? Too scared of losing Ernie to say the words he needed to hear to save him. These last three or four years, I watched him shrink. His legs got skinnier. His face grew more hollow. His hair turned white. I remember a year ago, two years ago, being in the living room, the three of us, and starting to cry. Ernie said: ‘What are you thinking that makes you cry?’ I couldn’t tell him. I didn’t have the courage to say what I was thinking: that soon we would no longer be a family of three; we would be a family of only two.”

“Back then, you couldn’t say what you were thinking and feeling,” Jeanette says. She’s sitting next to me. “Now, you can. His death has changed you.”

Jeanette’s voice is soft. Her brown eyes are full of compassion. When she smiles, her bright teeth gleam against her smooth amber skin. Usually she wears a bandanna about her head, giving her a Jamaican look.

Jeanette’s bandannas belong to Jim, her husband. Last November, they celebrated their twenty-first wedding anniversary. That night, at a restaurant dinner, with Jeanette wearing pearls, Jim saluted her. “I so look forward to spending the next twenty-one years of my life with you,” he said. Days later, exercising on the treadmill in their basement, he fell from the machine, dead before he landed. The sweat on his body left a shadow on the concrete floor.

It’s now late March. His shadow is still there.

“I go there,” Jeanette tells me later. “I visit Jim there.”