MARY: LIFE AFTER ERNEST

After Ernest’s death, Mary Welsh became the executrix of Ernest’s estate. She edited A Moveable Feast, which was published in 1964, and set to work on sorting the mountains of Ernest’s correspondence. (She complained that mixed in to everything was candy wrappers, mice skeletons, doctors’ notes – all faithfully transported by her in the last shrimp boat to leave post-Revolution Havana.)

Mary never remarried. Her memoirs detail her complicated but, I think, always loving relationship with her husband. She had a small apartment in New York and celebrated Ernest’s birthday with his sons and friends every year.

Mary died in 1986 at the age of 78.