After Annie

by Anna Quindlen

Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color. —W. S. Merwin

“It’s the same moon over us all,” she said, “no matter where we go.”

The problem with crying was that it made her believe it was all true, what was happening.

through “challenges” and “setbacks.” Exercise. Breathing. Meditation. But none of the strategies could help with a challenge or setback like this. None of the meditation sessions anticipated trying to quiet your mind and, in the quiet, hearing only the vast silence of eternal absence

They were all floating in some in-between where nothing seemed real and nothing seemed right. Waiting for the rest of life, whatever that was, a future that felt like a betrayal.

Grief was like spring, maybe. You thought you were getting out from under it and then it came roaring back. And getting out from under it felt like forgetting, and forgetting felt like treason.

Everybody wanted you to move on, but moving on felt like just another way of saying “turn your back.”

Words were all Ali had to make her mother alive again, words and stories.

He had to make a memory person because he was never, ever again going to see, speak with, hold, the real one.

He just wished his head were numb too, so he could stop thinking of what he’d lost.

“One need never be ashamed or afraid of grieving. Those who do not grieve cannot feel.”

The incessant drumbeat of women talking to other women. It never ended, except when one of them died, and then the silence left by that one woman was as big as the sky.

Maybe grief was like homesickness, something that wasn’t just about a specific person, but about losing that feeling that you were where you belonged, even if where you belonged seemed as everyday as brushing your teeth.

The years between twenty-two and thirty-seven made a universe.

You need to let them know that sadness shouldn’t lead to silence.