After Annie

by Anna Quindlen

“You know how, when you have a bird in a cage, and you open the door, what’s left is an empty cage? That’s like your mother now. The thing that made her her, like how nice and sweet and funny she was with all of you, and how she took care of you and loved you, is still there. It’s just inside of you now instead of inside of her body. It’s still alive inside the four of you.”

Sometimes he turned his head on the pillow, looking for her profile, and that empty space made everything inside him still and freeze.

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.

and it was fine to tell yourself that you would never go there but you would go there if you needed to, and she needed to.

That’s what the pills did, padding on the rails of life. One minute you were wondering what you were going to do and how you were going to wind up, and then in an instant it didn’t matter.

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.

There was no way to know how to move on, which everyone insisted you should do, without leaving the person behind, so that the further you got into this new, different, strange, impossible existence, the fainter they got, like a ghost in a movie that at first had clear edges and a discernible face and then was a cloud, and then smoke, and then nothing.

The best he figured a man could hope for was not to understand them, but to find one who understood you.

Becoming a man seemed to mean becoming a person who would be poisoned by loss and heartbreak and still pretend that neither existed.

No man ever likes his wife’s best friend, because that friend knows her in a way he never will, and because he will never have that kind of friendship with his own friends, even his oldest ones.

“There’s some things you can’t fix, no matter how hard you try.”

The hardest thing about friendship, she’d sometimes thought, was accepting that your friend wants what you think is not worth having.