After Annie

by Anna Quindlen

She was one of a kind. You just remember that. Most boys don’t have a mother who is one of a kind. It’s very hard to lose her, but it’s really something to have had her. Really something. You just tell yourself that.”

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

“God’s waiting room,” Annie had repeated. “That’s where I work. It’s like some weird middle ground between life and death. Like every waiting room I’ve ever been in, the furniture is cheap and uncomfortable, and everyone is looking around, waiting for their number to be called.”

Fatigue wrapped itself around her, or maybe it was peace, she couldn’t tell the difference, and she thought, Oh, to live like this, with no decisions, no deviations. The faint smell of woodsmoke and something bready baking in the kitchen. The books of the Bible, the order of the day, the same clothes, the same furniture. If she lived like this she would be comforted by the notion of Annie in heaven waiting for her so they could put their heads together and make gossipy comments about the angels. She wished she could live like this. She would go out of her mind, but she’d done that once already, under less pleasant conditions.

“The moon is a friend for the lonesome.”

She looked around at all of them and thought that if she lived here she would never be sad or lonely. And then suddenly, as though she’d been flying and bumped back to earth, she remembered that Jenny had once said something like that about living in Ali’s house, with her three brothers, and she wondered how many people it would take to make you feel not alone in the world.

Everyone was younger than she was. It was amazing, how fast you could get old, or older. The years between twenty-two and thirty-seven made a universe.

Annemarie had had no patience for any of it at the time, but now she understood that Annie had watched and worried simply because that was what a mother did. That was what Annemarie would do.

You need to bring your wife back to life for her children. You need to let them know that you will never forget her, and that you will help them never forget her, too. You need to let them know that sadness shouldn’t lead to silence. You need to find a way to do that every day.

And he realized as he turned to the table that what he’d felt when he held that puppy, what it had loosened within him, was the feeling he had always had when they first got the new baby home from the hospital. Each time he had held this warm, boneless, breathing miracle under his chin, careful not to scratch the fragile pink skull skin with the bristles of his beard, and felt as though the heart within it and his own had melded into one and that they were beating together.

Anne Fonzheimer Brown ANNIE She was so loved.

“Stop thinking about the future,” Maude had told Annemarie the last time she went to see the Mennonites. “Be present in the moment.” She sounded Buddhist, but then Annemarie assumed all religions had more or less the same underpinnings. “How could anyone expecting a baby not think about the future?” she’d said. “If you do you will miss so much,” Maude said. “I have eight children, and the best times are when I see them as they are now and don’t think about someday.” Annemarie was automatically dismissive: “Someday” for Maude’s boys would be woodworking, farming, marrying a neighbor girl at nineteen. “Someday” for Maude’s daughters would be quilting, canning, marrying a neighbor boy at nineteen. But in the car, she was ashamed by that. She had had a someday that had veered into something else. She’d had a few, in fact. Annie had had one, and then none. Or maybe now she knew Annie’s real secret, that she would never die because her children lived on in the world, that Annemarie’s someday was now the child inside her, one heel pressed hard against a rib. “Do you have a name yet?” Kathy said. “Hope,” Annemarie said.