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

You didn’t really talk about the big things because nothing started big. Everything big in their lives had started small.

Life got made that way, bit by bit, at the party, the doctor’s office, the stop sign, the grocery.

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

Forever was so much shorter than she’d always thought. Quiet was soothing. Silence was terrible.

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.”

“Having somebody die makes people mad,”

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“But maybe mad is just to cover up the other feelings. Maybe mad is just sad in disguise.”

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

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

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and a discernible face and then was a cloud, and then smoke, and then nothing.

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

She’d gone along to get along, which she sometimes thought was the linchpin of marriage.