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

I cart bowls and baskets and quilts and sweaters around from shop to shop so that women can buy things to try to fill the holes in their hearts. But you had no hole in yours because you made a family.

Spring messed with you, stepped up, rolled back, gave you hope of better days to come, snatched it away.

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.

And then he’d put a ten down on the bar and go back out to his van and his house, and he’d see the back of Annie’s neck as she bent over a stew pot on the stove, and he’d think to himself, This is what those younger guys at that table are looking for. You just don’t know you’re looking for it until you have it, until you drive to the jewelry store in Belmont and buy the biggest solitaire you can manage, and circle back and kneel down and say, “This is me, on board.”

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

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.

for the rest of his life, that there was some kind of river of loss underneath them all. 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.

People act like time will fix things so everything will be the same again, everything will be all right, but sometimes it’s the opposite.

that’s what Annie really wanted, a lovely reliable life that went on day to day with the occasional occasion, a party, a new baby, dinner out, vacations. That was enough.