After Annie

by Anna Quindlen

You didn’t really talk about the big things because nothing started big. Everything big in their lives had started small. Annie leaning against the wall at that one party, saying, “Do you think Bill Brown is cute?” It was like a seed, and now there was a tree. “He’s a plumber,” Annemarie had said, and “Don’t be a snot,” Annie had replied, playing with the necklace she always wore, with the gold A hanging from a chain. Now the necklace had four letters, AABJ. 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.

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 where your bestie forever had once been. Forever was so much shorter than she’d always thought. Quiet was soothing. Silence was terrible.

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.

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

“Hard to believe for someone of your age, isn’t it? I will show you if you come to visit. All of us here, we were all someone else once.”

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.

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