After Annie

by Anna Quindlen

All the general things people said, about how the person was a good friend and a good wife and a good mother, were useless, almost insulting in their lack of specificity.

Everybody wanted you to move on, but moving on felt like just another way of saying “turn your back.”

that says you can’t replace the paper towels?” He had to make a memory person because he was never, ever again going to see, speak with, hold, the real one. It seemed so obvious that that would be the case when someone died, but he couldn’t seem to wrap his mind around it,

The foreverness of it shocked him every single day.

built just after World War II, when the veterans couldn’t afford big but the building trades still built solid.

old people, some as bent as the daffodils,

used her finger to guide her as she read. “ ‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’ ”

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.