After Annie

by Anna Quindlen

It wasn’t just that Bill was uncomfortable standing up and speaking in front of a lot of people. It was that what he had he didn’t want to share. He needed to hold it all now like a life preserver.

He wondered from behind the bedroom door if the rest of his life he’d be hearing things he needed to know said by other people in other rooms.

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.

“People can’t be better than they are, sis,” Annie had said.

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.

Was his life a choice or an accident?

“Yep,” he said. Her “complicated” and his “yep” were first cousins, were two answers designed to keep the jack in the box, because who knew what might pop out, everyone has a whole universe of trouble inside and no one wants the world to know.

“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.

It’s broken me, babe, I’m not going to make it this time, as she called the office of the back doctor she’d canceled on twice before and made an appointment for the next day.

It seemed as though it was easier to talk about hard things if you didn’t need to look the other person in the face.

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.

The thing about sympathy was that it separated you.

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

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.

He was a visitor in his own life, without a map or a guidebook.

She wanted something she could count on forever.

The great thing about addiction was that you became a fluent liar.

So we can fool people who don’t really know us, but not the ones who do.”

The first time they slept together it had taken them more time to get all the pillows and quilts and throws off the bed than to get undressed.

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.

“There’s some things you can’t fix, no matter how hard you try.”

She sounded Buddhist, but then Annemarie assumed all religions had more or less the same underpinnings.