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

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.

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

what it had loosened within him, was the feeling he had always had when they first got the new baby home from the hospital. Each time he had held this warm, boneless, breathing miracle under his chin, careful not to scratch the fragile pink skull skin with the bristles of his beard, and felt as though the heart within it and his own had melded into one and that they were beating together.