After Annie: A Novel

“Annie’s phone kept coming to life on the bedside table, the picture of the kids on its screen brightening, then darkening, beating like a mechanical heart.”

Bill keeps Annie’s phone plugged into the outlet to remain connected to her essence in some form, however artificial it may be. The simile compares the phone’s power light to Annie’s heartbeat, representing Bill’s denial of the fact that she is gone forever.

“It was like a seed, and now there was a tree.”

Annemarie thinks about the earlier versions of her life in a passage that equates her first meeting with Bill to the planting of a seed. The metaphor conveys the fruitfulness of Annie and Bill’s lives, celebrating all that they have built together. However, this form of success also proves to be a pain point for Annemarie, who feels as though she lost a part of Annie when Ali was born. The contrast also highlights Annemarie’s lack of children.

“Their mother looked like a doll of herself.”

Seeing Annie in the casket is a destabilizing moment for Bill and the children because the sight serves as irrefutable evidence that she is dead, even though her remains do not resemble her appearance as she was in life. The way the funeral home prepares the body makes it look fake, and this impression characterizes much of Ali’s experience during the funeral; she feels that the entire scene is artificial and manufactured. This surreal experience exacerbates the family’s instinctive denial that Annie cannot be gone forever, for the body itself is unconvincing.

“[A]fter a while it was like a chant: so sorry, wonderful woman, loved you so, too young, better place.”

In an accurate portrayal of a funeral home’s receiving line, the narrative emphasizes Ali’s emotional exhaustion as she stands for hours hearing the same trite remarks about her mother repeated endlessly. The author uses Ali’s experience to portray a sense of dizzying disassociation that some mourners experience during burial rituals. The process makes Ali bitter, especially because no one says anything that makes her feel better.

“The winter grass at the cemetery had been tipped with white, its stems yellow, awaiting better days. It had snapped under their feet. It seemed that the moment was frozen too, as though time had stopped.”

In this passage, the author invokes the wintry weather to mimic the icy emotional mood of the scene. During the early days of the family crisis, the passage of time is portrayed as being fluid as the Browns go through the motions of the funeral rituals, dazed by shock. Seeing Annie buried freezes them in time, and this tableau becomes a moment they will never forget.

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

Seasons become a prominent motif in the novel, and this passage personifies spring itself as a trickster figure. Within the context of the novel, spring’s fickle nature represents the chaotic unpredictability of grief, for just when the characters think they have moved past their sadness, it roars back into the forefront of their thoughts.

“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.”

Bill and Karen Feeney share an unspoken connection as they skirt around talking about their losses directly. The passage addresses the truth that people often resist sharing their losses with others, for fear of what their admissions might reveal about them. Thus, this particular exchange becomes pregnant with unspoken meaning and weighted emotion, and the author relies heavily upon implication to deliver her implicit philosophical messages.

“He was waiting for her to fall, and she was waiting for him to fail and to forget.”

Annemarie and Bill have a complicated history. The almost flippant tone of the passage emphasizes the growing tension between the two characters as Bill holds Annemarie’s substance use disorder against her even as she silently judges him for failing to be a supportive father to his children in the wake of Annie’s death.

“[T]hey’d heard the thumpa-thumpa of that racing heartbeat. Then the next time, nothing, the empty sound like a seashell to your ear.”

The passage uses onomatopoeia to convey the sound of the fetal heartbeat, and this image is followed by a deliberately contrasting simile that emphasizes the absence of a heartbeat. Collectively, these descriptions highlight the fragility of life. In this moment, Annemarie’s internal emotional landscape reveals the pain she carries from her pregnancy losses and the physical and emotional emptiness that she experiences.

“The day was a sliver of silver along the horizon, diving the ash of the sky from the slate of the highway.”

The passage employs alliteration in order to highlight the gray gloominess of the sky. Noting that the sky color is the same as the road conveys the mundanity of Bill’s daily life, as well as the tendency of depression to wash the color from the world.

“The room was full of nurses and old people, some as bent as the daffodils, so that they could barely lift their heads, others standing tall just as they had since they first learned to walk- but face, neck, and hands now creased and pleated as though they needed ironing.”

The figurative language in this passage emphasizes the idea that although time has bent and wrinkled the residents’ physical bodies, they still maintain their dignity. Their memories of Annie relate to her dedication to supporting them with love and empathy.

“God’s waiting room […] That’s where I work. It’s like some weird middle ground between life and death. Like every waiting room I’ve ever been in, the furniture is cheap and uncomfortable, and everyone is looking around, waiting for their number to be called.”

Ironically, Annie compared her job at the nursing home to working in a death-haunted waiting room. Given the reality of her demise, the narrative implies that Annie herself was in that same waiting room, just as all people inevitably are. Thus, the passage suggests that death can come at any time and with no warning.

“Annemarie pulled down a gravel road and felt the branches of trees overhead touching the roof of her car, felt them in memory tearing at her hair and face.”

The visceral descriptions of this passage emphasize the idea that traveling to the Mennonite community brings back traumatic memories for Annemarie. The dilapidated house represents a low point in Annemarie’s early days of substance use disorder, and unlike her pleasant, comforting memories of Annie, these memories have claws.

“Ali sat down on it and felt sadness surge through her body, the way a fever had that time she got up to 103.”

The characters’ experiences repeatedly reinforce The Different Manifestations of Grief, and as each person struggles to find a new form of equilibrium, it is clear that the expression of grief changes drastically over time. In this instance, Ali has a physical reaction to grief and feels like she is falling ill.

“[H]e’d had a life and a family and it had been a wheel and then the hub of the wheel was gone and it was just a collection of spokes, and a collection of spokes didn’t’ spin, didn’t take you anywhere.”

Annie was the center of the Brown family; like the most critical part of a wheel, she held everyone together. The metaphor conveys Bill’s sense of dislocation within himself and within the family after Annie’s death. It is only after losing her that he finally appreciates the many ways in which she completed all their lives.

“[T]here was some kind of river of loss underneath them all.”

When responding to a plumbing call, Bill discovered water flowing underneath the town. Later, when Brian explodes in Bill’s defense, Bill remembers Brian’s own loss and compares the unseen grief that people carry to the hidden river. By recognizing that everyone has hidden emotional depths and currents, Bill gains a more compassionate and nuanced understanding of the long-term grieving process.

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

The metaphor conveys the idea that Bill feels incapable of fulfilling his role as a parent to his grieving children. Seeing Miss Cruz care for Ant in his stead brings Bill to the realization that he has been disconnected from life and has abandoned his children in their grief.

“[P]uppies were what puppies always were, little nuggets of warm, soft possibility.”

Bill’s thoughts of getting a puppy reveal a change in his emotional state as he considers a new start. The puppy’s innocent youth signals that he is ready to embrace the hope of happiness in his family’s future.

“[S]omething about her question had created a moment so big it was black, ready to burst, and all he wanted to do was avoid it.”

The passage compares Bill’s unresolved grief to an abscess or malignancy that will poison him when it explodes. To mitigate this possibility, Miss Cruz helps Bill to release his grief in the safety of her office, and this experience is designed to reveal the helpful, cathartic aspects of talk therapy, suggesting that this approach can be cathartic and healing for those dealing with loss.

“She was putting her life back together, but a lot of the pieces were different now.”

Ali’s grief often feels like a puzzle with missing pieces. After a year of shouldering her grief mostly alone, she gratefully accepts Miss Cruz’s help and benefits from her father’s decision to reengage emotionally with his family. In this later stage of the process, Ali can finally begin piecing together her new identity and learning how to live her life without a mother.

“What a difference a year makes.”

Kathy voices these resonant words over Annie’s grave as she notices how much Ali has grown physically over the last year. The words also symbolize how the entire family has changed since Annie’s death.

“The kitchen was shabby, but no one had died on its floor.”

Bill’s new home represents a new start for the family, far away from the traumatic memories of Annie’s sudden death. The irreverent reference to the circumstances of Annie’s death signifies the idea that with distance and time, a person can find humor even in connection with such a great loss.

“It felt as though Annie, gone, had created a centrifugal force that was sending them all in other directions, to the edges of one another’s lives, away from the center.”

In a previous quote, Bill considered Annie to be the wheel that held the family together, but this passage now compares her to a centrifuge, which is the opposite. Instead of holding a wheel together, it spins it and flings matter out into the world. Although there is no closure, the family members know that they must move forward without Annie at their center.