“Oh,” I said. “Do you have—”

“Yes, a daughter,” she said. “Sophie. She’s three.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s a great neighborhood for children.”

“So I see,” she said, looking at my boys in their sled. I think she envied the sled.

It began to snow. Among the swirling flakes, I noticed the stream of exhaust coming from an idling black town car, double-parked. A driver in a uniform stood at attention, waiting for Anna Brody. But she was in no hurry. She slowly smiled at me and said in her soft, breathy voice, “You don’t know what a help you’ve been.”

I must have shivered because she undid her light blue scarf and draped it around my neck.

“I couldn’t,” I said.

“You must,” she said, tying it for me. “Otherwise, you’ll catch cold.”

I wanted to say, “But it matches your eyes.”

The driver opened the door. As Anna ducked into the back of the car, Frida shouted out that she’d be calling. Anna didn’t look back, disappearing behind the tinted glass. I found myself waving stupidly as the sedan pulled away.

The rest of the walk home, I kept hearing the way she’d said it, as if it were a secret—Anna, Anna Brody. Like a stuck record, it kept playing in my head—Anna, Anna Brody, Anna, Anna Brody, Anna, Anna Brody . . .

The question became: How was I going to stop it? How was I going to drown it out?

Tim.

I imagined what Tim would say.

For six years my husband had been working on his dissertation. Titled and retitled countless times, it had turned into a large, sprawling work called “The History of Loss.” On the rare good days, he called it “Loss and Its Many Friends,” and on the frequent doubt-filled days, he laughed sadly and referred to it as “The Lost Cause.” Given his own history and seen from the vantage point of his childhood, Tim’s central thesis had been born out of necessity, a lifesaving theory that salvaged a lost boy, but, I had urged him to consider, what about the man? Wasn’t it time for a new theory? Happily, not yet. Besides, all theories need to be tested. Here I found myself with the opportunity to try out Tim’s. And while many people found his approach depressing, I had lived with it long enough that I’d begun to find comfort in it. On that day, in those post-Anna Brody hours, it was Tim and only Tim I heard loud and clear. Often he’d couch it in historical anecdote, or pepper his conversation with apt examples, but the gist was: Lose. Lose early, lose often. For it’s how you lose that counts. And you will lose. Your hair, your looks, your teeth, your body fluids and fecal matter; you will lose friends, your memory, and if you’re one of the elite few, like Anna Brody, who expect to be remembered, give it time: Eventually, the world will lose its memory of you, too. Anna who?