Some people are just passing through our lives

“Some people are just passing through our lives” is the novel’s expression for the possibility that a relationship can be brief and still leave a lasting gift. It first gives meaning to the Whittaker family’s grief after Annie’s death, then becomes a language Tommy and Maribeth use to understand loss, separation, and their own need for one another. Its comfort does not erase the pain of people leaving; it asks what can be carried forward from their presence.

The expression and its first meaning

The idea takes shape around Annie, who dies of meningitis at five and a half. In the hospital, her family watch as she remains unconscious and her fever continues to rise. The doctors can do little to change what is happening. Liz stays beside her, holding her hand and speaking to her; John and Tommy take turns doing the same. The family’s earlier sense of Annie as a gift is recast by the prospect of losing her: the child who brought them love and joy cannot be kept with them.

Annie dies just before midnight, with Liz and John holding her hands. At her funeral, the priest calls her a gift to the family for a brief time, a little angel on loan from God who taught them love and brought them closer together. This interpretation gives the expression its first, explicitly familial form. It does not make her short life less precious or the loss less severe. Instead, it identifies what her family received from her as something that death cannot simply take away.

The funeral also shows how difficult that belief is to live with. Liz cannot bear to leave Annie’s grave and says she wants her daughter back. Tommy cries with his hockey coach, who encourages him to keep Annie’s memories and tells him that she will return in little blessings throughout his life. For the Whittakers, the language of gifts and continuing presence sits beside raw bereavement rather than replacing it.

Maribeth gives the idea to Tommy

The expression develops further when Tommy speaks with Maribeth about Annie. He sometimes talks to his dead sister at night and wonders whether she can hear him. Maribeth, who has spoken to her grandmother after her death, takes his practice seriously rather than dismissing it. She suggests that some people are not meant to remain in a life forever: they may arrive to bring a gift, a blessing, or a lesson, and move on when they have given it.

Maribeth makes the abstraction personal by naming what Annie gave Tommy: the experience of loving and caring deeply for someone. Annie, in this account, did not have to live to adulthood for her life to matter. Tommy can keep what she taught him even though he cannot keep her. He listens and recognizes some sense in Maribeth’s interpretation, but the pain remains; he wishes Annie had stayed longer and wishes Maribeth could have met her.

The idea acquires particular force because Maribeth and Tommy are both sixteen but occupy sharply different circumstances. Tommy has a family, a home, and the prospect of returning to school. Maribeth is pregnant, estranged from her family, and expects to place her baby with another family. Their shared age does not mean their situations are alike: Maribeth faces a separation that lies ahead, while Tommy is trying to live with one that has already happened.

A continuing stream, not an easy consolation

In a later conversation, Maribeth describes people coming into and moving through one another’s lives as a continuing stream, like a river. She connects this thought to a dream in which Annie asks her to take care of Tommy, and Maribeth promises to do so. The dream gives the expression a concrete relational shape: Annie is gone, Maribeth has arrived, and care passes between people rather than ending with the first loss.

Tommy resists the part of this idea that makes departure sound inevitable. He says he would rather people stayed; he does not want someone else to come after Maribeth. Maribeth answers that some people stay, some do not, and some cannot. Her conclusion is not that attachments should be held lightly, but that people must be loved while they can and that what they teach one another should be learned. The difference between them preserves the expression’s emotional tension: it offers a way to understand impermanence, not a painless acceptance of it.

For Tommy, the exchange marks a change in how he carries Annie’s memory. He tells Maribeth that she has taught him about letting go, loving Annie wherever she is, and taking her with him. Later, while tending Annie’s gravesite, he remembers Maribeth’s words that not everyone is meant to stay forever. For the first time, the thought makes some sense of Annie’s death to him, though he still wishes she could have lived longer. He continues to visit her grave, read her name, and say goodbye, evidence that understanding does not end his mourning.

Separation, support, and the expression’s limits

The expression also resonates with Maribeth’s own uncertain future. At sixteen, she has been told by her father, Bert Robertson, to leave home and go to the Sisters of Charity convent; she is forbidden to tell her younger sister, Noelle, the truth. She eventually leaves the convent at dawn with her money and a small bag, buys an open-ended bus ticket to Chicago, and writes postcards to her mother and Noelle promising to send an address. Her departure is an act of independence, but it also follows the painful loss of home and family support.

In Chicago, her relationship with Tommy offers companionship without removing the conditions shaping her choices. He visits her regularly, and, after returning to school, finds a way to help her keep up with her studies: they work through the same assignments, and he lends her books. Their closeness grows alongside the knowledge that her baby will have a separate life and that she may return to Iowa. The expression therefore describes more than the death that first prompted it. It also speaks to relationships formed under the pressure of coming change, where affection and support matter even when no one can promise permanence.

The future remains painful rather than neatly resolved. John and Liz tell Maribeth that she can return home, finish school, and use the money they had saved for Annie’s education to attend college. They have also agreed that she will be known to Kate as their friend, not her mother. Maribeth dislikes the thought of going home, while Tommy hates the thought of her leaving; both understand that six months is not forever, even if, at sixteen, it feels like it. In this setting, “Some people are just passing through our lives” holds together a hard truth and a consolation: people may be separated, but the care and learning exchanged between them can continue to shape the lives they leave behind.