TOW #18: "After Life" (Written Text)

A few months after her husband died of cardiac arrest at the dinner table, Joan Didion wrote “After Life,” an account of the sudden death of her husband and her resultant grief. Didion, a lifelong writer in many fields, often authors essays with depressing themes or melancholy undertones. This essay, however, is perhaps more powerful than any of the others of hers that I have read in the past, because of the gripping emotion and bewilderment she aims to portray, and how this time it is clearly so real.

Didion structures her essay chronologically for the most part, a strategy that is helpful in leading her readers with her down the path of love and loss and shock and sorrow. She begins her outline with the death itself, contextualizing it by recounting the events of that day, namely their visit to their only daughter, Quintana, who was in the ICU after having fallen ill with pneumonia, which escalated, putting her in a coma. Despite the tough day, Didion places an emphasis on how utterly ordinary the moments before John’s death were: she was cooking dinner while he asked her something about the scotch she had poured for him, and they discussed WWI. “John was talking, then he wasn't,” she writes. Short sentences like this, which she uses after each longer, narrative paragraph, convey a sort of aloofness one wouldn’t necessarily expect to find in an essay about the death of a loved one, but which so perfectly, I am told, conveys the bewildering emptiness that follows such a loss. The idea of the “ordinary,” like the calm before the storm, while not hers specifically, is one she uses throughout this section. As a writer, she references the deaths she has experienced through others, quoting the people of Honolulu she had interviewed, saying: “ without exception, these people began their accounts of Pearl Harbor by telling me what an ‘ordinary Sunday morning’ it had been.” Such references exhibit the magnitude of her husband’s death to Didion. As a journalist, a tragedy meant a new story to Didion. However, following the death of her husband, the stories of others became her reality. By including stories she has covered in the past, Didion strengthens the message of her own account by forcing her reader to bring it to a personal level for themselves, letting them know that this is not just a story that they could leave and go back to a normal life, but that at some point, this just might be their reality. 
My reaction to this was to be somewhat taken aback and horrified. This, however, I believe was Didion’s goal. She aimed to convey death in a way that anyone could see as startlingly ordinary and natural. She solidifies this message by concluding with her decision to look up her and her husband’s old house in California, at which point she discovered that the area had been destroyed by a landslide that blocked off a cave she and her husband used to swim into: “We could have been swimming into the cave with the swell of clear water and the entire point could have slumped, slipped into the sea around us. The entire point slipping into the sea around us was the kind of conclusion I anticipated. I did not anticipate cardiac arrest at the dinner table.”