Commentary on Joan Didion’s Essay, Part 1: ‘After Life’

“Pearl of Grief” by Rembrandt Peale. Acclaimed writer Joan Didion reflects on death and those who grieve in her essay, “After Life.” Public Domain

Essayist, screenwriter, novelist, and journalist Joan Didion (1934–2021) was one half of a power couple in America’s late 20th-century arts and culture scene; the other was her husband of nearly four decades, fellow writer, John Gregory Dunne.

When she died in 2021, Didion left behind a lifetime of writing on culture, literature, and family. Her 8,000-word essay “After Life” meditates on life, love, marriage, children, death, and loss. There are other reflections on sickness and health, good times and bad, memory and grief.

Published in September 2005, “After Life” followed Dunne’s death in 2003 and that of their only child, Quintana, in August 2005. Since the couple couldn’t have children, they’d adopted Quintana as a baby. Dunne’s heart attack struck while they were helping Quintana, in her late 30s, battle pneumonia and septic shock.

A Monsoon of Grief

To be expected, Didion’s no dilettante in discussing death. Or grieving. Her grief-stricken essay feels like a monsoon, not a summer shower. It echoes her distraught mind, crisscrossing between and across events. Its tone exudes warmth and tenderness that betrays the primacy she places on life and living over the bleakness, even the suddenness of death. Its inescapably spiritual-religious tenor betrays the value she places on trust, loyalty, intimacy, respect, and openness.

Raised Episcopalian-Christian, Didion liked to think she was agnostic. She grew up convinced that “meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words. … I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room.” It might have allowed her to cherry-pick images from her pain-wracked emotional-cognitive album, as it were. But her familiar world of words fell short as a coping mechanism. She now needed “more than words” to find meaning.

Without intending to, Didion’s worldview on words paraphrases in the finite realm what the biblical verses John 1:1 and John 1:14 expound when reconciling finite and infinite realms. The verses explain that “the Word” that “was made flesh and dwelt among us” always existed. It wasn’t just inseparable from God but it was God. She’d long suspected that it’s the word that contains thought, whether articulated in speech or not. But in hungering for “more than words,” she unwittingly also paraphrases Romans 8:26, which explains that because we don’t know what to pray for, “the Spirit Himself” prays within and for us, with groanings “too deep for words.”

The Power of Words

It is the Spirit, or God, who loves through us. When we lose someone, to separation or death, it is the Spirit who aches for them with us, and in us. It’s why we’re at a loss to grasp the depth of these pangs. We wonder why even others are staggered at how deeply we feel love and loss: a baby we’ve lost after mere weeks as its parent, or an aged spouse we’ve lost after a lifetime together. Wordless stirrings that surprise us? They’re a glimpse of the Infinite within us.

Could it be that we’re not alone? Is someone else pleading, praying, thanking, rejoicing within and alongside us? Didion nods at this truth, recalling physicians pronouncing Dunne dead, “They asked if I wanted a priest. I said yes. A priest appeared and said the words. I thanked him.” What for? The words, of course. The priest proxies for God, praying on her behalf; she’s too shaken to think straight, let alone pray.

Following her mother’s death, another priest captured this inexplicable, seemingly inexhaustible depth of feeling, writing to Didion of how the death of a parent, “despite our preparation…our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us. … We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.”

Dunne

Movingly, Didion refers to Dunne and herself as near-inseparable. There was nothing they didn’t discuss: “Our days were filled with the sound of each other’s voices.”

Their marriage was first a warm exchange of words, of thoughts, and only then of trusting actions, devoid of “competitive … envies and resentments.” To her, the fact that others often raised the likelihood of such a “minefield,” mirrors misunderstandings of marriage as competition rather than collaboration. To her it was simpler, “I did not always think he was right nor did he always think I was right but we were each the person the other trusted.”

Premonition, Didion senses, is like a gift allowing those who know they’re going to die, to prepare, while offering only a hint to those left behind. She suspects Dunne had a premonition. While he seemed prepared, she hadn’t taken the hint. In contrast to death making itself familiar beforehand, Didion characterized grief as a stranger to the one grieving until the last moment: “Grief … is nothing we expect … has no distance … comes in waves … sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees.”

She’s right. The mechanics of grieving don’t unravel until they’re upon us: greeting and being greeted by condolers, wondering what to say or do, to whom, how, when, or where.

Explicitly, the essay’s title expresses the question: What comes “after” Dunne’s “life”? Implicitly, it’s more provocative, wondering what awaits in the “after life.” Didion’s fashionably agnostic answer? Nothing much. To her, the “unending absence” of the one loved, now “gone,” is the opposite of meaning, “meaninglessness itself.” Her musings on meaninglessness elicit geological analogies: shores, mountains, islands, earthquakes. But she’s discussing transcendental, not earthly, themes. We might allow ourselves analogies from geological astronomy to clarify how overwhelmed as she is by grief.  

Great Stars

First, that “void” feels massive because there was more than flesh, blood, and bones in Dunne’s body; there was soul, and spirit, and kinship. Why do people regard a dead body with deference? They’re honoring a person, not a mass of tissue. It’s not as if an insignificant human has “gone”; it’s as if a giant star has imploded, leaving behind a black hole that exaggerates otherwise normal gravity. It pulls in, then pulverizes, and imprisons anything that enters, even light. It’s a metaphor for the consuming darkness of death and grief. Those who’ve loved little, or been loved less, might be dwarf, not giant, stars, leaving behind mere white dwarfs or neutron stars, not black holes. Sadness might follow in their wake, rarely grief.

Second, the void of grief is meant for the living to feel with, feel for, and not follow the void of the dead. Grief is meant to meaningfully meditate on death, not mimic it. Crucially, grief allows a person to meditate on life. Didion recalls an Episcopalian funereal idiom: In the midst of life, we are in death. But that has it backwards. As we’ll see, it is life that predominates. Death is merely a placeholder: the end of one expression of life and the beginning of another—an interregnum, never the main event.

Third, in the finite realm at least, it’s harder for humans to grasp their transcendence without adversity. Henry Ward Beecher said, “Tears are often the telescope by which men see far into heaven.” If mournful memory is a tool to cope with death, it must help the bereaved “see” what a great star (a loved one) was doing before it (he or she) died: expanding outward with the exuberance of giving, not collapsing morbidly inward with a persuasion of victimhood.

Didion opens with words “of self-pity” and for a long time she writes “nothing else.” Entire paragraphs in her essay obsess with an autopsy and “to be in the room when they did it.” It’s a while before telescopic sight kicks in, and her words move beyond how Dunne died to how he lived: generously, kindly, humbly. 

Finally, while Didion’s words suggest that she doesn’t believe in an “after life,” her actions suggest otherwise. She defies her prognosis of meaninglessness by fighting it as it afflicts her as the bereaved. She seeks and finds meaning repeatedly: in memories of Dunne, their times together talking, writing, swimming, going out to dinner, watching TV, gardening, building home fires, and taking long drives. She finds meaning in remembering his favorite drink, cryptic humor, quiet supportiveness, and ideas for writing cards. Most importantly, she finds meaning in wearing down and exhausting, not just articulating, her grief through her hauntingly cathartic essay. 

Part 2 shares Didion’s thoughts on how she coped with grief.

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