Commentary on Joan Didion’s Essay, Part 2: ‘After Life’

"The Day of the Dead," 1859, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Oil on canvas; 57 4/5 inches by 47 1/5 inches. Museum of Fine Arts of Bordeaux, France. Public Domain

As discussed in Part 1, writer Joan Didion died in 2021 and left behind a lifetime of writing on culture, literature, family, and loss. Her 8,000-word essay “After Life” was published in September 2005. It focused on life, death and grief, after her husband John Dunne’s death in 2003, and the death of their only child Quintana in August 2005.

Didion finds meaning not only in the spectacular, but also in the everyday, including as wife and mother. She recalls with fondness, even pride, “Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking … clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way.”

Against that peaceful backdrop, she likens death to an earthquake whose personal impact is off the Richter chart, a disaster of a different scale. But she reckons there’s more at play in coping with grief that follows.

Joan Didion in 1970. Didion wrote her essay about grief and the loss of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Kathleen Ballard/UCLA/CC BY-SA 4.0

She interprets the Episcopal litany, “as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end,” to mean the earth in flux, the “shifting of geological structures that … could throw up mountains … and … just as reliably take them away.” She sees the natural order, or the “scheme in action,” as indifferent, unmoved by who it creates, and who it destroys. So she inverts the traditional hymn with a telling touch of despair, “No eye was on the sparrow. No one was watching me.”

Naturally, grief blurs her vision.

God’s Eye

The hymn, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” doesn’t imply some giant, unblinking eye in the sky. It implies that, although evil doesn’t come from God, everything else does, especially goodness. Wherever there’s truth, beauty, and goodness, God’s eye watches in, through, and with ours: A young groom looks his bride in the eye to say he’ll be faithful, a mother gazes adoringly at her newborn, and a middle-aged woman gratefully contemplates her disabled father.

It’s God’s eye that watches Didion through those ministering to her after Dunne’s death, “friends and relatives who brought food and made drinks and laid out plates … those who picked up the plates and froze the leftovers and ran the dishwasher.” It is God’s eye that cries with those sharing her grief; their housekeeper ​​José “was crying that morning.” Her friend Lynn, Quintana’s husband Gerry, Didion’s brother Jim, Dunne’s older brother Nick, and their assistant, Sharon, all offered to come over to comfort her. Days before Dunne’s death, Didion’s and Dunne’s doting eyes watched over Quintana lying unconscious in an intensive-care unit.

Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Getty Images

If anything, that hymn is a call to action. When disaster strikes—sickness, separation, or death—it calls for greater, not lesser, intimacy with love and life. “When songs give place to sighing, when hope within me dies, I draw the closer to him; From care he sets me free.”

Mortality’s Announcement

Didion misreads death as the announcer when, in fact, we’re all on notice the second we’re born. Birth announces our mortality first by the fragility of our tiny infant bodies and the limits of our tinier minds. That some of us grow up and stay unprepared for death is a postponement of the truth, if not outright denial. Didion’s distress after Dunne’s death leads her to wonder if she could’ve prevented it. Pithily, she calls it “delusionary thinking, the omnipotent variety.”

Death may shock, but it shouldn’t surprise. That it sometimes appears to should make us doubly cherish life’s opportunities to articulate and appreciate its truth, beauty, and goodness.

Perspective is conceivable only in the human realm, where one sees a personal situation from only one or two points of view, while friends and relatives see from a few more. Regardless, there’s a limit to finite ways of seeing. As humans we’re bound by our necessarily limited perspective, unable to appreciate the vibrancy of health without the sapping power of sickness; we can’t acknowledge light without darkness, or at least a little shadow. The infinite view, though, isn’t quite a “perspective.” It sees all possible views at once, as if it were just the one.

Unlike atheism or agnosticism, faith aspires to this expansive, divine way of seeing, even in our earthly realm. It’s not just about balancing what Didion calls “good fortune and bad” or adopting a coolness to what she calls “probability and luck.” Faith is not mere acknowledgement that life is a mix of darkness and light. It requires a positive bias toward the light, and a stubborn belief that life overrides death, and joy overcomes sorrow.

Didion’s agnosticism bends her grief more heavily toward gloom, as if conceding victory to death. Of her parents’ deaths, too, she repeatedly recalls the bleak, not the bright: She thinks of the sadness and loneliness. She dwells in regret for time gone by, for things unsaid, and for the pain, helplessness, and humiliation endured.

Poet John Donne, 1622, by Isaac Oliver. Public Domain

Unsurprisingly, Renaissance poet John Donne’s poem “Death be not proud” was born of faith, not perspective. He’s almost dismissive of death, “One short sleep past, we wake eternally.” No, death isn’t on par with life. Waking is the main event. We may not fully know why life is infinitely superior to death, but we can draw strength, hope, courage, joy, even gratitude, from knowing that it is.

To paraphrase Didion, it was so “in the beginning,” is still so “now,” and “ever shall be.” Would eyelids that open look magical if they couldn’t also shut? Would smiles thrill if frowns were impossible? Would there be effervescence in spring or summer were it not for the brooding of autumn and winter? Shouldn’t it follow, then, that it’s impossible for us to value the pulsing, explosive energy of life without experiencing the decay of aging, dying and death?

Belief that the “after life” holds only life, untinged by death, and that it’s on a plane that we can’t possibly fathom in our finite state must be more than a hunch. It must be a certainty. French philosopher-writer Albert Camus got it, shall we say, dead right, in “The Stranger”:

In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For … no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger—something better, pushing right back.

Of course, death is agonizing. But it reminds the bereaved of how deeply they love those dying, and how fervently they must treasure those still alive. It reassures the dying of how deeply they were loved.

Initially, Didion tries to seal herself off from the fact (the truth) of Dunne’s death. That “primitive instinct” is a luxury of the human condition. She describes it thus: “I needed to be alone so that he could come back.” Wishful thinking is understandable, a bit like giving ourselves the extravagance of shielding our eyes before sudden or near-blinding light. But that light is the truth; our eyelids or palms allow us, briefly, to delay or deny it. Delay or denial isn’t so much a lie as it is a brief comfort, as long as it’s brief, and we eventually open our eyes to the light.

Joan Didion at the Brooklyn Book Festival in 2008. Didion wrote "After Life" as she grieved the loss of her loved ones. David Shankbone/CC BY-SA 3.0

A grieving Didion feels at one with lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems that Dunne had “strung together” after his younger brother’s suicide.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. And I have asked to be, Where no storms come.

But life isn’t a denial of the dark. It’s a preference for the day. That’s precisely why Didion likens her brooding to the “leaden feeling” she wakes with, on mornings after she and Dunne quarrel. It may be a legitimate feeling, but it doesn’t quite belong. It must be brief or there’s something off. So, she’d always wanted to “fix it.”

Likewise, death isn’t our natural state. Life is. Death can mean only one thing: life in a newer, higher, more glorious form, as Camus says, “an invincible summer … something stronger … better.”

Didion stops short of asking what the antidote to grief is; she seems consumed by it. If she did ask the question, the answer is implied in the treasured memories she’s laid out in her essay, hidden in broad daylight: gratitude.

John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. (Getty Images)  

Gratitude

Gratitude is the antidote to grief.

Gratitude is joy tinged with humility. Without humility, joy is mere delight that rises with stimulus and falls without it. Grief thrives on deprivation, while gratitude blooms from a sense of abundance. Grief thrives on betrayal, while gratitude thrives on faithfulness. Grief can’t imagine being denied out of turn. Gratitude can’t imagine being gifted, let alone out of turn.

Both have their place, but there must be no doubt about which state of mind we must call home, and which must be allowed mere visitation rights. Grief that lingers too long denies gratitude a chance to return. Grief that doesn’t lead to gratitude sees birth as an entitlement, rather than a gift from an infinite Giver. It sees life as a right, not a sacred responsibility bequeathed by an infinite Benevolence.

We all live a little more and die a little more each day; we’re closer to life because we’ve experienced more of it, but closer also to death for that very reason. We’re entitled to lament loss, as we celebrate gain. But balance between light and darkness is vital, bias toward light, even more. Elsewhere Didion once wrote, “You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.”

As she touchingly expressed in this essay, she may have reluctantly visited grief; happily, she appears to have picked gratitude to inhabit. In interviews she once said, “It’s one of the clichés people say to you after a death: ‘He lives in our memory’ I mean I don’t disbelieve; I just don’t believe.”

As we’ve seen, Didion did believe, even if she had trouble acknowledging it.

Part 1 lays out how the author dealt with the loss of her husband and child.

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