After Life, by Joan Didion

September 25, 2005 7:07 AM

Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
After Life, by Joan Didion. (bugmenot for NYTimes)
posted by matteo (23 comments total)

Wow. Did not expect to start my Sunday morning crying. Thank you.
posted by cavalier at 7:19 AM on September 25, 2005

A recent article in the Guardian by the same author on the same subject.
posted by biffa at 7:30 AM on September 25, 2005

Ah. They are both referencing her new work,

"This is the first of two edited extracts from The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, published by HarperCollins next month, price £12.99"

However the Guardian excerpt jumps around a bit and gives a few more snapshots near the end.

Cherish every moment. Celebrate this chance to be alive and breathing.
posted by cavalier at 7:36 AM on September 25, 2005

The opening of this piece is a bit humdrum but read this and try not to feel for this poor lady...

"December 30, 2003, a Tuesday.

We had seen Quintana in the sixth-floor I.C.U. at Beth Israel North.

We had come home.

We had discussed whether to go out for dinner or eat in.

I said I would build a fire, we could eat in.

I built the fire, I started dinner, I asked John if he wanted a drink.

I got him a Scotch and gave it to him in the living room, where he was reading in the chair by the fire where he habitually sat.

The book he was reading was by David Fromkin, a bound galley of "Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?"

I finished getting dinner. I set the table in the living room where, when we were home alone, we could eat within sight of the fire. I find myself stressing the fire because fires were important to us. I grew up in California, John and I lived there together for 24 years, in California we heated our houses by building fires. We built fires even on summer evenings, because the fog came in. Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night. I lighted the candles. John asked for a second drink before sitting down. I gave it to him. We sat down. My attention was on mixing the salad.

John was talking, then he wasn't."

...how fucking horrible.
posted by j.p. Hung at 7:40 AM on September 25, 2005

I might have missed this--thank you.
posted by y2karl at 9:19 AM on September 25, 2005

I could only read bits of this because it is all too real; this is my future. When you love intensely and bond yourself to another human being you have to acknowledge that sooner or later the bond will be broken. I still think about my neighbor whose husband died in the night and she awoke to find herself sleeping with his corpse.

I like to imagine that we will die in our sleep together.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 9:28 AM on September 25, 2005

I can't read this. the comments in here, having made me realize what the article is about, suddenly just filled me with thoughts about my loved one dying. I'm going to go lay down now and breathe.
posted by shmegegge at 9:54 AM on September 25, 2005

Thanks for posting this. Too often we sweep natural death under the rug and only whisper what happened.

Over months my mother left a little at a time. There was the time she could no longer hold a fork. Then the time she could no longer hold herself upright. Then the time she no longer could speak. Then the time she no longer could respond. We knew she was still there though. Then she left.

My father dressed for bed then sat on the couch and said "I think." Then he was gone.

It sounds macabre and not like me at all, but I hope I am like my father. In his room we found he had distilled his life to a small box. We found clippings of articles I had written, photographs of my sister and I, a thought puzzle he planned to give me. And a letter he had saved from a cemetery responding to his request for information.

I am married now. I am of the age when my father had his first heart attack. I think often of dying, but I haven't yet made my small box.
posted by ?! at 10:05 AM on September 25, 2005

Beautiful, ?!.

A year and a half ago, my father poured himself and my mother each a glass of apple juice. They were at a meeting of my father's union at the college where he was an English professor for many years. He had taught two classes that morning. My parents first fell in love when they were teenagers in highschool, and secretly saw one another as heroes in a romantic novel. They had me when they were 19.

My father turned to my mother and said, "I think I drank that too fast." Then he vomited and fell over. Twenty minutes later, after frantic calls to 911, the paramedics revived him. No one in the room had performed CPR on my father, probably because he had vomited. When he was revived, 90 percent of his heart tissue, his kidneys, and most of his cerebral cortex was gone. Until that point, he had been a very vibrant, salty, witty, loving 68-year-old anti-war activist who taught poor urban kids in Jersey City to love Melville.

After a few days of watching my father arch his back, grind his jaw, and roll his newly blind eyes with a look of stark horror and agony, I signed the paper to stop dialysis. His wedding ring was returned to my mother in a biohazard bag as the machines chirped. My father died a few days later. At 2am, the phone in my mother's apartment rang and a nurse told me, "Mr. Silberman has expired."

Now my mother lives four blocks away from me in San Francisco.

When asked to summarize his life's teaching in a single phrase, a Tibetan Buddhist teacher replied, "Death comes without warning."

Thanks for the link.
posted by digaman at 10:28 AM on September 25, 2005

Thank you for this matteo.

My father died of liver cancer five years ago. It took a long time; he slipped bit by bit into a coma and then, after a couple days of that, at home in his bedroom, he died. I sat and read him the Wall Street Journal with tears running down my face but what struck me when the breathing finally stopped was how hard it is to die. It's hard to be born; there's pain and straining and fluid, immense labor for mother and child. And it's hard to die, too: you don't just go suddenly from one stage to the next; the body must work at it: it's as hard to die as it is to be born.

And harder to be left behind, sometimes.
posted by mygothlaundry at 11:05 AM on September 25, 2005

I am forever grateful that the last words I said to my father were "I love you." The next morning my mother called to say he'd gone into a coma, and less that twenty-four hours after that he died while my mother, exhausted, slept downstairs. What struck me the most was entering a suddenly silent house; the machine which supplied his oxygen had been running continually for the six months of his illness. Didion is utterly right about the ordinariness of days when these events occur; the contrast is so powerful, everyone else in the neighbourhood getting on with their lives around the little family circle of grief.

Thanks for the post.
posted by jokeefe at 12:12 PM on September 25, 2005

Death is the final fact of life.
posted by Cranberry at 12:31 PM on September 25, 2005

In the August afternoon, driving on the dirt road near our house I slow down to notice the screaming woman and the lump by the side of the road. I exit the car and she screams "please help him".

I go over to the lump and the training kicks in as well as the thought "is this really happening?' I feel for a pulse, there is none. I start the process I had thought was only a training exercise. No time to worry about the drool of blood from his mouth, or HIV, or even myself.

There is only look, listen, feel, nothing, do chin lift, still no pulse no breath, find the xyphoid, another chin lift, begin CPR, two breaths to start, 15 chest compressions, and two more breaths.

After 5 minutes a voice appears, "can I help?' She does the breaths I do the compressions. After 15 minutes I hear the sirens. The rescue crew arrives. They bag his mouth and tell me to continue the compressions. They say "stop" and hook him to the EKG. It is flat. I begin my piddly little compressions and actually see the green line dance on the screen. Stop again and out come the paddles and the shock. The green line moves on its own.

I am elated. The screaming woman returns and I give her a thumbs up and a hug. Suddenly there is nothing left to do but continue home. I am totally numb. i read the paper the next day. He died eight hours later of massive head injuries. I hear they couldn't even see his brain on the MRI. I alternate between numbness and crying for days. I get an AIDS test and make a statement to the police and the insurance company. And he lives on in me for weeks thru the poison ivy at the side of the road that covered my body afterward.

Even today the one thing I know for sure, is that on a hot summer afternoon, death is just around the curve in the road.
posted by Xurando at 1:43 PM on September 25, 2005

That's the price we pay when we dare to fall in love. I dread that day and selfishly hope I'm first to die.
posted by deborah at 1:50 PM on September 25, 2005

When I got back to the living room the paramedics were watching the computer monitor they had set up on the floor. I could not see the monitor, so I watched their faces. I remember one glancing at the others.

When the decision was made to move it happened very fast.

When I read this passage, I thought of an anecdote (I've shared this here before). At a British dinner party, the game of inviting famous historical figures came up, and one person suggested that Shakespeare would make an interesting -- and presumably loquacious -- dinner guest. One of the others (a well-known writer and intellectual, but I've forgotten who) replied, "Ah, but was there ever a better listener born?" Writers are observers of others, and themselves.
posted by dhartung at 2:00 PM on September 25, 2005

digaman, thanks for sharing your story.
posted by twsf at 3:57 PM on September 25, 2005

My mother died when I was 16. She went to bed one evening and didn't wake up. I was the last one to see her alive.

She would have been 61 today.

I can't bring myself to read the linked article.
posted by eilatan at 6:04 PM on September 25, 2005

My father-in-law went in a similar manner two years ago next month. His wife is still grieving. I wonder if giving her this to read makes any sense....
posted by Cassford at 7:39 PM on September 25, 2005

My husband died in June. We were sitting on the sofa talking about what we were going to do for our anniversary the following day. We kissed, said, "I love you" and I went to bed. I found him on the sofa the following morning. I'm not supposed to be a widow at 32 years old. I still expect him to walk through the door.
posted by moosedogtoo at 9:06 PM on September 25, 2005

Wow, I thought the article was intense and moving, but the thread is much more so.
posted by OmieWise at 5:28 AM on September 26, 2005

Very much more so. Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart.
posted by matteo at 6:50 AM on September 26, 2005

Jesus, moosedogtoo, my condolences.
posted by jokeefe at 11:17 AM on September 26, 2005

They had been married for forty years. Except for the first five months, when John still worked at Time, they both stayed home and wrote in an amazing intimacy: "We were together twenty-four hours a day." Even during the occasional week apart, if she were teaching in Berkeley or he had gone to Las Vegas, they talked on the telephone several times a day. When, in the second paragraph of her first column for Life magazine, she dropped a rhetorical grenade—"We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce"—upset readers simply weren't aware that John had edited the column, as he edited everything she wrote, and then drove her to Western Union so she could file it.

You'd think they needed each other to breathe. But you'd also think that Didion, the tarmac woman, has been rehearsing death for many years on many runways. It's her preferred tropic, as skepticism is her preferred meridian. Maria in Play It As It Lays not only expects to die soon, but also believes that planes crash if she boards them in "bad spirit," that loveless marriages cause cancer, and that fatal accidents happen to the children of adulterers. Charlotte in A Book of Common Prayer dreams only of "sexual surrender and infant death," and came to Boca Grande in the first place because it's "at the very cervix of the world, the place through which a child lost to history must eventually pass." The body count in Democracy is remarkable, not even including the Reuters correspondent and the AID analyst who are poisoned in Saigon in 1970 by oleander leaves, "a chiffonade of hemotoxins." In The Last Thing He Wanted, everybody we care about will die, leaving only Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to eat by candlelight and Ted Sorensen to swim with the dolphins.

-- The Black Album, The New York Review of Books
posted by matteo at 6:20 PM on October 4, 2005