Living After Death

This intimate chronicle is the careful recollection of Ms Didion's personal trials in the span of several weeks and how she was affected the subsequent year, indeed a solid and genuine contemplation on the marks of death on the living; the perception of and reaction to death by the American ethos; mourning and grief; loss and temporariness; self-pity and memory; recovery and the fragility of the human sense of the real; and, of course, change. Ms Didion's only daughter has been hospitalized and in coma for a bit more than a week after severe septic shock. Then, her husband of 40 years dies instantly at the end of 2003. This book is the narrative of meditations contemplated by the author after these tragedies.

Death is specific, however. Death of a loved one is not everywhere the same to the survivor. Death witnessed, in one way or another, with the certainty it has happened, evokes some reactions from the bereaved that are markedly different from those whose loved ones' death is unknown and merely presumed. Think here of the relatives and mothers of the “disappeared” youth in Argentina, Laos, Guatemala or El Salvador during the 70s, or Consuelo Sunsín, wife of writer and resistance fighter Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose plane never returned from a mission in the south of Vichy France in 1944. In these instances a sense of closure is denied, hope is painfully entertained and then betrayed. Ms Didion's deliberations, however, are those of the person who has witnessed the sudden death of a loved one and the resulting mental and emotional states suffered by the survivor. Ms Didion is among the most acute and sober examiners of American society, culture and body politic in the last 40 years, hence it is no surprise that she manages to say, to speak, to write her thoughts on a subject that is of extreme privacy, closed to public telling. This makes her both specific as a person and as a writer and typical of this complex, fascinating American life.

In her non-fiction work Joan Didion has continually struck me as a precise and economic essayist and her language as simple, her prose short, her rhythm terse, punctuating, in this text, those subjects which should have been recognized long ago by the speaker herself. It was this quality of revelation of the absurd amidst tragedy, the sincere telling of inmost thoughts and the simplicity of scarce and succinct language what made me finish a book that, without which, would be merely an expression of grief. However, the book is more than that, much more. In addition to the palimpsest of carpe diem and in spite of its scope, it is an examination of the bereaved, of the bittersweet realization that everything is in flux all the time, and that we (as humans, as Americans?) take for granted and expect conditions that are, in the context of the probable, near the miraculous.

As the narrative continues, I come to realize that the speaker has recently discovered new perspectives on her conceptions of life, loss and change. “Time is the school in which we learn.” One such discovery is the reaction American society in general has toward death and the expectations it holds from those who have lost by death of a loved one. Indifference does not quite hit it on the nail with exactitude, although much of it is there, in the general response to the concept of death; negation is more accurate in describing the American obsession with avoiding (or even evading?) death. People “pass on” or “pass away,” they do not die; as if Euphemism would protect us from some morbid and obscene event that is not supposed to happen at all. Death is not a subject to be discussed without feelings of breaking a silent covenant, even some guilt; it is, instead, to be covered, camouflaged, diverted, as if in so doing its permanence could, somehow, be ameliorated. In the same spirit, from the bereaved it is expected a response of strength and stoicism, marching onto life as if nothing incapacitating has happened. Grief and mourning are thus reduced to temporary and short states of the heart that cannot, and should not, be examined, removed instead to a dark corner of the self where they may be forgotten, never contemplated as possibly healing processes, as a time to come to terms with the permanent absence of someone in our lives. In fact, any other response is labeled self-pity, a compound steeped in connotations of weakness, indulgence and victimization. But, who that feels sorry for you matters most if not yourself? Aren't you the one who grieves the loss and who has to overcome oneself?

Why this hiding away from the most certain of facts of life? Why this indifference to and shutting off of sorrow? Why us, Americans? Why other cultures have a more comfortable relationship to death and we don't? What are we missing?

Perhaps the very act of accepting death as a definite future certainty is a catalyst to observe too closely the inevitability of grief, the ineluctable state of sorrow and, thus, the unimaginable: the end, our end, the void. “We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we shall one day not be at all.” What of religion, then? What of the Christian and Muslim heavens and their rewards? I daresay that every human being, innately and deeply, knows the finality of death but refuses to accept it if only because it is the threshold to the truly unknown, that from and about which no living human can find information. Faith needs no hermeneutics: it is vitally necessary.

Or, this reaction is a form of protection that, in its variety of schemes, hints at the precariousness of our fragility: our thin line between sanity and insanity, the obscure fuzziness relating perception to interpretation, the clear bifurcation between life and death. And this form of protection, this survival tool, is perhaps a very good thing because it helps us build our world and encapsulate us in whatever it is we define as reality, so that ultimate safety, unstoppable continuity, solidity of permanence, and certainty of a future may not be cracked as thin illusions.

The emphasis Ms Didion forces throughout her essay is on the suddenness of change: “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” And in the blink of the eye nothing is ever as it was; physics has transmuted our lives by proxy, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” black and white, yes and no. A binary state. Given that, it might well be that this routine and habit of living to which we become accustomed through life is both the greatest of illusions and the expert facilitator of ordered, organized, purposeful living. It allows us to plan ahead, to project our desire on to the future unknown as the first lamp might illuminate and reduce the dense darkness of a cave, therefore making it easier to place more lamps to fill the space with light; it may keep the continuity of our lives intact, reducing our daily experiential fragmentation and allowing us to act as in a whole which includes the firm belief that the future is as palpable as solid rock.

And if so, the better to understand one of the most persistent of reactions to the death of a loved one: inability to let go. We keep mementos from the departed because they are keys to memories fond and not, but, more importantly, because they make us feel connected to the lost one. More than a comforting feeling, this may be the key to a return to normalcy inasmuch as memory and the act of remembering are the betrayers of wellness, of which a sign may be the settlement of desire for our departed or its transfer elsewhere.

Another observation Ms Didion makes which I find keen and true is her commentary on how hermetic is the language used by science around the body and around death. And I say “around” because it is not a language as precise as it seems with the exception of, perhaps, the pronouncement. The family of the sick and hospitalized become quickly savant of medical terms they would otherwise not know, and Ms Didion, as the reader of her husband's autopsy, is baffled by the amount of unknown or obscure words describing the causes and particularities of death. She had to go to the limits of her understanding of death in order to accept it.

I find paradoxical this large and exact and, to a large extent, public but rarefied body of knowledge about the human body, its functions and dysfunctions, its mechanics and chemistry, about everything of which it is made up, from the gene on, and the obscurity with which we treat death, the invisibility shrouding it.

Knowledge is power, but not yet power over death nor, sometimes, over ourselves. Yet it is that specific and particular and specialized knowledge that has and is serving humanity to “progress” beyond what we understand to be human, to the eradication of illness and the institution of permanent life.

Finally, Ms Didion poses the question of recovery: Is recovery of the bereaved possible? Perhaps from grief and mourning, yes. Recovery means to re/gain, to re/store. Is it possible to recover our life and self back as it was before our loss by death? I believe not. Change has happened, and it has brought the absence of the departed, and a void and, perhaps, meaninglessness inside ourselves -and for the rest of our lives- which cannot be replaced.

So what then as an attitude before permanent change? “You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change, ” her husband had told Ms Didion many years before in relation to an entirely different subject but completely accurate, for her, now. And how true; because there is not much else we can do, and “you don't get a choice.”

--Copyright 2008, Miguel Rivas.