In "After Life," by Joan Didion, the author documents her experience of grief after losing her husband, John. Didion's purpose in her memoir is to understand her husband's absence and investigate the events that led up to his death. Through careful examination, it is revealed that Didion is able to accept the physical aspect of her husband's death, such as the autopsy, but fails to overcome the intellectual aspect of his death, such as the obituary. More importantly, she is able to accept his physical death, but absolutely cannot live a life without him.
             "This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then
             months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about
             illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about
             marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which
             people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness
             of sanity, about life itself (Didion 89)."
             Here in her essay, is where Didion begins her efforts to justify the events that led up to John's death. All her life, Didion has been a writer and adapted to a way in which she would express herself through words. Both Didion's and Dunne's careers as authors established a strong connection between the couple. Her husband's death was the first time in which she needed more than words to express her sentiment. Mentally, Didion was not able to absorb the events that occurred. She explains further in the text how "meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was..." (Didion 90). Through John Dunne's death, Didion loses a part of herself in which she can never replace. She lost who she was as an individual and as a writer. As a write,r you need to be able to transform simple words into feelings that resonate with meaning and beauty. J...