Chapter 12 Summary and Analysis

As Quintana's rehabilitation progressed and as Quintana's health improved, Didion became less necessary to Quintana's recovery, leaving her with time get back to her own life. This, she writes, was "the beginning of the process of mourning. . . Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention . . ." and up to that point, she writes, she did everything she could to avoid paying that attention.

Didion describes discovering things about John that she hadn't known, and had no way of asking him about. She contemplates on how there was a definite line between alive and dead, a line a doctor once said wasn't there. "It's not black and white", she recalls him saying—yet to John or friends who have died, it was. In contemplating this realization, the author writes that she no longer believed in what...