After Life (2019): Grief After Breast Cancer

Ricky Gervais's comedy-drama opens once the mourners have gone home. Tony Johnson writes small features for a free paper in the invented English town of Tambury. His wife Lisa has died of breast cancer. He keeps her present by replaying the videos she recorded for him from a hospital bed.

He decides that wanting to die has one advantage. If nothing matters, he can say and do whatever he likes. So he sets about being deliberately cruel to colleagues, to his nurse, to the postman, to strangers.

Three series follow his slow retreat from that position. It happens through people who refuse to give up on him: a widow he meets at the cemetery, a nurse at his father's care home, his brother-in-law, and a dog whose need to be fed keeps stopping him.

His grief never resolves. It changes shape. By the end he has decided that being useful to other people is enough of a reason, and he steps back into his life rather than out of it.

The ending is discussed below.

This is not a show about cancer treatment. It is a show about the years afterwards, and on that it is precise.

Lisa's videos capture something bereaved partners describe often. A recording of the dead person is both a comfort and a trap. It can be played again, so it never has to be finished with.

Tony is flat, snappish and unable to picture next year. He sleeps badly and eats little. That is what grief tends to look like, rather than the tidy sadness screens usually give us. The series is also honest that grief comes back in waves years later. It does not move through neat stages towards an exit.

The help that reaches him is informal and imperfect. A stranger on a bench. A colleague who keeps turning up. A postman who will not be insulted away. That is much closer to how most bereaved people are actually carried than any support group montage.

Lisa's illness is a premise, not a subject. No stage is named. No treatment decision is shown. Nobody says whether it was found early or late, and screening is never mentioned once.

Her hospital footage shows her lucid, composed and made up for the camera. Real advanced breast cancer usually means months of changing treatment, symptom control and hard conversations, none of which the series is interested in.

Tony's suicidal thoughts are handled the same way. They are mostly a comic engine. No one around him treats them as a medical problem, and nobody suggests he see anyone about them. In life those thoughts are treatable and worth naming out loud to a doctor.

Breast cancer is the second most common cancer among women in the United States, behind some kinds of skin cancer. In the UK it is the most common cancer in women, at around 59,000 new cases a year.

The best known early sign is a new lump or thickening in the breast or armpit. The CDC also lists:

• Swelling of part of the breast.
• Irritation or dimpling of the skin.
• Redness or flaky skin on the nipple or the breast.
• The nipple pulling inward, or pain in the nipple area.
• Nipple discharge other than milk, including blood.
• Any change in the size or shape of a breast.
• Pain anywhere in the breast.

Plenty of people with early breast cancer notice nothing at all. That is the reason screening exists.

Breast cancer is unusual among the cancers on this site. It has an organised screening programme for people at average risk.

The US Preventive Services Task Force recommends a screening mammogram every two years for women aged 40 to 74. That is a grade B recommendation, published in April 2024. The change that year was for women in their forties. Screening in that decade used to be framed as a personal decision; the Task Force now recommends it outright.

For women aged 75 and over, the Task Force says the evidence is not good enough to judge whether screening helps or harms. That is not the same as saying it does not work.

Two limits are worth holding on to. Screening finds cancers before they can be felt, but it does not find all of them. So a new breast change between appointments needs looking at now, not at the next invitation. And men get breast cancer too. They are not screened, so for them a change is the only warning there is.

Tony spends three series describing thoughts of ending his life, and the show never sends him to anyone. That is a gap worth naming.

Bereavement after a cancer death is its own kind of load. Sleep goes. Eating goes. So does the ability to imagine a future, which is the part that frightens people most.

None of that means a person is failing at grief. It does mean a GP or cancer team is worth telling, especially about thoughts of not wanting to be here. Hospice and cancer services usually run bereavement support for families, and it does not stop at the funeral.

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After Life is worth your time for what it does with the aftermath. It has nothing to teach you about the disease that caused it.

If you are recently bereaved, be warned that the videos of Lisa are the part people find hardest.

And if the series prompts one practical thought, make it this one. A breast change that lasts more than a couple of weeks is worth reporting, whatever your last mammogram said. After Life cannot tell you what to watch for, but screening and possible warning signs can.

This page discusses After Life for education. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is a judgement of anyone's real medical care. Spotted an error? Please email corrections@cancerexplained.org.