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Phrase: After the fact
We are living in ageing societies, and that comes with inevitable consequences.
One of them is that so many of the people we interact with daily suddenly disappear, and we often only find out after the fact that they have been hospitalized for an illness or even passed away.
During the pandemic, it was common to find out someone was dead and buried or cremated a few months after the fact.
That’s one of the meanings of the phrase after the fact – after an event has occurred.
If you watch a lot of American police dramas, you’ll hear the term used frequently.
Assisting a person who has committed a crime to evade capture by the police, dispose of a gun, or liquidate stolen goods could make you an accessory to the crime after the fact.
What does that mean?
I’m not a lawyer, but in layperson’s terms, it means you bear some of the responsibility for the original crime, whether it’s theft or murder.
So, with our busy lives and such a high number of elderly, we often find out someone has passed away, and the funeral has happened only after the fact.
You also need to be careful about how you choose your friends and what you do for them.
If you make a mistake, you could find yourself an accessory to a bank robbery, drug trafficking or even murder after the fact.
Life is so complicated sometimes.
It just makes you want to curl up into a little ball in your favourite comfortable spot and stay there until others hear about your funeral, of course, after the fact.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 64.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.