The day after/before - the choice of tenses

Question

I've a question regarding the tense choice with the phrase "the day/night/minute... after/before + clause.

As we all know, after some words only the Present Simple is possible. Some of such are After, Before, As soon as..., but lately I've seen a sentence that puts me in doubt.

Here it is: Juice Wrld and his entourage had packed a total of 70 pound of cannabis into their suitcases in preparation for Juice's birthday which had been scheduled for the night after he would die.

On the analogy of that one it should be also grammatically correct to write:

1. I'm going to visit my old friend the day before I will depart and

2. There's going to be something the minute after we will leave.

I kind of feel that those sentences are different from, for example: There's going to be something after we leave, but maybe I'm just wrong.

Could you please give the explanation of this part of grammar?

Answer 1

There is quite a lot of fairly confusing tense and generally "time" in that quote. It might make more sense in context but taken out of context it seems muddled.

There is "now" (the time that the writer wrote those words) and "then", the time that the paragraph is set at. "Then" is at a point in time after the preparations for Juice Wrld's birthday, but before his death.

So the writer uses past perfect to talk about preparation that were made before "then". Now for the phrase "after..." It would be problematic to say "After he died", since "then" he wasn't dead. And it would be wrong to say "After he dies", since that is taking about the future from "now". So the only possibility is an explicit future in the past: "After he would die".

Normally in these "after..." expressions you don't use future tense. It isn't correct to say "The day after we will leave". That is simply a time in the future and you can say "The day after we leave". It is only the complex chronology and sequencing that makes "after he would die" necessary. It isn't normally done.