We Met At A Funeral, And For A While, Grief Felt Just Like Love

The funeral home smelled like lilies and regret. I didn’t want to be there, but Sarah had been my best friend’s sister, and some obligations transcend convenience. I grabbed a seat in the back, planning to pay my respects and leave quietly.

That’s when I saw him crying.

Not the polite, dabbing-at-eyes crying that most people do at funerals. Real, shoulder-shaking sobs that he was trying desperately to hide behind his hands. Something about his raw vulnerability in that sterile room full of whispered condolences and awkward hugs broke my heart.

During the reception, I found him standing alone by the coffee station, staring at a plate of untouched sandwiches.

“She would have hated this,” he said without looking up. “Sarah. She would have hated all the formality. She once told me she wanted her funeral to be a party where everyone told embarrassing stories about her.”

“Were you close?” I asked, pouring myself coffee I didn’t want.

“Best friends since childhood. She was supposed to be my best woman next month.” His laugh was hollow, brittle around the edges. “Was going to be, anyway. I called off the wedding last week. Sarah was the one who helped me realise I was about to marry someone I didn’t love.”

I watched him struggle with the weight of that admission, how losing Sarah had stripped away his ability to pretend about anything else in his life.

“She had this way of cutting through all the noise,” he continued. “Three weeks ago, she looked at me over coffee and said, ‘You know you’re not happy, right? Like, happy?’ And I realised I’d been going through the motions for two years, convincing myself that comfortable was the same thing as content.”

We talked for three hours. About Sarah, about loss, about how grief makes everything else seem either insignificant or impossibly significant. He told me about their childhood adventures, how she’d convinced him to dye his hair blue in high school just to see if his parents would notice. She’d been the first person he’d come out to at sixteen, and she’d celebrated by taking him to get matching temporary tattoos. How she’d held his hand through his father’s drinking and his mother’s subsequent breakdown.

I told him about losing my grandmother the year before, how I still picked up the phone to call her when something good happened. “I barely knew Sarah, honestly,” I admitted. “Only met her a handful of times when she’d visit my roommate. But even in those short interactions, she had this way of making you feel seen. The last time I saw her, she remembered I was nervous about a job interview and asked how it went. Such a small thing, but it meant everything.”

There was something magnetic about that afternoon. In a room full of people tiptoeing around death, we spoke honestly about life. About fear and love and the terrible fragility of everything we hold dear. About how Sarah, even in our brief encounters with her, had been the kind of person who made everyone around her feel more alive. It felt like we were the only two people who understood something essential about what it meant to be human in the wake of losing someone who had touched so many lives, even in passing.

He told me about how Sarah had been planning to start a podcast about “radical authenticity”, her phrase, interviewing people about the moments that had forced them to stop lying to themselves. “She was going to call it ‘The Uncomfortable Truth,'” he said, smiling for the first time that day. “She already had a list of people she wanted to talk to. Said everyone has at least one story about the day they finally got honest with themselves.”

“It’s strange,” I said, watching people gather their things. “I barely knew her, but losing her feels significant. Like the world lost something important, and even those of us on the periphery can feel the absence.”

“That was Sarah,” he said. “She had this way of making everyone feel like they mattered, even in the smallest interactions. A friend of mine  used to say she collected people, not in a manipulative way, but like she genuinely wanted to understand everyone she met.”

“I should probably go,” he said eventually, but neither of us moved.

“I wish I’d known her better,” I said. “I only met her a few times through my roommate, but she was always so vibrant. Even in those brief encounters, you could tell she was someone special.”

“She was. She was the kind of person who remembered your favourite coffee order and the names of your pets and the exact anniversary of the worst day of your life, just so she could check in on you.” His voice caught. “I don’t know how to do this without her. Any of it. The big decisions, the small ones. She was my compass.”

He asked for my number as we were finally leaving. “I’d like to see you again,” he said. “Away from all this sadness. Maybe we could get coffee and talk about something ridiculous. Sarah would have wanted that. She always said funerals should end with people making plans to have more fun.”

Our first real date was two weeks later. Coffee, as promised, but within twenty minutes we’d moved from small talk about the weather to discussing whether dogs dream in colour and what we’d want our last meals to be. He had this way of asking questions that made ordinary thoughts feel profound, and I found myself saying things I’d never said out loud before.

“Sarah used to do this,” he said suddenly. “Ask the questions that made you think differently about everything. She said most people spend their whole lives having the same conversation over and over, just with different people.”

We dated for eight months. Eight months of intense, passionate connection fueled by shared understanding of loss, but also by genuine curiosity about each other. We talked for hours about life and death and meaning, but also about terrible movies and childhood pets and whether aliens would find human music beautiful or disturbing. We held each other through nightmares and anniversary dates, but we also laughed until we cried at inside jokes and stayed up too late playing board games.

At first, it felt like Sarah had given us each other, like our connection was her final gift. We visited her grave together on her birthday, bringing ridiculous flowers she would have loved, bright orange gerbera daisies and purple roses that clashed beautifully. We shared stories about her that made us double over with laughter in the cemetery, earning disapproving looks from other mourners.

But slowly, I began to notice how every conversation somehow circled back to loss. How every happy moment was immediately followed by guilt, as if joy was a betrayal of Sarah’s memory. How we’d both become experts at supporting each other through pain, but had forgotten how to simply enjoy each other’s company without the weight of grief giving it meaning.

He started cancelling plans to spend time alone with his memories. I found myself manufacturing crises just to feel close to him again, because our most intimate moments always happened in the aftermath of tears. We were both becoming addicted to the intensity of shared sorrow, mistaking emotional exhaustion for deep connection.

The night I realised we were in trouble, we’d gone to see a comedy show, something light, something Sarah would have loved. But when everyone else was laughing, we sat in stiff silence, as if joy was a language we’d forgotten how to speak. Afterwards, walking to the car, he said, “I felt guilty the whole time. Like I was betraying her by laughing.”

“She would have wanted us to laugh,” I said, but even as I said it, I realised I’d felt the same guilt, the same sense that happiness was somehow disloyal.

“Would she, though?” he asked. “Or is that just what we tell ourselves so we don’t have to feel this forever?”

That’s when I understood that we weren’t grieving Sarah anymore. We were grieving our grief, terrified that healing meant forgetting, that moving forward meant leaving her behind. We’d built our entire relationship inside the architecture of loss, and we didn’t know how to love each other in any other landscape.

The conversation that ended things happened on a Tuesday evening in his kitchen. We were making dinner, or trying to, but kept getting distracted, talking about Sarah again, analysing what she would have thought about this or that decision. Finally, he put down his knife and looked at me.

“I think we’re stuck,” he said quietly.

“I know,” I said, because I did know. We both knew.

“I love you,” he said, and I believed him. “But I think I love you because you understand this sadness, and that’s not… that’s not enough, is it?”

“No,” I said, though it broke my heart to admit it. “It’s not.”

We cried together that night, but it was different from all the other crying we’d done. It was grief for us, for what we’d been and what we couldn’t become, rather than grief for Sarah. It was the first time our tears had been entirely our own.

The breakup was gentle, mutual, and inevitable. We both knew we needed to learn how to carry our sadness without drowning in it, how to honour Sarah’s memory without making it the centre of our lives. We needed to discover who we were beyond our grief, and we couldn’t do that while using each other as mirrors for our pain.

I still think about him sometimes, especially when I pass the coffee shop where we used to meet, or when I hear a song that would have made Sarah laugh, not with longing, but with a strange sort of gratitude. We found each other in the darkest moment, and for a while, that meant everything. He taught me that love born from shared pain can be real and beautiful and still not be built to last. Some connections are meant to heal you just enough to let you move forward, and there’s grace in recognising when that work is done.

Sometimes I wonder what Sarah would think about all of it. I like to imagine she’d be proud that we both learned to laugh again, separately, in our own time. That we both eventually found our way back to joy without feeling guilty about it. She always did say the best gift you could give someone was permission to be happy.