Forget BFFs, You Need FFs—Funeral Friends

None of us had enough money to bid on “Disco Ball Moon,” a painting we all loved.

I’d gone to the art auction with three of my friends, but most of the art was way out of our budgets. So I suggested a painting party to recreate the art work for ourselves, DIY style.

As the day drew closer, we discussed rescheduling. One was getting over a cold, one busy. But I was having a hard time, and so instead of saying, yeah, okay, I took a deep breath and texted: “I really need this.” They didn’t say, ew, gross, you’re so clingy. They said:

What time?

And

How much glitter do we need?

And then they came over, and when I burst into tears 30 minutes into the night, they didn’t leave. They got up one by one and awkwardly stood at my back while I dripped tears on my painting. And T said, so do you like want a hug or nah…because you’re already really sweaty.

This moment has stayed with me. My body dripping with tears and emotion. And yeah, sweat. A glittery mess on my hands. Three friends I trust at my back.

Falling apart didn’t ruin the night. Allowing myself to be who and how I actually was gave silent permission to everyone else to do the same. There was no small talk to be had that evening. One friend stayed up way past her bedtime to be with us, one ordered dinner when I couldn’t make any decisions about food, and the third booked our very first funeral friends retreat.

What are funeral friends?

It’s one of those concepts I picked up from somebody somewhere years ago, and I remember it wasn’t mine, but that’s the extent of my recollection.

It’s the idea that anyone I meet could become a funeral friend, someone so important to me that we will go to each other’s funeral. Well, one of us will.

Maybe it sounds morbid, but it’s made me more open, more curious, less judgy and dismissive. Of course, most people will not become funeral friends, but the potential makes me excited, and it makes me pay attention. There’s just something about the possibility of looking back in 10 or 30 or 50 years that grounds me in the presence, fully immersing myself in these interactions, because one day I might think back on our first meeting, first deep conversation, or first road trip. Entertaining the idea that a chance interaction may result in a funeral friendship makes me ask better questions and helps me listen more closely. It makes me trust my gut feeling about a person.

You’re not too old to make friends.

I’ve only consciously invested in making funeral friends over the last few years. I used to read articles about how it feels impossible to make new friends in midlife. I contributed one such article several years back, complaining how difficult it was for me to find people, because the random woman I struck up a conversation with at Target one Christmas Eve never returned my texts. That’s what I called trying.

It didn’t really occur to me that one of the main reasons for my friend-less-ness was that I invested most of my relationship energy into romantic partners.

Elizabeth Gilbert

speaks about this cultural expectation in a gorgeous Substack interview with

Jane Ratcliffe

titled The Warm Vanilla Pudding Hum Of Well Being:

“The great consistent love of my life, especially as I get older, are my friendships. Culturally and in my family, I was taught that the most important love relationship is between you and your romantic partner. […] Friendship was always a sort of marginal thing. You love them, but they’re not as important as your family.”

I realized how, throughout my life, I’d always prioritized romantic relationships over friendships, even though it was my friends who got me through those relationships and breakups. When I was bullied in middle school, it was E and K and T who made my days bearable when my stomach was in knots. During a foreign exchange semester, it was G and M and C who made me feel welcome and shared a pint of ice cream in the car when whatshisface broke up with me backstage after opening night of the high school play. When I had my twins with my first daughter only 13 months old, it was J who brought her kids to watch mine and stocked my fridge with snacks and meals and cleaned my kitchen and put together a dresser while I was at a postpartum appointment. When I left my cult-y church and got a divorce, it was L who helped me scrub my rental on move-out day.

I’m not in close contact with any of these friends anymore, but their kindness still makes me smile involuntarily while my insides dissolve into liquid gold. Not all friendships are forever, but I cannot help thinking that by not putting in the effort to maintain these relationships, I lost out on some funeral friends. Reading the interview, I found myself envious of Liz’ friendships:

“At my birthday party, I was looking around and realizing there's my friend Jennie, we've been friends since I was nine. That’s a forty year friendship at this point. I've got multiple thirty year friendships, twenty-five year friendships, twenty year friendships. These are deep, foundational relationships, and nothing has given me more love than that. And they just get richer and deeper and more faithful. I have such fidelity in my friendships that I could never seem to have in romantic relationships.”

Jealousy and envy are no longer sources of shame for me. They are flashing arrows that show me what I want and need and who I want to be. I decided to create the community I crave.

For my birthday last year, my partner and my sister split the cost of her plane ticket to visit from Germany so I could have my very first funeral friend, who’s known me since birth, share that day with me. I’m incredibly lucky that my sister was my first friend and remains so over 40 years later. She is the one person I’m 100% sure will be at my funeral. Or the other way around. Because we live on different continents, our relationship mostly exists through the phone and pictures and cards and packages and emails. But this will be the third consecutive year that we’ll see each other in person, because we’re finally making it a priority.

That birthday was the first party I had in decades. I felt self-indulgent and thought nobody would come, but then I rented a bouncy house, played 90s Gangsta rap, and served exclusively desserts. Friends came over to jump and squeal like children and eat cake and popsicles and sit in my backyard mouthing wholly inappropriate lyrics.

Peak little sister energy.

The weather wasn’t great, the desserts were meh, and I almost peed myself on the bouncy house, but I laughed harder than I had in a long time, and I caught a glimpse of what it would be like to have a small, tight-knit community of funeral friends.

“My lived experience is that the most foundational relationships in my life are my friendships. I now have a belief that everything that I was ever looking for in one romantic partner can only be found for me in a group of women. I really need a coven. It doesn't take a village, it takes a coven. Or a convent. All of us together.”

When I was growing up, my mom was on the phone with friends for hours, debated politics and feminism around the kitchen table while drinking black coffee and chain-smoking, or hosted parties in the backyard. Her friends had bushy armpits, laughed loudly, and didn’t wear bras. They were strong and kind and edgy and complicated and many of them have seen devastating accidents and chronic illnesses and horrible divorces and losses that tore their hearts into bloody confetti. Sometimes they had vicious fights and wouldn’t speak to each other for years, but in many ways, they had each other’s backs. And their love extended through the generations, to each others’ parents or kids or siblings or spouses. It was a community, flawed and riddled with difficult personalities, addictions, mental illnesses, and rock-bottom life struggles, but a community nonetheless.

My mom’s friend S lived in a big city, and I’d get to travel there by myself, and she’d take me out to see the newest movies and eat Croque Monsieur and walk her giant, black Newfoundland Nemo. K sent me a Bavarian cookbook and a potato peeler when I moved to the US, in case I got homesick for German food. Which I did. Her best friend I and husband K had moved to the US and became my kids’ surrogate grandparents. They’d take my kids to Germany to see my mom when I couldn’t travel, and whenever we stayed at their house, she made them milkshakes and pizza, and he hung a swing from a giant tree in their backyard and let them pick as many raspberries as they wanted.

All of the ones who were still alive and could make it (and were on current speaking terms), came to my mom’s funeral, and all of them honored the memory of their friendship in a million beautiful ways, often including me and my children. P has always been an artist and activist with edges that will slice you, but she was one of the only people who didn’t say anything dumb to me when my mom died. A still emails me pictures of ice cream celebrations in honor of my mom’s deathiversary every year, and U mails me thick envelopes with old pictures of my mom I’ve never seen.

When I thought of creating community and finding funeral friends, I thought of my mom. And once I was open to looking for magic and putting in the effort, I started finding my people. Some were women I’d met through work years ago and reconnected with. Some were part of my recovery groups. Others were fellow writers and editors I got to know through classes and groups.

It started with that birthday party in June. Then, for Thanksgiving, the kids were with their other parents, and Rob and I didn’t want to cook dinner, so I decided to have Pie Fest instead. I invited a bunch of people, baked some pies (and bought a bunch more) and then I spent 8 hours eating 17 different kinds of pie and playing reverse charades and sitting in front of the fireplace and talking.

When I went downstairs to my office the next morning, my friend K had left one of the napkins on my desk, a message scribbled on top: “Make magic, you beautiful creature.” Because funeral friends believe in you and cheer you on and are happy when you do stuff that’s scary and creative. One of the best ways to figure out if you have a funeral friend is observing if they show Freudenfreude. You may be familiar with the German word Schadenfreude (joy at someone’s misfortune). Freudenfreude is the opposite (joy at someone’s good fortune). K is one of those friends who is truly deeply happy when something good happens to me, and that’s one reason I trust her.

Jealousy and Freudenfreude aren’t mutually exclusive, of course. As long as I let my jealousy and envy guide my actions, so I build a satisfying life for myself, I can still experience genuine Freudenfreude for my friends, even when I’m currently lacking something beautiful they already have in their lives.

Go ahead, act like a child.

I was better at making friends when I was a kid. One of the reasons why that might be true in general is that there are no ambiguous friendships among kids. If a kid likes you, you will know. If they don’t…you will fucking know. That’s how I approach my friendships now.

No ambiguous friendships. If I feel dread every time a certain name comes up on my caller ID, I consider if that friendship is right for me.

No games. If I like someone, I will tell them. I approached my friend S after having only two casual conversations. I just knew she was one of my people. I don’t know HOW I knew, but I did, and she is. At an event, I walked up to one of the speakers and said, hey, I really like your vibe (or something equally cringe-y), do you want to be friends? D pulled out her phone to schedule a walk. (We went to our town’s beautiful cemetery, and she told me about her dead friend, and I just knew that she’d be at my funeral, too.)

It doesn’t matter if we like the same shit.

Shared activities or interests are great but not the most important to me. D is an ultramarathon runner, getting up at 4 am to run an ungodly number of miles. I would literally never. My friend S is a gamer and IT expert, while I send out vibes that immediately break every electronic device within a 1-mile radius. T hates the show Yellowstone with a passion normally reserved for political protests and election speeches, while I think Rip Wheeler is a snack and totally worth all the Californians buying up real estate. K has never met a dog she didn’t love, while I’d rather spend time with a tree than a shedding, crotch-sniffing, barking, slobber monster. A is an accountant while I have 99 problems, and math is all of them. I run errands with D and hike with A (who is always way faster than me) and go to yoga with K and will start dance classes with T and have entire conversations based on memes with S. But mostly, I just genuinely like being around them and talking to them. About anything.

I love collecting little sparkly treasures about my friends, and I put them in a shoebox under my bed, all construction paper and glitter and glue and random buttons. I remember these little bits they share, the delight I see on their faces, the date in the calendar marking a loss. One’s favorite snacks are sweaty cheese sticks and giant sour pickles, while another is a coffee snob, only drinking Nespresso (but damn, she’s correct). They love the color purple and hot yoga and are into bird watching and used to compete in bodybuilding competitions and hate February because there was so much death it was overwhelming. And I set phone reminders about recovery birthdays and big work presentations and court dates and deathiversaries, so I can show up with purple irises or Sushi or handwritten cards or flowers or that fucking Nespresso that’s always out of stock.

I missed out on the beauty of friendships for decades, but it turns out, like Liz, “I have a real talent for friendship. That’s how I've learned to approach myself. People talk about loving yourself, and I think that's a very tall order, especially if you're love starved. I’m always trying to show people what it means to be friendly towards yourself, just a fundamental self friendliness, because I'm a better friend than I am a lover.”

I wasn’t sure if I should go to that first funeral friends retreat recently, because my life felt like a dumpster fire, and I was behind on everything. But I went anyway. We drove from our little mountain town to an even smaller mountain town and then into the hills beyond that smaller mountain town and then down a dirt road until we got to a little ranch house with three cats and one asshole rooster and so many chickens and even more cow shit.

And there we talked our faces off. We fed the barn cats and watched the sunset and drank coffee in the mornings and got groceries and explored the backroads and peed over logs and cheered on some rock climbers in a canyon while hoping nobody would die, but definitely splitting up tasks on who would run down the mountain to rescue them (the ultra-marathoner, naturally), call for help (the tech geek), or just stay where they were and freak out (me).

Driving back home after the weekend, straight toward the snowy mountain ranges so gorgeous it was hard to breathe, I knew there was a good chance I’d look back in 10 or 30 or 50 years. My face lined from more laughing and more crying, sitting on a creaky porch swing or at a scratched-up kitchen table, I might remember being 41 and feeling like everything was falling apart, and I had no idea who I was or what to do next, but my funeral friends saw me through…

Sending me that poem with the line I still whisper to myself. Texting me that inappropriate video that made me snort-laugh on a dark day. Coming over when I said I didn’t need any help but actually did. Picking up when I called at the worst time. Loving me when I had a hard time seeing the good, whole parts in the wreckage.

And always collecting little sparkly treasures to put in a shoebox under their beds.

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