Although the announcement stated “Celebration of Life,” we were still unprepared for what greeted us when we walked through the door. There was an open bar. There was a DJ setting up in the corner by what looked like a dance floor. There was a photographer capturing candid shots of attendees.
Large arrangements of white flowers sat on round tables that had clearly, in some previous life, hosted wedding centerpieces. We have been told in advance to wear festive attire. The room was a sea of Hawaiian shirts and bright florals, and I felt something in my chest tighten with a feeling I can only describe as disorientation. We were there to mourn a friend who had died far too young, and the room was arranged for a party.
I want to be honest about what came next, because I think honesty is the point of this whole reflection. My first reaction was not generous. It was judgment, fast and reflexive—the kind that arrives before you’ve even decided to have an opinion: This isn’t right. This isn’t how you honor someone who just died. Where is the solemnity, the quiet, the space to actually feel what we’re all clearly feeling underneath these Hawaiian shirts?
When the videographer approached our small cluster of grieving friends and asked, with a cheerful and practiced tone, if we had any “final words” for our friend, I nearly laughed out loud—not because it was funny, but because it was so jarringly mismatched to the moment that my brain didn’t know what else to do. Final words? He’s not on a plane about to take off. He’s gone. There is no channel through which final words could possibly reach him.
To her credit, the videographer caught herself almost instantly and rephrased the question, asking instead if we wanted to share a memory for the camera. But the damage, if you could call it that, was done. I spent the next hour a little bit outside of myself, observing the party-that-was-not-a-party with a kind of anthropological detachment, cataloguing all the ways it was wrong.
And then the hostess, who had organized the entire event and who clearly loved our friend enormously, stood up to speak.
She had, I think, wanted this gathering to be a burst of light in the middle of something unbearably dark. She wanted laughter instead of tears, color instead of black, dancing instead of silence. She stood at the front of the room in her own bright clothing and began to talk about our friend. And partway through, the effort of holding up that brightness became visible. Her voice caught. She said some things that, if you were being clinical about it, did not quite land, a joke that fell flat, a transition that felt abrupt, an attempt at levity that arrived at the wrong moment. Sharing information that should have remained private. She simply could not keep going in the register she had planned, and something rawer came through, and she stood there in front of all of us, this room full of people in Hawaiian shirts and no black clothing, and she fell apart.
That was the moment the evening actually became a memorial, whether anyone had planned for it or not.
I’ve thought about that night a great deal since, and I keep landing on two ideas from Buddhist practice that feel more relevant to ordinary life than almost anything else I know: equanimity and compassion. They are not the same thing, and it’s worth being precise about each because the temptation is to skip straight to the second without doing the work of the first.
Equanimity, upekkha in Pali, is often misunderstood as a kind of emotional flatness; a practiced indifference that lets you float above the mess of life without being touched by it. That’s not quite right. Equanimity is not the absence of preference. I clearly had a preference that night. I wanted quiet, black clothing, hushed voices, maybe a eulogy and some silence afterward, because that is the shape grief takes for me and for the culture in which I was raised. Equanimity doesn’t ask me to pretend I didn’t have that preference or to convince myself that the open bar and the DJ were secretly wonderful. It asks something more modest and more difficult: that I hold my preference lightly enough that I don’t mistake it for the truth of how grief must be expressed.
My idea of an appropriate memorial is not a universal law. It’s a template I inherited, shaped by my own temperament, my own losses, my own culture’s habits around death. The hostess’s idea was shaped by hers.
Neither of us was staging the “correct” version of mourning, because there isn’t one. There is only the version that helps the specific humans in that specific room survive a specific unbearable night. Practicing equanimity meant noticing my judgment arise, examining it, and setting it down rather than letting it harden into a verdict about her character or her love for our friend.
This is harder than it sounds because judgment during grief feels so justified. When something touches the rawest part of our experience—mortality, loss, the people we love disappearing from the world—we want the response to match its weight. We want ceremony to rhyme with feeling. So when someone else’s ceremony clashes with that feeling, it can register almost as a betrayal, as if they aren’t taking the death seriously enough.
But that reaction says more about my attachment to a particular aesthetic of grief than about the sincerity of anyone else’s love. The Hawaiian shirts were not evidence that the hostess loved our friend less than anyone else. They were evidence that she was trying, in the only language available to her, to keep herself upright.
Which brings me to compassion, karuna, the half of this pairing that actually requires the first to be real rather than performative. Compassion is not simply feeling bad for someone. It is the active wish that they be free from their suffering, paired with a willingness to meet them in it rather than correct them out of it.
Watching the hostess crumble mid-sentence, I felt whatever residual judgment I’d been carrying about the DJ and the flowers dissolve almost instantly, because what became visible underneath the party planning was a person trying to organize her way out of grief, trying to build something so festive and bright that it might hold back a sorrow she wasn’t ready to face head-on. The open bar, the photographer, the insistence on color, the nonsensical request for “final words,” all of it, I now think, was armor. Not denial that our friend had died, but the only way she knew to approach that fire: by first building a room around it full of light and noise and other people’s presence, so she wasn’t left alone with it in silence.
Compassion asks us to see that scaffolding for what it is instead of critiquing its architecture. It asks us to recognize that grief has no single correct form, that a wedding-adjacent memorial complete with dancing might be exactly as valid an expression of love and loss as a hushed room and a slow eulogy, because the measure of a memorial isn’t whether it matches our expectations. It’s whether it helps the grieving get through the day, and whether it honors the person who died in a way that felt true to those closest to them. My friend might have loved that party. He might have hated a somber room. I’ll never know. And that uncertainty is itself a small lesson in humility.
What I’ve tried to carry forward from that strange evening is a two-part practice.
First, notice the judgment when it arises, because it will, quickly, and with total conviction, telling you exactly how things should have been done.
Second, don’t stop there. Let the noticing become an opening rather than a verdict—a doorway into asking what this person might be going through that led them here, to this room, with these flowers, this DJ, this insistence on no black clothing.
Underneath almost every memorial that looks wrong to us is a person doing the best they can with the tools grief handed them in a moment when clear thinking wasn’t available. The hostess didn’t need my approval of her flower arrangements. She needed, and deserved, the same thing we all eventually need when we’re the ones standing at the front of the room trying to hold ourselves together: to be met without judgment, in whatever form our sorrow happens to take.
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