What To Wear to Your Best Friend’s Funeral

Grieving Advice for the Fashionable

Photo from Unsplash.

The first thing I am here to say is that yes, I did get this idea from the television series You. Beck’s breakout article is a dishy piece about what to wear to her friend Peach’s funeral after Peach is tragically killed in mysterious circumstances (*glares in Joe’s direction*).

The second thing I will say is that this is not that.

I didn’t get to go to James’s funeral. Nor do I know if there even was one. I’ve written about James before, how he succumbed to a death that I know nothing about aside from my own fearful suspicions. On the long days that we languished by the poolside, him in swim trunks and a white t-shirt, me foolishly wearing jeans and Doc Martens even in the Valley heat, we spoke of his family, and the most I could garner was that they were estranged. He reminisced on his mother as if she were as cold as the winters back east, which was home for him. His wraparound shades and casual demeanor spoke of California, despite him being a transplant, and for me he is forever grounded in the interminable waves of heat that undulate off the shiny blacktop under an unforgiving sun. James was a sunny person.

A year since the date of his death is fast approaching, and I still haven’t done anything for it… I intended to, several…