The Mourning Report: How I Faked My Death to Feel Something

I didn’t hire a professional mourner because I was dying. I hired one because I wasn’t.

I wanted to know how people would react if I disappeared. Right now, mid-sentence, without explanation. Would there be grief? Confusion? Would anyone call my name out loud, or would they just slide into the life I left behind and eat my fridge leftovers? I wanted to see my own absence from the outside. So I Venmo’d Marlene $275 and sent her a photo of me eating a sandwich. She promised one public collapse, light crying, optional fainting. We agreed to meet at Panera to discuss. It was here I realized Marlene had either misunderstood the assignment, or understood it far too well.

Panera was supposed to be the audition. I asked Marlene to grieve me loudly in public. One scene. One scream. One dramatic fall near the soup. I wanted someone in widow attire to shriek about my lost potential while I chewed a sandwich and stared into the clouds like an unsolvable riddle. She walked in already weeping. Held up a framed photo of me brushing my teeth and collapsed beside a crouton display. People gasped. A manager dropped his ladle. A stranger whispered, “He seemed gentle,” and placed a single scone on my tray. It was everything I wanted. The clapping felt earned. The mystery felt complete.

But then she followed me to work.

Not twenty minutes later I walked into the lobby and she was already there. Crying into a travel-sized urn and distributing programs that said “In Loving Memory of Joe (He Tried).” She had created a timeline of my imagined accomplishments in a tri-fold display board with accents. She stood up and told the receptionist I had passed peacefully in a booth, surrounded by bread. When I tried to interrupt, she turned slowly and said, “Trevor? Joe told me he had a twin. My God… you look just like him.” I didn’t even clock in. She got applause. I got sent home to process things.

So I played along. I said I was Trevor. I said I was proud of him. I said Joe always gave more than he had, especially emotionally, and that he once forgave a barista for getting his order wrong in a way that changed lives. I said he believed in lunch breaks and in the healing power of light printer maintenance. By noon, HR had drafted a memorial policy in his name. I signed my own condolence card. I attended my own grief huddle. They gave me Joe’s desk. I asked if I could decorate it. They said yes.

I tried to shake her by canceling my dentist appointment and driving to a completely different clinic across town. I never told her the new location. I booked it anonymously. She was already there. Not in the parking lot. Inside. Reading a tattered copy of Highlights for Children and humming the Jaws theme. She stood up when she saw me, held out a sympathy card, and said, “He flossed with dignity.” I turned around and left so fast I knocked over a model of an incisor. She whispered “Goodbye, sweet man,” as the door closed behind me.

I attempted to save part of the day by arriving early to a business meeting I had scheduled weeks prior. I thought, there’s no way she could’ve known about this. I arrived at the co-working space thinking maybe, just maybe, I could salvage a piece of my professional life. It was a standard client pitch. Nothing dramatic. I’d rehearsed. I had slides. I walked into the conference room, and Marlene was already there.

She stood at the front, in full mourning attire, clicking through a PowerPoint labeled “Joe: A Life in Motion.” Slide one was my face in black and white. Slide two was my face slightly blurred. Slide three was a quote that read, “He wanted meetings to mean something.” She had props. She had printed programs. She had a laptop that wasn’t even hers plugged into the projector.

I tried to speak. She cut me off with a raised hand and said, “Please, don’t make this about you.” Then she turned back to the screen and said, “Joe touched lives. This one included,” and pointed directly at a stunned client who had never met me.

I asked her to leave. She sighed and said, “He never liked conflict. This is exactly why we lost him.” Then she pulled out a framed photo of me standing in some office and said, “He once laminated a document while thinking about forgiveness.”

The client nodded, slowly. Then wept. I never got to open my laptop. I left without speaking. Marlene handed me a sympathy mint on the way out.

I went to my mother’s house without calling ahead. I parked four doors down. I turned off my headlights. I tiptoed through the backyard like I was avoiding a sniper. But when I opened the sliding glass door, she was already there. On the couch. Holding a bowl of peanuts and giving a eulogy to my own mother.

“You raised him with so much promise,” she said, stroking the armrest. “And yet the world, so cruel, so busy, took him from us.” My mother looked over at me and sighed.

“Joe,” she said, “didn’t I warn you after the woman in leather showed up?”

I said, “That was an Instacart mix-up.”

“She had an octopus.”

“She said it was a gift.”

“She had a LED lights in her underwear.”

“That was experimental.”

“She asked if I was ready to be her backup mother.”

“That part I don’t remember.”

Marlene stood. She walked over to me, placed a hand on my cheek, and whispered, “You were loved, and now you’re not here. That’s the tragedy.” I looked her dead in the eye and said, “I’m not paying you past lunch.” She turned to my mother and said, “Grief is a journey. You don’t get to choose the bus.” Then she tried to release a handful of rose petals she had stashed in her coat pocket, but they were damp and just sort of flopped to the floor.

My mother looked at the photo Marlene had propped against the microwave, then looked at Marlene, then looked at me. Her expression did not change. She didn’t ask a question. She didn’t raise her voice. She just stared at me like I was the last straw in a bale she did not want to carry. Then she turned and walked into the kitchen, opened a cabinet, took out a wine glass, and filled it to the brim. She drank half of it standing up. Marlene took this as a sign to continue. She spoke softly, reverently, as if narrating a documentary about a great loss no one else understood. My mother walked back into the living room, snatched the photo off the microwave, flipped it over, and handed it to me without a word. Then she sat on the couch, turned on a lamp that didn’t need to be on, and said, “This is why I tell people you live out of state.”

Marlene screamed, “YOU’VE GOT TO LET HIM GO!” and then tried to crawl under the coffee table like she was retreating into her own memory. My mother poured a glass of wine and asked if I’d be staying for dinner. I said no. She said good.

I left the house and walked to my car. Marlene was already sitting on the hood. I didn’t say anything. I just started the engine and drove. She held on for three blocks. I turned up the radio. She screamed into the wind, “YOU DESERVE TO BE MOURNED.” A man walking his dog nodded solemnly.

By the time I dropped her off in the church parking lot she requested, she’d already planned a candlelight vigil and handed me a flyer with my own face on it.

It said “Joe Was Here.” In the bottom corner, it read: Probably still is.

She waved as I drove away, then turned to a family unloading groceries across the street and screamed, “GRIEF DOESN’T TAKE TIPS BUT I DO!”