At the Grave of a Good Friend
Loss, longing, and living a life | A short story
This short story was featured in Substack’s Top in Fiction.
Martin stood by the kitchen sink, scrubbing the remains of the microwave lasagne off his plate. As the dish soap and brush worked the dried sauce on the porcelain, he stared at the unblemished calendar pinned on the wall. Days had blended into years, his life reduced to its repetitive rituals. Mornings with instant coffee and toast, evenings alone on the couch, scrolling through photos of his adult children who rarely called. The world, smaller now, contained within the walls of his apartment and the steady pacing of a solitary routine.
His phone buzzed, the little red dot appearing on the lime green WhatsApp logo. He dried his hands on his T-shirt and opened the message: “Luke has passed away.”
Martin sank down hard on the sofa. Luke. They hadn’t spoken in years, but once, they had been inseparable. Nights stretched with laughter, vodka, and dreams of conquering the world from their shabby university halls. Martin had often wondered what had become of Luke, but never enough to reach out.
Instantly, or was it hours, it was definitely the same day as Martin found himself still sitting in the same position on the sofa, leaning forward, elbows on knees, both hands gripping the phone when it buzzed again, bringing him back to the present. Clive, one of the boys from the same university halls, had set up a WhatsApp group. It was named Luke, followed by a heart and a teary face emoji.
The messages followed shortly after, from people he hadn’t heard from nor thought of for years. Sure, there was the internet now and everyone was connected but Martin hardly ever logged onto Facebook, although he liked Instagram, scrolling endlessly for pictures of cars and faraway places, sometimes even posting a pic himself. The world had changed, nay morphed, since his university days in the early 90s, when no one had heard of the internet and google wasn’t a verb.
The messages kept coming, middle-aged people posting emojis of sorrow and love as if they were teenagers, which, to Martin, most of them still were. Every new message, however, brought a jolt of adrenaline. It was like one person’s death had brought all these past lives, nascent and suspended, back to life. Over thirty years had gone by and now these lives were here again, pinging on a handheld screen. He remembered them all, he could summon each of their faces, the memories of youth graffitied onto a wall in his mind.
It was a digital cocktail of joy and sorrow, people reconnecting and rediscovering each other, while simultaneously mourning the loss of a friend. Soon the chatter turned to the funeral. Who would go? For a moment, Martin imagined himself there, standing among them, remembering Luke, remembering them. But the thought was quickly overtaken by unease. To him, these people were still young, yet they weren’t. They weren’t the same people now, he was not the same person now. Who had he become compared to who they had been?
“I can’t go,” Martin muttered to himself, shooting up from the chair and pacing the living room. He didn’t have the strength to face Luke’s absence—or his old friends. His simple, uneventful life would be laid bare over coffee and cake in a hushed wake. And besides, what did funerals change? Luke would still be gone.
He typed on his phone, “Sorry all, I will miss it, out of the country. Slam a shot of Smirnoff in Luke’s honor for me ,” but his fingers hesitated. He waited for the lump in his throat to subside, to retreat to where it had come from, then he hit the send button.
That evening, Martin called his mother to tell her the news.
“Luke,” his mother said softly. “He used to make you laugh like no one else.”
“That he did, but I’m not going,” he said “It’s not like we stayed close. What’s the point now?”
His mother sighed. “Sometimes the past is a door that only opens when someone leaves. If you don’t walk through it, you might never see what’s waiting on the other side.”
The morning of the funeral, Martin woke early and threw on the new black suit he had bought off the rack at the mall. The drive to the small town where Luke had grown up was like scene from a B-movie, the rain requiring the wipers to work double time and the gray clouds muting the daylight. The only thing missing, thought Martin, was the Guns N’ Roses song November Rain playing on the radio.
The faces waiting at the church—their features softened with age—were both familiar and foreign. Anna, with the same wild hair now streaked with grey. Marco, more reserved than he’d ever been in their rowdy youth but this was a funeral, after all. And there was Luke’s mother, holding them all together, eyes engulfed by sorrow and her body held up by a tender smile.
The service was simple, unadorned. During the reception, Martin felt the weight of each passing year as he exchanged tentative smiles and stories with the others. They recounted Luke’s humor, his unflinching loyalty, his talent for making everyone feel seen.
Martin stood to the side, unsure how to fit into the group that was once a second family. But Luke’s mother approached them, her voice warm. “You all meant the world to him. Come back here a month from now. Stay for a while. We’ll remember him properly then and I can be around you all.”
One month later, Martin returned. This time, they stayed in Luke’s family home, perched on a hillside overlooking the town. They crowded into the small kitchen with mismatched chairs, much like they had decades ago. There, in the glow of old photographs spread across the table, they began to peel back the layers of the passing of time.
“I thought life would look different by now,” Anna admitted, staring at a photo of their younger selves laughing on a dusty road with tents dotted in a field in the background.
Marco nodded. “I thought we’d all stay in touch. That life wouldn’t get in the way.”
Luke’s mother joined them, cradling a box of his son’s belongings. Inside were letters, journals, and scraps of paper covered in Luke’s scrawling handwriting. Letters and journals, a concept foreign to any young man now. Did they even write by hand anymore? Would they even know what a journal was? Did young men, instead, pour their fears and dreams into bytes of data on a Word document or were their lives now recorded on an Instagram feed?
“He loved you all, you know,” his mother said, almost whispered. “He wrote a letter for each of you when he knew his time was close.”
She began handing out envelopes to each of them. The room fell silent. Martin found looked at the envelope, his name, written by hand in blue ink. He opened it: “Martin, mate, I think about you more than you know. Life is peculiar, isn’t it? So much of it happens before we even realize it’s started. But you were part of the best years of mine.”
Martin’s chest tightened. He had spent so long distancing himself from his past that he had forgotten how much it had shaped him.
For the first time in years, Martin felt a spark of connection. He had avoided his old friends because he couldn’t take being judged a failure, but now he realized they were all just searching for meaning in the choices they had made, the lives they had built.
In the weeks that followed, the group rekindled their bond, swapping WhatsApp messages and planning visits. Martin even began to write—letters, journal entries, and stories inspired by his youth, feeling like he was continuing what Luke had started.
As Martin returned to his quiet apartment, the walls no longer felt constraining. He began reconnecting with his children and reaching out to friends he had lost touch with. The rhythms of his days changed, imbued now with a sense of pace and, in his journal, he relived those moments of connection, of joy.
One evening, Martin bought a Marshall bluetooth speaker and synced it with his phone. From his playlist he chose the song they had danced to in the student halls that magical year in 1991, when the world was open to your dreams and a good future awaited, that moment before life picked up speed. He pressed play and, as Axl Rose’s voice blared from the speaker, for a moment, his head moshing up and down, spinning around in his small living room, Martin was there, in a run-down common room in the student halls with beer-stained carpets beneath his feet.
So never mind the darkness, we still can find a way
'Cause nothin' lasts forever, even cold November rain
Don't ya think that you need somebody?
Don't ya think that you need someone?
Everybody needs somebody
You're not the only one
You're not the only one
The next morning, head groggy from the wine from the previous night, Martin wrote a letter to Luke’s mother, a proper one, on paper, with a fountain pen, thanking her for the invitation that had reopened the door to a part of his life he had lost.
I thought I was too late to be part of those memories again, he wrote. But instead, I found them waiting for me, as if no time had passed, and they brought me to the present.