It’s a funny thing. Talking to relative strangers about the deaths of loved ones. Hardly a light topic for an early Friday afternoon, but there we were. I’m not sure how we got on to the topic, really. We’d started out talking about window cleaners (the folks who do ours aren’t very good, and apparently are a lot more expensive than the guys who do theirs).

Then, suddenly, we’re talking about Terry, who died at 54 of a massive heart attack—me, with his widow and his daughter. It was a shock. It was the middle of the night. He’d been watching the football and didn’t come up to bed. And it hurt my heart to hear it, of course. I thought about the shock of my grandmother’s sudden death, and the upside-down-ness of the world after my mother died unexpectedly.

The funny thing isn’t death, of course. The funny thing is how much less alone in the world I felt afterward. Nothing funny about a man dying at 54 and leaving a widow, grown children and adoring grandchildren. But in the talking about it, with the crazy things the relatives did and the way the then-25-year-old daughter managed everything, there were the funny bits and the shocking bits, and the poignant bits. How the then 7-year-old grandson was devastated and still hasn’t fully recovered. How the siblings who weren’t speaking to the deceased wanted to elbow their way in to everything. How his widow struggled and couldn’t get out of the car at the funeral home.

We laughed and gasped. We didn’t cry. (We don’t know each other that well, I guess.) And I thought about those I loved who have died, and those I dearly love who someday will.

I can’t say the conversation ‘cheered me up’ exactly. How could it? But in a strange way, a way I can’t quite understand, I know I’m better for it. My feet are on the ground, and my heart feels full of life.

It’s a funny thing.