My best friend died eighteen months ago. He was thirty-two. Brain aneurysm, completely out of nowhere. One minute we were texting about something stupid, the next minute his wife was calling me from the hospital.

For the first six months, everyone wanted to know how I was "doing." Not in a genuine way - in that way where they're already checking their phone while asking. I understood then they were asking because they'd been taught to ask, the way you ask someone how the weather is.

But now people want my healing narrative. They want to know what I've learned from it. They ask if we've done anything to "honor his memory." There's this assumption that enough time has passed that I should have extracted some wisdom, some growth, some silver lining from the fact that my friend is dead and I'll never see him again.

Here's what I actually think: his death wasn't transformative. It was just tragic. There's no lesson to justify why he's gone. Setting up a scholarship fund doesn't make me feel better. Watching inspiring documentaries doesn't help. Going to therapy helped a little, but not because I've healed - it helped because talking about how much I miss him is actually easier when someone isn't simultaneously dying inside wanting to leave the conversation.

I'm tired of the demand that grief become something productive. Some of us don't want to become better people because someone we loved died. Some of us just want to say "this sucks and it always will" without someone nodding knowingly and asking what I learned.

Do other people feel like there's this unspoken pressure to make meaning out of loss? Or is it just that everyone around me watched too many TED Talks?