The weather is mild the day after Judy’s wake, and Bud and Tim play catch at a Brooklyn ballfield. Tim was a skilled baseball player before his accident and enjoys the sense of normalcy that catch still provides. Bud recalls a recent conversation where Tim explained the difficulties of life using a wheelchair. Tim challenged Bud to spend a day in one to understand. The experience proved exhausting: A two-minute walk to a diner took 16 minutes, and navigating a grocery store’s narrow aisles and high shelves required specialized equipment and left Bud sore and humbled. After 90 minutes, Bud was drained.

Back at the ballfield, Tim uses his 45-year-old baseball glove and tries to teach Bud how to throw a curveball. Tim tells Bud that he’s living in “limbo”—neither fully engaged in life nor accepting death—and explains the religious concept of a space between heaven and hell requiring redemption. When Bud mentions Clara and her funeral habit, Tim jokes that Clara must have been pretty if Bud is considering the idea. However, he also cites Montaigne’s idea that practicing death is a path to freedom. He suggests that they both start attending strangers’ funerals together.

Bud and Tim attend the funeral of Dr. Samuel Gauss at Green-Wood Cemetery. Walking among the headstones, Bud observes the quiet beauty of the setting and watches mourners’ varied reactions to grief. When the priest begins the service, he mistakenly calls the deceased Walter. Mrs. Gauss, the elderly widow, loudly corrects him. When invited to speak, she denounces her late husband as unfaithful and moody and gives his casket the middle finger, prompting nervous laughter.

Clara has also attended the funeral and afterward asks Bud whether he felt anything; when he doesn’t understand, she gives him information about another wake in Brighton Beach.

Later at a coffee shop, Tim asks about Bud’s funeral preferences and shares that he wants cremation and burial in his family plot. Their conversation turns serious when Tim suggests that they need to reflect on what they’re learning from these experiences. He explains how a therapist helped him choose life after his accident and draws a parallel to Bud’s current state of disengagement. Tim observes that everyone is essentially writing their own obituary through the lives they lead.

One evening, Bud encounters his seven-year-old neighbor, Leo, and his Rottweiler, Muffin, on their stoop. Leo enjoys sitting outside counting things and recording observations in notebooks. When Leo asks if Bud is dead, Bud jokes that he’s better now.

Bud met Leo about a year earlier. Leo’s parents are successful but largely absent professionals, and he’s cared for by his nanny, Benni. Bud noticed Leo compulsively tapping stairs and learned the boy believed that it prevented meteors from hitting Earth. Leo’s therapist, Rachel, helped him gradually reduce the tapping, though he confided to Bud that he then switched to blinking 10 times instead.

When Leo asked about Bud’s therapist, Bud shared a simplified version of his divorce story. Leo listened seriously and then shifted to sharing random facts, like the age of the world’s oldest tree. As Leo was called inside by Benni, Bud noticed his secret blinking compulsion and reassured him with a wink that his secret was safe.

Bud reflects on his philosophy of obituary writing, recalling memorable stories like Tony Iarratti, a man diagnosed with AIDS at the same time his mother developed terminal cancer; he danced on his mother’s coffin to fulfill a promise they made to one another about how to honor whoever died first. He acknowledges the emotional toll of constantly interviewing grieving families.

Bud and Tim drive to Brighton Beach for Jan Kaminski’s wake. Inside the funeral home, they’re mistakenly ushered into the receiving line. Tim uses Google Translate to deliver polished Polish condolences. When Bud attempts the same phrase, he mispronounces it and inadvertently offers the family a horse, earning the nickname “the horse man” to much laughter (120).

Clara appears at the wake. She accurately assesses Bud’s lonely life and reveals that she formerly worked in finance but developed suicidal ideation, spending time at a hospital in the Berkshires. She says that she’s now trying to “change [her] narrative” (116). When Bud mentions publishing his own obituary, Clara admires the absurdity of his actions. She invites him to swim in the ocean the next morning at Jacob Riis Beach. After she leaves, Tim encourages Bud to go.

Later, as the wake winds down, Tim revisits his earlier point, asking what they are learning from these experiences. Bud grows irritable, and Tim connects the overpowering flower scent to Bud’s childhood trauma by guessing that he had a similar experience when he was 13, which prompts Bud to correct him: He was 12.

Bud arrives early at the deserted Jacob Riis Beach, initially convinced that Clara has stood him up. Tuan calls, worried that a new intern named Kyle—incompetent and using inappropriate language in the workplace—might replace Bud. Bud tells him about his strange new activities, prompting Tuan to remark, “I don’t have words for how unraveled your life has become” (131), before hanging up.

Clara arrives in her vintage truck. She warns Bud about the shock of the 40-degree water, describing potential benefits and risks, including possible heart attack. They strip to their bathing suits and run screaming into the frigid ocean.

Warming up afterward in her truck with hot tea, Clara shares trivia about caskets and coffins. When Bud asks why she attends funerals, she explains that after her mental health crisis, these experiences make her feel alive and remind her that this is it. She playfully pitches a movie concept based on his life called “Bury the Lede” (136).

Feeling unexpectedly comfortable and giddy from the cold plunge and her company, Bud opens up completely. He shares details about his job troubles, his divorce, his friends, and his mother’s death, talking more freely than he has in years.

Bud reflects on his father’s funeral four years earlier, for which he wrote a formal, impersonal obituary. He describes Gerald Stanley Sr. as a man he lived with but never truly knew—someone who preferred simple pleasures like yard work to his job as an insurance agent and seemed more interested in and proud of Bud’s older brother, Gerry.

After Bud’s mother died, his father sold their West Hartford home and moved to Delray Beach, Florida, where his personality shifted dramatically toward pursuing romantic relationships. His second wife choked to death on a peach at a grocery store. His third wife, Connie, died when her golf cart tumbled into a sand trap; his father finished his round before going to the hospital and later asked Connie’s sister on a date at the funeral.

At the Boynton Beach Fishing Pier, Bud and Gerry attempted to scatter their father’s ashes. The wind blew them back, and Gerry accidentally dropped the urn into the ocean. They laughed at the absurdity. Gerry bought beers from a fisherman, and they toasted their father. They caught up briefly; Gerry was living in Shanghai at the time but hoping to return to London, which he considered home. He encouraged Bud to find someone and have children. For a moment, the brothers reconnected as they once were.

Bud is summoned to Human Resources. In the lobby, Tuan complains about Kyle, the new intern, explaining that he called Howard harsh for threatening to fire Kyle if he refused to write an obituary for a tobacco executive on moral grounds.

At the meeting, Bud sits across from Howard, Beth Liebling from HR, and Buckley, a young HR representative who introduces himself with his pronouns, to Bud’s confusion. Beth explains that Bud’s self-published obituary triggered an automated process in the company’s system. Because the system now considers him officially dead, they cannot legally fire him—unlike a living employee, a dead one has “rights.” Howard grows increasingly frustrated with the bureaucratic absurdity while Buckley speaks in earnest corporate jargon. Beth asks Bud to sign documents declaring that he isn’t legally dead so that the system can classify him as alive again, enabling them to proceed with termination.

As Bud leaves, Howard reveals he had been trying to build a case to retain him before the obituary incident complicated everything. He tells Bud to try out being dead, admitting that he wishes he were dead to the system himself.