"I wish he'd just die" she thought to herself. Two weeks later she was at his funeral.

When someone breaks up with you, you may find yourself saying a whole host of things you don’t actually mean: “I hate him,” “I wish we had never met,” “I wish he’d just die.”

After my ex-boyfriend broke up with me outside a Thai restaurant in the middle of Newtown’s King Street, I spurted any number of variations of those phrases at anyone who would listen to my post-breakup drunken ramblings.

And then, he did “just die.” For real.

When you’re twenty-one, you don’t really expect to receive a phone call on an ordinary Wednesday evening telling you your ex-boyfriend has passed away.

It seems more likely that you’ll be receiving such a call about a parent or grandparent than an ex-boyfriend you’d happily been watching movies and brunching with not six weeks before.

You’re mostly just hoping that you won’t run into him on a bad hair day, or without the attractive, successful new boyfriend you just know is in your future.

Because, let’s face it, sometimes we just kind of want to rub it in someone’s face when they’ve broken up with us how much better we are than them. To prove to them how foolish they were for letting us go. That revenge tactic is perhaps a little bit insensitive when they’re dead. “Oh, dead you say? That’s a shame, I’m doing so well, still walkinng around, breathing, got a nice new haircut the other day.” It’s just a bit cruel to try and one-up a dead guy.

Timothy* died from a rare genetic disease where the body is unable to process protein. Instead of using protein as fuel, the body turns it into ammonia, which then poisons the carrier. The majority of individuals with this condition die several days after birth. The rest pass away in their late twenties; they will never know they have the ailment until it kills them.

After receiving the news, I ended up doing what any other twenty-one year old university student would do in such situation. I got wildly drunk at seedy bar’s ‘Lady’s Night’ (apparently that’s a thing). One good thing about being the dead guy’s ex-girlfriend is that everybody buys you drinks. A really bad thing about being the dead guy’s ex-girlfriend is that you’re the dead guy’s ex-girlfriend. Try really empathising with a friend’s rough break-up when you’ve also just gone through a rough break-up and, oh, your ex just died.

The looks of pity you have to endure from university tutors who you’ve had to inform about the death because of late assignments are nothing compared to the excruciating awkwardness when somebody accidentally mentions the word ‘death’ around you.

Because apparently every time anybody arbitrarily mentioned the word ‘death’ I would immediately think of the dead ex-boyfriend. Not.

Another not-great thing about your ex-boyfriend dying is finding out the day before the funeral that he had moved onto another girlfriend. You discover this amidst the adamant cries of his friends that they definitely got together after you split up. Cries so very adamant that they indicate exactly the opposite.

Add all of this to the actual funeral itself where, if we are to believe everyone, this girlfriend of six weeks or less constantly proclaims her love for your ex, the priest proclaims of the love they shared, and your ex’s friends proclaim how lucky your ex was to have somebody who loved him so much.

When you deal with emotions mostly via sarcasm, it’s a tad difficult to not yell out “but I thought you had only been together a few weeks,” when someone is stealing the grief you spitefully believe is truly yours.

My way of dealing with things is mostly by making fun of them. It may give people the impression that I am callous, especially in this incredibly awkward situation for which I had no precedent, but didn’t mean I cared any less. If a friend told me something bad had happened to them, I would comfort them by saying something along the lines of ‘at least you don’t have a dead ex-boyfriend!’ They didn’t find it too amusing.

Considering my then very limited life experience, this was the most difficult thing I had ever had to endure. When you’re twenty-one you are mostly concerned with discovering who you are, what you are meant to be and how to get there. Anything else throws a spanner in the works— and inevitably has an irrevocable long-term impact upon your life.

For a while there, I felt different from everyone else, more immune from the petty problems of unreasonable bosses, difficult university assignments and the inability to afford new shoes. I had a dead boyfriend, if I could deal with that, surely I could deal with anything, right?

Where before I was abnormally shy to the point of often being unable to form a coherent sentence in new social situations, I became far more outgoing and able to converse with strangers. I applied for jobs, expanded my social circle and shared my ideas and opinions more freely. Sure, I still got a stabbing pain in my chest every now and then when I was reminded of his death, but learnt to move past it with more haste and less pain each time it happened.

As awful as it sounds, and without trying to rehash a tired cliché, that experience helped me in more ways than I can count. Not only did it toughen me up, but somehow it gave me more confidence, and less fear of trying new things. Three years on, I have managed to somehow force myself to quit fretting over trivial things, and have lost much of my fear of rejection. Much of this I would attribute to the horrible awkwardness of my experience at a relatively young age.

Generally, it has altered my adult life for the better. Of course I wouldn’t want the situation repeated, but I have managed to milk whatever positives from the experience that I possibly could.

Meeting his parents for the first time at his funeral, and subsequently having coffee with his girlfriend a few months after the fact are discomfiting situations for which the majority of people don’t have precedence.

Trying to navigate these circumstances with dignity and grace was like being a completely blind person trying to find an oasis in the middle of a desert — impossible. Of course there were tears, uncomfortable silences and weird questions were asked. But you try going through these experiences without making a mistake — it’s almost impossible.

Job interviews aren’t nearly as awkward as meeting your dead ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend in a coffee shop. Or when you do some sneaky Facebook stalking, and find photographs of them together before you had broken up. To use a far too frequently repeated phrase: it was character building.

But like all things, feelings and pain fades. You move onto other relationships, other life problems and suddenly the minor issues in life begin to take on more significance again. Slowly your friends stop mentioning to people within your extended social circle that you may be a little sensitive because of the dead ex-boyfriend. The phone calls from your parents asking how you are coping trickle down from daily to weekly and then fortnightly. And finally, finally, you can get on with your life. Everybody quits projecting a victim mentality onto you. And you can finally start worrying about not being able to afford new shoes again.

Che-Marie is a Sydney-based writer, whose work has been published on Rescu and Junkee among others. She tweets about whatever is on her mind @che_mariet

*Name has been changed.

Have you ever had an ex pass away?  Or experienced something similar? And when an ex dies, how are you ‘supposed’ to feel?