TIFU by thinking a friend had died, sending her a memorial message, and only discovering months later that she was alive.
For context, I'll call my friends Morgan, Alex, Jamie, and Taylor. All five of us attended the same university, and I think Morgan, Jamie, and Taylor also went to high school together.
I was close to Morgan during college but only ever as friends, dating never became a consideration for either of us. She eventually met Alex in college and started dating him, and they were together for what may have been around 12 years.
After college, Morgan and Alex became involved in a LARP group. For anyone unfamiliar with LARP, it stands for live-action role-playing, where people physically act out characters in a fictional setting.
I followed the group's Facebook page and Discord because I was interested in joining, but I never quite worked up the courage to try it myself. This wasn't just a few people meeting in a park with foam swords, either. The group had elaborate costumes, a fleshed-out fantasy setting with its own official map, and a large player base. Some participants even operated as vendors.
It looked like a whole fantasy world that people had put a tremendous amount of work into building. I thought it was fascinating, but as someone who'd never participated in anything like it, the idea of walking into that established community and figuring out how everything worked was intimidating. So I followed along from a distance instead, thinking I might join once I understand it more.
Morgan and Alex lived in a fairly rural area, had farm animals, and Morgan owned a thoroughbred horse. I only visited them a couple of times because they lived pretty far away.
Neither of them was particularly active on social media. Morgan occasionally shared her art, but not much about her personal life, and Alex barely posted anything at all. At some point, Morgan decided to step away from social media. Her profiles remained online, but she stopped using them.
Then, in May 2025, Alex passed away. There was an obituary and a GoFundMe posted to Morgan's FB profile, so I know that part of the story wasn't something I imagined. By that point, he and Morgan were engaged.
Sometime around August 2025, I somehow became convinced that Morgan had died, too.
I thought Jamie had told me through a Facebook message about her passing, but I remembered the news being kept relatively private, without an obituary being posted to Morgan's Facebook page. In my recollection, the funeral had already happened by the time I learned about it.
There was just one problem: none of that had actually happened. Morgan hadn't actually passed away.
I still don't know exactly how I acquired this false memory but I have two theories. One is that I dreamed Morgan had died and the dream was so realistic that I later remembered it as an actual event. The other is that I mixed her up with a former high school classmate of mine who really did die by suicide about a month after her fiancé passed away. I can verify both of those deaths through their obituaries.
My best guess is that my brain took a real tragedy, combined it with a dream, and somehow manufactured a memory that Morgan had died as well.
And I believed it.
For months, I occasionally thought about Morgan and felt sad that she was gone. I had so many good memories of her that I wanted to send her a private message honoring her memory, even though I hadn't learned about her supposed death until sometime after the funeral.
On April 16, 2026, I finally sent that message. It was on what would have been Alex's next birthday. I wrote about how sad I was that Morgan had died, how much I regretted not finding out until after the funeral, and some of my favorite memories of her. She really was a remarkable person, and I wanted to say something meaningful about her even though I knew nobody would read it.
Except, of course, she was alive.
I didn't find that out until September 2026, when I decided to look up the obituaries for Alex and Morgan. I found Alex's, naturally, but nothing for Morgan. Nothing on her Facebook page or anywhere else suggested she had passed.
I messaged our mutual friend Jamie, who I thought had originally told me about Morgan's death. She had absolutely no recollection of that conversation and thought Morgan was probably still alive, although she hadn't heard from her in a long time. I couldn't find the conversation I thought we'd had, either.
Then I asked Taylor, another close friend of both Morgan and I, and he was equally confused. He hadnt heard from her in a while either but didn't know anything about her passing away.
Then Jamie mentioned that she'd spotted a Venmo payment from Morgan dated May 1, 2026. That was two weeks after I'd sent my memorial message. Unless somebody else had been using Morgan's account, she had apparently been alive and making payments after I'd supposedly learned she was dead. There hadnt been another public Venmo payment after that date.
At this point, I was seriously questioning my memory.
I'd sent a heartfelt memorial message to a living person. Worse, because it was a private message, I couldn't simply delete it and pretend the whole thing had never happened. If she ever got back on Facebook, she would see it and I would have to explain.
Mortified, I sent Morgan a few dollars through Venmo and an apology for getting things mixed up, with a note suggesting she buy herself a coffee on me. I didn't explain what I was apologizing for, because I was still trying to figure out what the hell had happened.
So Morgan had received a memorial message from someone who thought she was dead, followed months later by a small Venmo payment telling her to buy herself a coffee, with no explanation for either one. But I still felt like I needed more definitive proof.
Then I remembered another mutual friend, someone I'd met through Morgan but didn't know particularly well. Still, we were connected through Facebook and she was an active user so it was worth a shot. This friend hadn't spoken to Morgan recently, either, but knew that Morgan was still active on the LARP Discord.
THE LARP DISCORD.
The group I'd followed for years, then forgotten about completely.
I rejoined the server, and it was bustling with activity. I spotted someone whose comments sounded like Morgan, although she was using a different username from the one I remembered. Then I saw a photo she'd shared of herself the previous day.
It was her.
She was alive.
I finally had visual confirmation that my friend hadn't died, and that was enough for me. I didn't message her again or try to explain the bizarre situation out of nowhere.
TL;DR: I spent months believing a friend had died, mourned her privately, sent her a heartfelt memorial message, and then discovered that I'd somehow invented the entire event. I even sent her an unexplained apology payment before finding the Discord account that finally resolved the mystery.
I'm still embarrassed by the whole thing. I spent a year carrying around grief that, in this particular case, never needed to exist.
At least I eventually found out she was alive. Now I just have to live with the knowledge that in her inbox is a memorial message from a friend who accidentally convinced himself she'd died.
Edit: i just wanted to add that I will be messaging her, I just wanted a couple of days between joining the Discord and reaching out to her there.
Yes, I still consider us friends, she's just gone off the grid so the ways I used to communicate with her were no longer an option. People don't stop being friendly just because their lives haven't crossed in a while.