I Worried Sandals At A Funeral Would Read As Disrespectful, Maybe I Was Overthinking It

I stood in my closet for eleven minutes on a Tuesday morning deciding what to put on my feet for a funeral, which tells you something about my priorities and also about how little control I had over anything else that day. My grandmother’s service started at eleven. It was ninety one degrees. I own exactly one pair of black closed toe shoes and they’re heeled ankle boots that make a specific clicking sound on hard floors, the kind of sound that carries through a quiet room during the part where everyone’s supposed to be sitting with their thoughts, not listening to my footwear announce itself down the aisle.

The sandals I almost wore were plain, dark brown leather, flat, the kind Sam actually left behind at my place two summers ago and never asked for back. Not strappy, not the beachy kind with the plastic buckle, just a low key pair that could’ve passed as regular shoes from six feet away.

I put them on. I took them off. I put them back on. At some point I texted my brother a photo of my own feet with the message “be honest” and he wrote back “why are you asking me this” which, fair, he wasn’t going to be there and had zero stake in whatever I decided.

Why This Question Even Gets Under Your Skin

Here’s what I’ve landed on after turning this over way longer than the actual decision deserved: the anxiety isn’t really about the shoes. It’s about being the one thing in the room that reads as slightly off while everyone else has apparently gotten the memo. Funerals are one of the last places where there’s still a loosely agreed dress code, nobody hands you a printed sheet but you absorb the rules from somewhere, dark colors, covered shoulders, nothing that clicks or squeaks or draws an eye. Breaking one piece of that code, even a small piece, feels disproportionately loud because everything else in the room is deliberately quiet.

I think what actually kept me standing in that closet was less about my grandmother and more about my aunt. Not because she’d said anything, she hadn’t, I just had a very specific mental image of her clocking my feet during the eulogy and filing it away as evidence for whatever ongoing opinion she has of me. That’s the part nobody talks about when this question comes up. It’s rarely really about the deceased or the occasion itself, it’s about the living people in the pews and what they might silently decide about you based on eleven square inches of leather.

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And the thing is, I’ve been to enough of these now to know that almost nobody is actually doing the math I was so convinced they’d be doing. I asked myself, honestly, how many times have I noticed someone else’s shoes at a funeral and formed a judgment about their character. Once. Maybe twice. And both times it was because the shoes were bright white sneakers, not because they were open at the toe. Open toe leather sandals in a somber color occupy a completely different category than sneakers or flip flops, but in my head, standing in that closet, they’d gotten flattened into the same bucket, just “wrong,” with no room for degree.

What I Actually Decided And What I’d Tell Myself Now

I wore the boots. Clicking and all. I stood at the back near the door specifically so the click had less floor to travel across, which is an unhinged level of planning for footwear at a funeral, and I’m aware of that. My feet were miserable by the reception, properly swollen in a way that meant I sat on a curb outside for ten minutes taking them off entirely, which if anything drew more attention than the sandals ever would have. Nobody at that funeral remembers my shoes. I remember my shoes, in exhaustive detail, because I was the one wearing them and thinking about them the entire time instead of thinking about my grandmother, which is the actual disrespect nobody warns you about. Not the sandals. The eleven minutes and the follow up ten minutes on a curb, all spent on my own feet instead of on her.

If I’m being completely honest with myself, the real rule I’ve come away with isn’t about sandals versus boots at all. It’s that the emotional labor of policing your own appearance for imagined judgment from people who are mostly grieving too is its own kind of waste, and it steals attention from where it should be going. A closed toe shoe that’s actually comfortable and unremarkable would have solved this instantly, and if that shoe happens to be a sandal, plain, dark, not resembling something you’d wear to a barbecue, I don’t think that reads as disrespectful to anyone who isn’t already primed to find fault with you specifically. The occasion asks for restraint and quiet, not a specific silhouette of shoe.

What I’d actually tell a friend asking me this now, the version of the advice I didn’t give myself in time, is that the sandals were never the risk. The risk was spending the service half present because I’d outsourced my sense of appropriateness to a room full of people who, statistically, were mostly thinking about their own shoes, their own grief, their own eleven minutes of doubt before they left the house that morning. I was overthinking it. Not because the concern was baseless exactly, dress does communicate something at a funeral, but because I gave it a decision making weight it never deserved, and I paid for that decision with blistered feet and a curb in a parking lot instead of a clear head during the one hour that actually mattered.