The One Where Nana Dies Twice

Thursday, 10 November 1994

Ross and Monica's grandmother dies twice in one afternoon and the family gathers for her funeral, while Chandler discovers that his coworkers and his own friends have always assumed he is gay.

What happens

• Chandler accepts a blind date from his coworker Shelley and then works out that the person she has in mind is a man.
• Chandler questions the group and learns that Monica, Phoebe and Rachel all took him for gay when they met him, and Ross admits he once exploited that assumption to keep a woman in college for himself.
• Monica takes a call from her father and learns that Nana is dying.
• A nurse pronounces Nana dead, she briefly revives while Ross and Monica are saying goodbye, and then she dies a second time.
• Jack Geller tells Monica he wants to be buried at sea so that people will stop thinking of him as predictable.
• Shelley tells Chandler the man she meant was Lowell from Financial Services, and Chandler insists he could have attracted someone better.
• Ross, stuck inside Nana's closet, finally gets his mother and Aunt Lillian to settle on the burgundy dress for the burial.
• Ross walks away from the burial praising how alive the day feels and drops straight into an open grave.
• Ross, dazed by his mother's painkillers, announces at the wake that he would not mind if Chandler were gay, which convinces a guest that her friend had read Chandler correctly.
• Monica presses her mother to admit that Nana criticised her constantly, her mother decides some things are better left unsaid, and she then compliments Monica on earrings that turn out to have been Nana's.
• Lowell tells Chandler that gay men can usually tell and that Chandler is not one, and adds that Brian from Payroll is gay and well beyond him.