Deceased acquaintance from high school?

This is going to be kinda long so I hope you bear with me. A brief history before I begin on the dream: I was sort of friends with a guy in high school who I'm going to call "Ted". We did not keep in contact after we graduated. I'm 30 now and about 8 months ago I found out he passed away last summer in a spear-fishing accident. No one really knows what happened but they think he drowned somehow. He had just gotten married the year before and had a new baby. I hadn't been thinking about him at all recently so I think it's weird that I'd suddenly dream about him:

I'm in a house I've never seen before. It seems like there is a party or gathering of some sort as there are a lot of sharply dressed people milling around. I see Ted amongst the crowd, wearing jeans and a gray hoodie. People are moving and talking around him as if he is not there. He sees me and comes towards me. He looks a bit confused though somewhat relieved that I'm there. He asks me how I've been. I simply say "fine" and ask him the same. He shrugs and says "Okay." He looks around and then says "I think I used to live around here."
"You know you're dead, right?" I ask.
He shrugs again. "I don't know. I guess so."
"Do you know how you died?"
He doesn't seem to like that question. He turns down a hallway and I follow. We enter an empty bedroom with wooden floors. We sit Indian-style on the floor across from each other. He launches into a quick narrative about how things have been for him since high school. Most of his words are silent or garbled but I somehow understand what he's trying to express: constantly trying to please others, doing things just because it was what other people expected; until he finally made a change and started doing things that made himself happy and not worrying about what everyone else thought. He also makes it obvious how much better his life was since marrying his wife.
He looks at me as if he's waiting for me to tell the truth about how "fine" my life is. In not so many words, I talk about how tough the last year of high school was for me- the anxiety, the panic attacks, the self-infliction- and the long hard road it's been to attempt to be a normal person. He seems genuinely sympathetic.
Somehow without speaking out loud, he asks me if I'm going to talk to his wife for him. I say no and that I think it would be too inappropriate. I think to myself that I don't even know her name and again without speaking out loud he tells me it's similar to mine. He seems a bit distraught that I don't want to talk to her but he drops the subject. We sit quietly for a moment longer then a voice calls from behind the door something about flowers. I say no thank you, but Ted decides he wants carly? flowers for his wife. The door opens and an old woman is standing there with a basket of beautiful flowers. She reaches into the basket and pulls out three weeds of some sort. They're not pretty and they smell weird. They appear to be some kind of brown thistle.
"What are those?" I ask.
Ted hands them to me. "Carly? flower."
Then suddenly we are in a truck. I can't see anything out of the windows. Everything is pitch black except for the dim dome light above our heads. I know the truck isn't moving, but I can tell something outside is. I notice I still have the weeds in my hand. I lift them up to look at them. Ted gets upset and swats them away. He's starting to get agitated about something and I try to ask him what's wrong. He fidgets and mumbles incoherently. Then I wake up.


I've had strange feeling in my stomach all day and I decided to go snooping on Facebook and the internet. I found out that yesterday(the 7th) and today(the 8th) are the one year anniversaries of two memorial services that were held for him. Also I find out his wife's name is slightly similar to mine. But I can't figure out what the carly flowers are.