After five months of teasing, The Walking Dead finally pulled the trigger (so to speak) in the Season 7 premiere. We now know who died a gruesome death at the business end of Negan’s bat. The cast and crew gathered for a live taping of The Talking Dead, and for what Steven Yeun promised would be an occasion for “joy, sadness, remembering great things. . .It’s going to be a wonderful time.” Yeun, Lauren Cohan, and the rest of The Walking Dead family took fans behind-the-scenes of the bloody, brutal Season 7 premiere, including the meaning behind Glenn’s heartbreaking final words.

The Walking Dead showrunner Scott Gimple told the thousands of fans gathered in L.A. that he was “looking for a way to break the audience.” If that break came at all, it was as Glenn struggled to get out one last romantic gesture for his wife Maggie after Negan brutally bashed his head in. “I will find you,” he told her, echoing such romantic heroes as Daniel Day Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans and Henry Ian Cusick in Lost.

Video: The Cast of The Walking Dead talk Season 7

How does Cohan interpret that promise? “In this life or the next,” Cohan says. “They’re star-crossed lovers. ‘I’ll find you, I’ll be with you, I’ll watch over you. I’ll be there.’” Yeun added later, “He dies in such a Glenn way. Still not thinking about himself. It’s important the he puts those final words out as a way of saying, ‘Look out for one another.’”

But Cohan made it clear that Maggie won’t be romantically mourning Glenn for the rest of the season. She ended the episode threatening Negan’s safety and, as she described it to the Talking Dead audience, “By the time we see that happen, there’s such a fucking fire burning so strong in her belly.”

Yeun, for his part, largely held it together during the emotional evening—though he broke a little bit after Chris Hardwick ran an in memoriam video for Glenn.

But Yeun said that he didn’t want the big dramatic death that Glenn experiences in the comic to go to any other character:

Robert wrote such a messed up but at the same time incredible way to take something away. To make a story as impactful as it is. When you read the comic, you kind of don’t want that moment to go to anyone else. I think I said that, ‘Don’t let that go to anyone else.‘ To do it the way we did it, I think, was brave and super effecting.

To a certain degree, Yeun seems relieved that the whole thing is over and he no longer has to keep secrets. “It was fun to lie to people” at first, he says. But, eventually, he couldn’t lie anymore and just stopped talking about the show entirely.

Meanwhile, some Glenn fans are still reeling from his passing—with one Talking Dead fan writing in to say he grew up with Yeun’s character. After Hardwick pointed out that, yes, it had been seven years since The Walking Dead premiered, Yeun exclaimed, “It’s like Harry Potter.” Ah—but this time, after so many close calls, Glenn turned out not to be the pizza boy who lives.

Video: Before They Were Stars: The Walking Dead