I (45M) lost my daughter Becca four years ago. She was nineteen. Car accident, two weeks into her second year of college, and the version of my life where she grows up and gets old just – stopped. My wife Denise and I have been doing okay, I think. Therapy. The grief group on Tuesday nights. We don’t talk about Becca every day anymore, which I used to feel guilty about, and now I’m told that’s actually healthy.
I take the 7:15 bus to work because we’re down to one car and Denise needs it for her mother’s appointments on Wednesdays and Fridays. I’ve been doing this route for about eight months. It’s fine. Headphones in, forty minutes, done.
Two weeks ago a girl got on at the Ridgeline stop. She sat three rows ahead of me.
My chest went tight.
Same dark hair, same way she had it pulled over one shoulder. Same build. Same little habit of pulling at the sleeve of her jacket. Becca used to do that when she was nervous, tug at her left cuff. This girl did it twice in the first five minutes.
I told myself to stop.
I put my headphones back in. I looked out the window. I did everything right. But then she turned her head just slightly to look at something out the window on her side, and I saw her profile, and I just – I couldn’t breathe.
I got off at her stop. It wasn’t my stop. I followed her about half a block down Mercer Street before she turned around because I guess she heard my footsteps behind her and it was early and quiet.
She looked at me and said, “Can I help you?”
And I just stood there on the sidewalk like an idiot and said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You look exactly like someone I lost.”
She took a step back.
I told her I wasn’t – I said, “I’m not dangerous, I promise, I just – I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have followed you, I’m really sorry.” I was crying by then, which I think made it worse, not better.
She said, “Okay,” and she walked away fast, and I stood there for a while and then called a Lyft to work.
I told Denise that night. She didn’t get angry. She got quiet, which is worse, and she said, “Garrett. You can’t do that.” I know she’s right. My friend Doug said what I did was “unhinged” and that the girl was probably terrified, and he’s probably right too. But my sister Karen said she understood completely and that grief does things to people.
My friends are split. I’ve been going back and forth about whether I’m just a grieving dad or whether I crossed a real line.
Here’s the thing I haven’t told Denise yet.
The girl takes the same bus. She was there again this morning. And when she got on, she looked straight at me – like she recognized me – and she sat down, and then she reached into her bag and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
She looked right at me. And she held it out.
What Happens When You Take It
I didn’t move at first.
There were maybe six other people on the bus. A guy in a Carhartt jacket asleep against the window. An older woman with a rolling cart wedged between her knees. Nobody watching us. The bus smelled like diesel and somebody’s fast food bag from the night before.
The girl kept her arm out. Patient. Not scared, not that I could tell. She had dark eyes and she wasn’t smiling, but she wasn’t hard either. She just waited.
I got up and walked the three rows and took the paper.
She nodded, once, and looked back out the window.
I sat back down. My hands were doing something I didn’t like. I unfolded it.
It was a notecard, actually, not a full sheet. College-ruled. Neat handwriting, slightly left-leaning, the kind you get when someone’s been writing in journals since they were twelve.
I looked you up. I know about Becca. I’m sorry.
My name is Nora. I’m not her. But I don’t think you’re dangerous.
If you want to talk sometime, I get coffee at the place on Mercer before my shift. Tuesdays and Thursdays. You don’t have to.
That was it. No phone number. No last name.
I read it four times before my stop came up.
What I Know About Grief (Which Is Less Than I Thought)
The Tuesday group, the one Denise and I go to, it’s held in the basement of a Methodist church on Halford Street. Metal folding chairs. A card table with a coffee urn that takes about eleven minutes to produce anything drinkable. There’s a woman named Pat who lost her son to an overdose, and a man named Terrence whose wife died of a stroke at fifty-one, and a rotating cast of people in their first terrible year who mostly just sit there looking like they got hit by something and aren’t sure yet what.
The facilitator, a social worker named Dr. Voss who goes by “just call me Voss,” she said something once that I’ve been chewing on ever since.
She said grief isn’t linear and it isn’t logical, but the body keeps its own calendar.
What she meant was: you can be fine for months. Genuinely fine. And then something, a smell, a song, the angle of afternoon light in October, catches you completely sideways and you’re back in the hospital parking garage at 2 a.m. like no time passed at all.
That’s what happened on the bus. It wasn’t a decision. It was my body doing something before my brain caught up.
That doesn’t make it okay. I know that. What I did on Mercer Street scared that girl, whatever she wrote on the notecard afterward. For those seconds when she heard footsteps and turned around, she didn’t see a grieving father. She saw a man following her in the early morning quiet. That’s what happened, regardless of what was happening inside me.
Doug’s not wrong. I crossed a line.
But here’s the thing about lines: I’ve been crossing them for four years, just quietly, just internally, where nobody can see. The time I drove past Becca’s old high school at eleven at night and sat in the parking lot for an hour. The time I called her number, fourteen months after the accident, just to hear her voicemail. The time I kept her shampoo in the shower until Denise finally moved it without saying anything, and I found it under the sink and put it back, and Denise found it there and didn’t say anything again, and we just kept doing that rotation for six months like two people pretending not to notice a leak.
The bus was the first time it happened in front of someone.
Nora
I went on a Thursday.
I almost didn’t. I sat in the car outside the coffee place on Mercer for about eight minutes, which is long enough to feel stupid about sitting in a car. The place was called something with “Bean” in it, the kind of name that means nothing, small front window, a chalkboard menu.
She was already there. Corner table. Laptop open, headphones around her neck, a drink that was more whipped cream than coffee. She was maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. Up close she looked less like Becca. Still the dark hair, still the build, but her face was different in ways I hadn’t been able to see from three rows back on a moving bus. Sharper nose. Different mouth.
She looked up and saw me and waved. Just a small wave. Like we’d done this before.
I got a coffee and sat down across from her.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
She closed the laptop. “You don’t have to explain anything. I already know the broad strokes.”
“How did you find her?” I asked. Because that was the thing I couldn’t figure out. She’d said she looked up Becca, but how do you get from a crying man on a sidewalk to a name?
Nora pulled the sleeves of her jacket down over her hands. That same gesture. I made myself not react to it.
“You said ‘someone I lost.’ I heard you say you were sorry. I saw your face.” She shrugged. “I grew up in a small house with a lot of people who were bad at hiding things, so I’m pretty good at reading situations. I just looked up local obituaries for young women. It didn’t take long. There aren’t that many.”
She said it plainly. No performance of sympathy.
“That’s a strange thing to do,” I said.
“Yeah.” She didn’t disagree.
What She Said Next
Nora’s grandmother died the year before. Not the same, she said immediately, not even close to the same, she wasn’t trying to compare. But she’d flown home for the funeral and come back to the city and gone back to her regular life and found that nothing fit right anymore, like a coat that had been altered wrong.
“I kept wanting to tell her things,” she said. “Stupid things. Like, I found this restaurant she would’ve liked. Or I heard a song on the radio she used to play in the car. And there was nowhere to put it.”
I nodded.
“I thought about you,” she said. “After that morning. I thought, that man is carrying something that has nowhere to go, and it came out sideways, and that’s not nothing.”
She wasn’t absolving me. She was careful about that. She said, “It scared me. When I heard footsteps and turned around. I want you to know that.” Direct. Not cruel.
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“I know you are.” She wrapped both hands around her cup. “I just didn’t want you to think I was only doing this because I wasn’t scared. I was. And I’m still here.”
We sat there for a while. The coffee place filled up a little around us. Someone’s kid knocked a muffin off a table.
I told her about Becca. Not the accident. Just Becca. The way she laughed too loud at her own jokes. How she’d wanted to study marine biology and then switched to education and then wasn’t sure, and we’d told her she had time, she had so much time.
Nora listened.
She didn’t say anything about it being beautiful or heartbreaking. She just listened, and when I stopped talking she said, “She sounds like she was a lot.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She really was.”
What I Haven’t Told Denise
I’ve been to the coffee place three times now.
I don’t know how to explain it to Denise in a way that doesn’t sound like something it isn’t. It’s not anything. Nora is twenty-three years old and she lost her grandmother and she has kind instincts and she’s letting me talk about my kid, and that’s the whole of it.
But I haven’t told Denise because I know what the facts look like: I followed a stranger off a bus, and now I’m meeting her for coffee, and I haven’t mentioned it.
The facts look bad.
What I keep coming back to, though, is Tuesday night group. Voss talks a lot about the people who hold space for grief, how rare they are, how most people love you and still can’t do it, can’t sit with the weight of it without flinching or fixing or changing the subject. Denise loves me. She’s flinching less than she used to. But Becca is her loss too, which means when I talk about Becca with Denise it lands on both of us at once, and sometimes I need to say things that don’t have to land on anyone.
Nora didn’t know Becca. She has no skin in it. She just listens.
I don’t know if that makes it okay. I don’t know if I’m the asshole in this story or just a man whose grief finally got out of the box in a parking lot on Mercer Street, in front of the wrong person, who turned out to be maybe the right one.
I’m going to tell Denise. This week. I’ve said that before, but I mean it this time.
And I’m going to keep going to the Tuesday group.
And I’m going to keep taking the 7:15 bus, headphones in, looking out the window.
Just maybe not always at my own reflection.
—
If this one stayed with you, pass it along to someone who knows what it is to carry something that has nowhere to go.
If you’re curious about what happened when my wife opened the door and I saw what was behind her, or want to read about the time I followed a stranger out of a laundromat because she looked like my dead daughter, we’ve got you covered. You might also be interested in the story of how my daughter said she felt like she wasn’t supposed to be there, and she was right.
