The little girl is feeding the ducks twenty feet away from me, and I can’t breathe.
She’s maybe six years old. Same dark curls. Same way of tilting her head when she watches something move.
My daughter Becca died four years ago. She would have been six.
Eight months earlier, I was still doing the thing my grief counselor called “functional.” I was going to the park because the park was where I used to take Becca, and going back was supposed to help. That’s what I told myself.
My name is Donna. I’m forty years old and I have a dead daughter and a park I can’t stop visiting.
I started noticing the woman on the bench first – mid-thirties, dark hair, watching the same little girl. A few weeks in, she was always there. Tuesdays and Thursdays, same bench, same time I arrived.
I didn’t think anything of it.
Then one Thursday the girl ran toward me instead of the ducks, and I froze.
She held out a feather. “For you,” she said.
I couldn’t speak. She had Becca’s gap between her front teeth.
The woman was behind her fast. “Nadia, come here, sweetheart.” She took the girl’s hand and looked at me – not apologetic, not embarrassed. Something else. Like she’d been waiting.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “She does that with everyone.”
But she didn’t walk away.
She sat on the bench next to mine and said, “You come here every Tuesday and Thursday.”
My stomach dropped.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk to you,” she said. “My name is Gwen. I think – I think you knew my sister.”
I didn’t move.
“Her name was Carol Marsh,” she said. “She passed away five years ago. She left something for someone named Donna. We never found her.”
Nadia was back at the water, tilting her head at the ducks.
Gwen reached into her bag and put an envelope on the bench between us.
“Carol said you’d understand what it means.”
Carol Marsh
I hadn’t heard that name in six years.
Carol was in my grief support group. Not for a child. For a pregnancy she’d lost at twenty-two weeks, a boy she’d named Daniel, and she used to say the name out loud every session because she said the world wanted her to act like it hadn’t happened. Like he hadn’t happened.
She was thirty-one when I met her. Sharp sense of humor, the kind that made you feel guilty for laughing. She brought bad coffee to every Thursday session in a thermos that said World’s Okayest Human and she meant it without irony.
I liked her immediately.
We weren’t close in the way people think of close. We didn’t text constantly. We didn’t have each other’s numbers saved under anything cute. But for about fourteen months we sat in a circle of folding chairs in the basement of St. Anthony’s on Mercer Street every Thursday night, and we told each other things we couldn’t tell anyone else, and that makes a particular kind of bond that doesn’t have a good name.
Then Becca died.
I stopped going to group. I stopped going everywhere. I went dark for a long time, and by the time I surfaced, the group had shifted, new facilitator, different night, and I never went back.
I didn’t know Carol had died.
Five years ago. Which meant she died the same year Becca did, just a few months after. I’d been so inside my own wreckage that I hadn’t noticed someone else’s.
I sat there on the bench with Gwen, holding the envelope, not opening it.
“How did she die?” I asked.
“Cancer. It moved fast.” Gwen was watching Nadia at the water. “She was sick for about four months before we knew how sick. Then another two months, and then she was gone.”
I looked down at the envelope. My name was on it. Just Donna, in Carol’s handwriting, which I recognized because she used to write things down during group sometimes, quotes or her own thoughts, in this very particular loopy print that looked almost childlike.
“She had a list,” Gwen said. “People she wanted to reach. Most of them we found. You were the only one we couldn’t.”
“How did you find me now?”
Gwen smiled. Small. A little tired. “I didn’t find you. I’ve been coming to this park with Nadia for three months. I come on Tuesdays and Thursdays because Carol mentioned you came here. She said you used to bring your daughter.”
What Was Inside
I opened it there. I don’t know why I thought I’d wait.
It wasn’t long. Two pages, front and back, in that same loopy print. No date. She must have written it when she knew she wasn’t going to make it.
I’m not going to repeat all of it here. Some of it was hers and I’m keeping it.
But the part I can share: she wrote about the group. About how she used to sit across from me and think I was the most honest person in the room, not because I said the most but because when I did say something I said it without the armor most people kept on even in a grief group. She said she admired that and never told me.
She wrote about Becca. She’d heard me talk about her enough to know her. The dark curls. The gap in her teeth. The way she tilted her head at things she found interesting, birds especially.
She wrote: If you’re reading this, you’re still going to the park. I know you. You’re still going. Good. Don’t stop.
I put the pages down on my knee.
Nadia had abandoned the ducks and was crouching near the edge of the path, looking at something in the dirt. A beetle, maybe. Head tilted.
My chest did something I can’t describe cleanly. Not good, not bad. Both at once, pressed together.
“She knew I’d be here?” I said.
“She hoped.” Gwen shrugged. “She said you were the kind of person who goes back to places.”
The Thing About Carol I Didn’t Know
We talked for almost two hours. Nadia came back and fell asleep on the bench with her head on Gwen’s lap, which is the kind of thing six-year-olds can just do, fall asleep anywhere like it’s nothing.
I found out that Carol had had another pregnancy after Daniel. A girl. She’d made it to thirty-four weeks and then something went wrong fast, placental abruption, and they lost her too. This was between Daniel and when I knew her. She never talked about the second one in group. Only Daniel.
I don’t know why she kept the second one to herself. I didn’t ask. It felt like a door I shouldn’t open without being invited.
What I did find out was that Nadia was Carol’s niece, Gwen’s daughter, and Carol had been close with her. Close enough that Nadia, who was two when Carol died, still sometimes said her name. Still said Aunt Carol in the present tense the way little kids do before someone corrects them.
Gwen didn’t correct her.
“I figure she can figure out tenses when she’s ready,” Gwen said. “Carol’s still real to her. Why mess with that.”
I thought about Becca. About how I still buy the brand of juice she liked when I see it at the store, put it in my cart before I remember, stand there for a second, and then put it back. Or sometimes don’t put it back. Sometimes I buy it and drink it myself even though I don’t even like it that much.
Grief is embarrassing in its specifics. That’s something Carol used to say.
She was right.
What I Did With the Letter
I went home and I read it four more times.
Then I put it in the box where I keep Becca’s things. Her drawings. A hair tie. The little plastic duck she carried everywhere the last year of her life, yellow, one eye rubbed almost completely off from handling.
I put Carol’s letter in there because it belonged with things that mattered.
I went back to the park the following Tuesday. Gwen was there. Nadia ran straight to the ducks without looking at me, which somehow felt right. Like we’d moved past the feather moment into something more ordinary.
Gwen and I didn’t talk about Carol the whole time. We talked about other things. She’s a dental hygienist. She’s trying to decide whether to move closer to her mother, who’s in her seventies and starting to need more help. She hates the word moist with a specific passion she was happy to explain in detail.
Normal stuff. The kind of stuff you talk about with someone you might actually become friends with.
I didn’t expect that. A friend. I’d stopped thinking of myself as someone who made new ones.
Four Years and a Feather
Here’s the thing about the park.
I started going back because my grief counselor said it might help and I was desperate enough to try anything. That was the official reason.
The real reason is that I can still see Becca there. Not in a haunted way. In a regular way. I can see her at the water’s edge throwing bread in chunks that were too big, laughing when a duck lunged for one. I can see her running back to me with her arms out, wanting to be picked up, and me picking her up even though she was almost too heavy for me to carry comfortably.
I go because she’s there. In the way places hold people after they’re gone.
Carol knew that. She knew I’d keep going back, and so she sent Gwen there, Tuesdays and Thursdays, with an envelope and a six-year-old with dark curls and a habit of giving feathers to strangers.
I don’t know what Carol thought would happen. Maybe she just wanted to make sure I got the letter. Maybe she thought it would help.
It did. Not in a clean way. Not in a way I can explain without it sounding smaller than it actually was.
But I go to the park on Tuesdays and Thursdays and now sometimes Gwen is there and sometimes she isn’t, and when she is we sit on adjacent benches and talk about nothing in particular while Nadia feeds the ducks.
Last week Nadia found another feather and looked at it for a long second, deciding.
She kept it for herself.
Good call, I told her.
She agreed.
—
If this one got to you, pass it on to someone who might need it today.
If you’re looking for more emotional stories, you might find solace in reading about My Best Friend Left Me Everything. The Letter Explained Why I Couldn’t Say No., or how one parent handled My Daughter’s Name Wasn’t on the Permission Slip. I Showed Up Anyway.. And for another dose of heartfelt moments, check out My Stepdaughter’s Teacher Called Me Her “Helper” in Front of the Whole Room.
