Am I a terrible person for following a stranger through a parking lot because she looked like my dead daughter?
I (40F) lost my daughter Brianna six years ago. She was nineteen. A car accident on the interstate, two weeks before her sophomore year of college. I have a younger son, Derek (17), and a husband, Paul (44), who have both been through grief counseling and come out the other side of it in ways I apparently have not, because what I did last Tuesday has everyone in my life looking at me like I need to be hospitalized.
I go to the laundromat on Teller Street every week because our dryer has been broken for three months and Paul keeps saying he’ll fix it and he hasn’t. It’s fine. I don’t mind it. I fold things and I don’t think for an hour and a half and it’s actually the most peaceful part of my week.
Last Tuesday a girl came in and sat down across from me.
My heart stopped.
She had Brianna’s hair – that specific dark auburn, not dyed, the kind that goes copper in the light. She had the same way of pulling her knees up on the plastic chair. She was reading something on her phone with the same exact expression Brianna used to get, this little crease between her eyebrows, lips pressed together just slightly.
I know it wasn’t her. I am not crazy. I know my daughter is dead and in the ground and this was some girl, probably twenty-two, twenty-three, who has no idea she exists.
But I couldn’t stop staring.
She was there for maybe forty minutes. When she pulled her stuff out of the dryer she dropped a sock and didn’t notice and I picked it up and I said “excuse me” and she turned around and I almost couldn’t breathe because even her VOICE, even the way she said “oh my god, thank you” – I told her she looked like someone I used to know.
She smiled and said “small world” and walked out.
And then I followed her.
Not in a chasing way. I just – I was outside before I knew I was outside, and she was crossing the parking lot toward a green Civic, and I called out “wait” and she stopped and turned around and she wasn’t smiling anymore.
I don’t know what I was going to say to her.
She took a step back. She had her keys in her hand.
I said her name.
Not the stranger’s name. Brianna’s name.
The girl looked at me for a long moment. Then she said something I didn’t expect – not scared, not angry – just quiet, and the way she said it made me feel like I’d been standing in a dark room and someone had just turned on the light in the worst possible way.
What She Said
She said, “Is she gone?”
Just that. Not “who’s Brianna?” Not “get away from me.” She looked at my face and she read something there and she asked if Brianna was gone.
I said yes.
She said, “I’m sorry. My mom lost a baby before me. She used to look at me sometimes like she was seeing two people at once.” She paused. “I never knew what to do with that either.”
Then she got in her car and she left.
I stood in that parking lot for I don’t know how long. The asphalt was wet from rain earlier in the day, and there were these long orange streaks from the lights in the puddles, and I just stood there in my socks – I’d walked out without my shoes, which I didn’t realize until that moment – and I couldn’t make myself go back inside.
A man loading bags into a truck gave me a look. I probably looked insane. I probably was, a little, right then.
What Six Years Actually Looks Like
People think grief has a shape. A beginning, some ugly middle part, and then you get to the other side of it and you’re changed but functional and you don’t do things like follow young women through parking lots calling out your dead daughter’s name.
Paul went to counseling for two years. He cried in a therapist’s office twice a week for two years, and somewhere in there he put something down, or rearranged it, and he came home different. Quieter. Sadder in a way that had edges you could see. He still has bad days. But he doesn’t lose time anymore. He doesn’t stand in the cereal aisle for ten minutes because Brianna liked a specific kind of granola and they still stock it.
Derek was eleven when she died. He processed it in the way eleven-year-olds process things, which is to say he went very quiet for about eight months and then slowly came back to himself and now he’s seventeen and he talks about Brianna the way you talk about someone who was real, which she was, which is more than I can do most days without my throat closing up.
I went to four sessions of grief counseling in the first year. The therapist was a nice woman named Dr. Carla Hess and she said a lot of things that were probably correct and I sat there nodding and then I stopped going because I told Paul it wasn’t helping and that was true but not the whole truth. The whole truth was that talking about Brianna out loud in a fluorescent-lit office made her feel more dead, not less. Made the shape of the hole more specific. I didn’t want the hole to have a specific shape. I wanted to keep it blurry.
Blurry is survivable.
That’s what I’ve been doing for six years. Keeping it blurry.
The Part I Haven’t Told Paul
I’ve seen other girls before. Not like this, not where I’ve done anything. But I’ve noticed them. Girl with dark auburn hair in the grocery store, and I watch her until she turns a corner. Girl at the gas station laughing into her phone, and I sit in my car an extra three minutes. It’s not something I planned. It’s just a thing my eyes do now, a little search that runs in the background all the time.
Nineteen-year-old girls are everywhere. I didn’t understand that before. They’re in every parking lot and every coffee shop and every waiting room, and they all have futures, and most of them have no idea that’s a thing you can just lose.
I haven’t told Paul about the laundromat because I know what his face will do. He’ll go careful. He’ll use the soft voice he uses when he thinks I’m fragile, and he’ll suggest I call Dr. Hess, and he’ll mean it kindly, and I will want to throw something at him. Not because he’s wrong. Because being seen clearly by someone who loves you is its own specific kind of awful.
Derek would understand, maybe. He’s got Brianna’s same instinct for sitting with uncomfortable things without flinching. But he’s seventeen and he’s already carried more than a seventeen-year-old should, and I’m not putting this on him.
So I’m putting it here. On the internet. To strangers. Which is either brave or pathetic and probably both.
What I Keep Coming Back To
The girl’s name was not Brianna. I know that. I don’t know what her name actually is and I never will, and she drove off in a green Civic and she’s probably back in her apartment right now with no idea that a forty-year-old woman in socks is still thinking about the eight words she said in a parking lot.
Is she gone.
She asked it like she already knew. Like she’d seen grief before, up close, the specific way it makes a person’s face do something involuntary. Her mother had lost a baby before her. She’d grown up being looked at like she was two people. She knew what that looked like from the outside.
I’ve been thinking about that baby. The one who came before her. Some child who didn’t make it, whose absence shaped this girl’s whole childhood without her even knowing, because you can’t know what a dead sibling would have been. You just know there’s a shape missing. She grew up in the outline of a loss that wasn’t hers.
And here she is, twenty-something, and she walks into a laundromat and a stranger follows her across a parking lot and says a dead girl’s name, and instead of screaming or calling the police she just asks: is she gone.
I don’t know what to do with someone being that kind to me. I’m not sure I deserved it.
The Dryer
I went back inside. Got my shoes. Finished folding the laundry.
There was still a pile of Brianna’s things in the basket, which sounds insane, I know it sounds insane, but I kept some of her clothes and I wash them sometimes. Not often. Maybe once every couple months. I don’t wear them. I just wash them and fold them and put them back in the box I keep in the closet. Paul knows about the box. He doesn’t say anything about the box.
I folded a green sweater of hers, the one she bought at a thrift store sophomore year of high school and wore until the cuffs went thin. She called it her lucky sweater. It wasn’t lucky. But she wore it the first time she drove on the highway alone, and to her first college interview, and in approximately four hundred photos on her phone that I still have every one of.
I folded it and put it in the basket and drove home.
Paul was in the kitchen when I got back. He asked how the laundromat was. I said fine. He said he was going to look at the dryer this weekend, for real this time, and I said okay.
I put the laundry away. I put the box back in the closet.
Then I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark for a while, which is something I do sometimes, and I thought about a girl I’ll never see again who knew, just from looking at me, that someone was gone.
I don’t think I’m a terrible person.
I think I’m a person who hasn’t found the bottom of this yet. Six years in and I’m still falling, just slowly enough that on most days it looks like standing still.
The sock, by the way. I still have it. I forgot to give it back when she turned around and then she was gone and I was outside and then everything happened. It’s just a gray ankle sock, nothing special. I put it in the box too.
I don’t know why I’m telling you that. It just seemed like the kind of thing that should be said out loud.
—
If this one got you somewhere quiet, pass it on to someone who’d understand why.
For more stories of navigating grief and unexpected encounters, you might find solace in reading about following a stranger who resembled a lost loved one or exploring tales where a parent speaks up after a profound loss. And for a different kind of difficult confrontation, there’s always the story of a wife found far from where she claimed to be.
