Am I a terrible person for following a stranger out of a laundromat because she looked like my dead daughter?
I (38F) lost my daughter Maisie four years ago. She was seven. I’m not going to get into the details because that’s not what this is about, but I want you to understand that there is no version of me that has fully recovered from that, and there probably never will be.
I’ve been in therapy. I’ve done the grief groups. I know what “grief hallucinations” are – the thing where you think you see someone who’s gone in a crowd. My therapist Karen (54F) warned me this would happen and it did, for the first year or two. I thought I saw Maisie at the grocery store, at the park, twice at her old school when I drove past it for reasons I still can’t explain.
But that stopped. I thought I was past it.
Last Tuesday I was at the laundromat on Clement Street, the one I’ve been going to for three years, just sitting there waiting on my dryer. Normal night. There was a woman maybe a few years younger than me sitting across the row, and she had a little girl with her.
The girl was maybe ten or eleven. Old enough that it wasn’t Maisie – Maisie would be eleven now, and I know that, I KNOW THAT – but something about this kid made every single nerve in my body go still.
Same dark reddish hair. Same way of pulling her knees up to her chest when she sat. She was reading something on a tablet and she laughed at whatever it was and I had to grab the edge of the plastic chair.
I told myself to stop looking. I folded laundry. I stared at my phone.
Then the woman said something to the girl and the girl said “okay, Mom” and turned to grab her jacket off the chair next to her.
And she looked RIGHT AT ME.
I don’t know what my face was doing. The woman – the mother – noticed. She gave me this look, not mean exactly, just cautious. She started gathering their stuff faster than she needed to. They left before their dryer was done.
Here’s where I might be the a**hole: I followed them out.
Not chasing them, I wasn’t running, but I left my own laundry in the machine and I walked out behind them onto the sidewalk and I called out “excuse me.”
The mother turned around. And the way she pulled her daughter behind her – she was SCARED. She thought I was unhinged.
I tried to explain. I said my daughter passed away and her daughter reminded me of her and I was so sorry, I just wanted to – and that’s when I realized I didn’t actually know what I wanted.
The mother said something. Short. Quiet. And the girl looked up at her mom, then back at me.
My friends are split. Half of them say grief makes you do things, the other half think I crossed a line I can’t uncross.
But what the mother said – I keep replaying it. Because she wasn’t angry.
She reached into her bag and she handed me something small.
What She Gave Me
It was a prayer card.
One of those laminated ones, the size of a business card, with a saint on one side and a prayer on the other. I couldn’t read it right then because my hands were doing something I didn’t have full control over, and the streetlight on Clement was doing that thing where it flickers once every few seconds like it’s deciding.
The woman’s name was Patrice. She told me that, which surprised me, because I hadn’t asked and she didn’t have to. Mid-thirties, I think. She had on a down vest over a hoodie and her daughter was already tucked behind her arm but not hiding, just leaning. The way kids do when they’re old enough to understand something serious is happening but not old enough to know what.
Patrice said, “I’m sorry about your daughter.”
That was the thing she said. Short. Quiet. Just that.
I had expected her to be angry. Or to keep walking. Or to take out her phone and make it clear she was ready to call someone. And she might have been ready to do all of those things, I don’t know, I couldn’t see inside her. But she didn’t. She stood on the sidewalk in the November cold and she said she was sorry, and then she gave me the card.
I stood there after they walked away and I looked at it. Saint Monica. Patron of mothers who have lost children. I didn’t know that was a thing. I looked it up later.
I still don’t know if Patrice carries those cards for herself, or for other people, or if she’d had some loss of her own that made her recognize something in my face. I didn’t ask. I should have asked. I didn’t.
What Was Actually Happening in That Laundromat
I want to be honest about the thing I’ve been avoiding saying, which is that the last few months have been bad.
Not crisis bad. Not call-Karen bad. Just the regular, grinding bad that I don’t talk about much because there’s only so many times you can say “I’m having a hard time” before the people who love you start to go quiet in a specific way that means they don’t know what to do with you anymore.
October is always rough. Maisie’s birthday is October 14th. She would have been eleven. I did the thing I do, which is make her favorite dinner (buttered noodles, she was seven and extremely serious about buttered noodles) and put on the movie she liked and sit with it for a while. My friend Donna thinks this is unhealthy. My friend Bev thinks it’s beautiful. Karen says it’s mine to decide.
By the time November came I thought I’d gotten through the hard part. I was going to the gym again. I was sleeping okay. I went to my laundromat on a Tuesday night like a normal person with a normal basket of clothes.
And then a kid laughed at a tablet.
The thing about grief hallucinations – and I want to be clear that I was not hallucinating, I knew exactly what I was seeing, I knew that girl was not Maisie – is that my therapist explained it as your brain pattern-matching so hard it bypasses the part of you that knows better. It’s not delusion. It’s more like your nervous system running a search it never got a clean result for.
I knew that girl wasn’t Maisie.
But something in my chest didn’t get the memo.
The Part I Keep Turning Over
My friends who think I crossed a line aren’t wrong, exactly.
I scared that woman. I did. Whatever my reasons were, whatever grief was doing to me in that moment, Patrice did not know any of that when she looked back and saw a stranger following her and her kid out of a building at night. She just saw a woman with something wrong in her face coming toward them on a sidewalk.
That’s a real thing I did to a real person. I can feel bad about it and also understand why I did it and both of those things can be true at the same time. That’s not me letting myself off the hook. That’s just what it is.
What I can’t stop thinking about is the girl.
She was looking at me from behind her mother’s arm and she had this expression that I can only describe as careful. Like she was trying to figure out what kind of situation this was. And then, right before Patrice pulled her away to walk, the girl said, “I’m sorry about your daughter too.”
Eleven years old.
Just said it. Straight out. The way kids sometimes do when they haven’t yet learned to hedge everything they feel.
I said thank you. I think I said thank you. I might have just nodded. The details of that part are softer than the rest.
What I Told Karen
I have a session every other Thursday and this past Thursday I told Karen the whole thing.
She didn’t say I was terrible. She also didn’t say I was fine. Karen’s good at not doing either of those things, which is why I’ve kept seeing her for two years even though she’s expensive and her office has a motivational print on the wall that I have spent a lot of time disagreeing with silently.
She said something about how grief doesn’t follow a linear path, which I already knew, but then she said something that stuck. She said the part that matters isn’t whether I followed that woman out. It’s what I thought I was going to get if I caught up to her.
I didn’t have an answer for that.
I’ve been sitting with it for six days now.
I think – and I’m not sure about this, I’m not sure about much of it – I think I wanted to look at the girl for a few more seconds. That’s it. Not to touch her, not to talk to her, not to do anything. Just to look. The way you look at something that reminds you of something you lost and you just need one more second with it before it’s gone again.
Which is maybe the saddest thing I’ve ever said out loud. Or typed out. Whatever.
The Card Is on My Nightstand
Saint Monica, patron of grieving mothers.
I looked up her story. She spent years grieving a son she thought was lost to her, not to death but to choices he was making, a life he was living that she couldn’t reach him in. She prayed for him for a long time. He came back to her eventually, though not in the way she expected.
I’m not religious. I don’t know what I am. But I’ve been reading the prayer on the back of that card before I go to sleep, not because I think it does anything, just because someone handed it to me on a sidewalk in November when I was standing there shaking and it seemed like the thing to do.
Patrice didn’t have to stop. She didn’t have to turn around at all. She had every reason to keep walking and call it a weird night and put her daughter to bed and lock the door.
She stopped.
I’ve been thinking about that more than I’ve been thinking about whether I was wrong to follow her. Maybe that’s avoidance. Maybe that’s just where my brain wants to live right now.
Maisie would be eleven. She would be in fifth grade. She would probably be past the buttered noodles phase by now, onto something new, something I don’t know about because I don’t get to know about it.
The dryer finished without me. The laundromat holds clothes for 24 hours before they move them. I went back the next morning and everything was in a pile on the folding table, a little wrinkled, smelling like someone else’s dryer sheet.
I brought it all home and I washed it again.
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If this story sat with you, pass it to someone who might need it. You probably know who that is.
If you’re looking for more stories that explore complicated family dynamics, you might find some solace in “My Granddaughter Was Sitting Alone at Her Own Party. So I Opened My Phone.” or perhaps “The Envelope Had My Name On It. Phyllis Never Never Told Me Why.” And for a different perspective on similar themes, consider reading “I Followed a Stranger’s Child Through the Park and She Reported Me to the Police.”
