I (45M) lost my daughter Becca four years ago. She was nineteen. Car accident on a Tuesday morning, nothing dramatic, just a wet road and a truck that crossed the center line. Becca was a junior at State and she was coming home for a long weekend and that was it. That was the whole story. My wife Donna and I have been doing the work – therapy, the grief group at the church on Kelsey Road, all of it – but there is no finish line to that kind of thing. You just get better at carrying it.
I still drive past the bus stop on Meridian where Becca used to wait for the 14 when she was in high school. I don’t do it on purpose. It’s on my way to work. I’ve been taking that route for eleven years and I’m not going to change it because it hurts. That’s the version of myself I’m trying to be.
So last Thursday I was running late and I parked and took the bus downtown for the first time in maybe two years.
She was already on it when I got on.
The girl. She was sitting near the back, earbuds in, hood up, and when she turned to look out the window I had to grab the rail. Same jaw. Same way of sitting with one knee pulled up. Same dark hair with that one piece that always falls forward. Becca used to tuck that piece behind her ear about forty times a day.
I sat three rows ahead and I did not look back. I told myself it was nothing. I told myself I was going to ride to my stop and get off and go to work and be a normal person.
I rode past my stop.
I don’t know when I decided. I don’t think I decided. The bus stopped at Garfield and the girl stood up and I stood up. I followed her off. Not close. Half a block back. I just wanted to see her face straight on, one time, and then I would let it go.
She stopped at the corner and turned around.
She was not Becca. Of course she wasn’t. She was maybe twenty-two, different eyes, a nose ring Becca never would have worn. She looked at me and I could see she knew. She knew a man had followed her off a bus.
I stopped walking. I put my hands up – I don’t know why, some instinct – and I said, “I’m sorry. You look like someone I lost. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t run. She just stared at me. And then she said something that I have been turning over in my head for six days straight, something I don’t know what to do with.
My friends say she was just scared and talking. Donna says it means something. My therapist says I need to bring this to our next session and not act on anything until I do.
But the girl looked me dead in the eye and said –
What She Said
“She knows.”
Two words. Said them flat, no hesitation, like she was reading them off something.
Then the light changed and she walked away. Not fast. Just walked. Didn’t look back.
I stood on that corner for probably three minutes. A guy on a bike nearly clipped me. I didn’t move. I was doing the math on what had just happened, running it through, checking for an explanation that wasn’t the one that kept landing.
She knows.
Present tense.
I got to work forty minutes late and sat in my car in the parking garage for another twenty. My hands were doing something I didn’t notice until I tried to open the door.
What I Told Donna
I didn’t tell her that night. I made dinner, we watched something on TV, I went to bed. Lay there until about two in the morning and then I went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table in the dark and I thought about Becca.
Not the accident. I’ve made a rule about that. You can’t think about the accident or you’ll never stop. I thought about the other stuff. The way she’d steal my coffee and then make a face because she didn’t actually like coffee but she wanted to like it. The time she was fifteen and tried to lie to me about where she’d been and was so bad at it that she started laughing in the middle of the lie. The voicemail she left me two days before she died, asking if I knew where her blue rain jacket was, had she left it at home? She had. It’s still in the closet. Donna and I don’t talk about the jacket.
I told Donna the next morning. All of it. The bus, the following, the corner, what the girl said.
Donna is not a mystical person. She’s a dental hygienist. She reads crime novels and she’s on a bowling league and she does not believe in signs. She cried when I told her. Not sad crying. Something else. She held my arm with both hands and said, “That means something, Gary. I don’t know what, but that means something.”
I don’t know either. That’s the problem.
What My Buddy Phil Said
Phil’s known me since we were twenty-three. He came to the hospital the night of the accident. He sat in that waiting room for five hours and he never once said the wrong thing, which is more than I can say for almost anyone else.
I called him on Friday.
He was quiet for a second after I told him and then he said, “Gary. She was scared. You followed her off a bus. She said something to get you to stop following her.”
“It worked,” I said.
“Right, because it was the right move. She read you. She saw a guy who looked sad, not dangerous, and she gave you something to think about so you’d stop. She didn’t know what she was saying.”
I asked him how he could be sure.
He said he couldn’t. He said, “But you’re a rational person and you know what’s more likely.”
He’s not wrong. He’s probably right. That’s the thing about Phil, he’s usually right, and it doesn’t always help.
The Grief Group
Thursday nights, Kelsey Road. There’s maybe twelve of us depending on the week. I’ve been going for three years. I know these people the way you know people you’ve cried in front of; it’s a specific kind of knowing.
I told them Thursday. The whole room.
Marge, who lost her son to an overdose in 2019, said she’d had three moments like that. Three times she’d seen her boy’s face in a stranger. Said once she’d almost said something and stopped herself. Said she was glad I didn’t stop myself.
A guy named Dennis, who I don’t know as well, said he thought I should be careful. Not mean about it. Just said grief does things to pattern recognition. The brain looks for what it’s missing. He’s not wrong either.
The facilitator, Carol, didn’t say much. She has this thing where she asks one question instead of giving an opinion. She asked me, “What do you want it to mean?”
I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t. Or I have too many and I can’t sort them.
The Jacket
Sunday I opened the closet.
I don’t do that. Donna and I made an agreement early on, not a spoken one, just an understanding that settled between us: the jacket stays there, we don’t take it out, we don’t move it, and we don’t talk about it. It’s been in the same spot for four years. Blue rain jacket, size small, her name written on the tag in Sharpie because she kept losing things at school.
I took it off the hanger.
It smelled like the closet now, not like her. I knew it would. I wasn’t expecting anything. I just stood there holding it.
Donna came in and saw me and she didn’t say a word. She sat on the edge of the bed and watched me hold it. After a while she said, “Do you want to talk about her today? Just talk? Not about the accident, not about any of that. Just Becca.”
We talked for two hours. I hadn’t done that in a long time. Just talked about her like she was a person, not a loss. The coffee thing. The lying-and-laughing thing. The time she was seven and convinced she could train the neighbor’s cat and spent an entire summer trying and the cat remained completely indifferent and she refused to admit it hadn’t worked.
Donna told me things I hadn’t heard before. Little things Becca had said to her, mom-daughter stuff she’d kept to herself. Four years of holding those and she just opened them up.
I don’t know if that was because of the stranger on the corner. I don’t know if it matters.
Am I the Asshole
Yeah. Probably. A little.
I scared her. That girl was twenty-two years old walking to wherever she was going and a middle-aged man followed her off a bus and she had to turn around and handle it. She handled it better than I deserved. She gave me something instead of screaming for help or running, and she didn’t have to do that.
I’ve thought about whether I could find her to apologize properly. I can’t. I don’t know who she is. She got on the bus at Meridian or before, got off at Garfield, and that’s everything I know. She’s gone.
So I’m sitting with that. The thing I did was wrong. The thing that came out of it, the two hours with Donna, the jacket, the talking, Marge telling me she’d almost said something to her son’s face in a stranger and was glad I didn’t stop myself – I don’t know how to call that wrong. I don’t know how to call it right either.
My therapist appointment is Tuesday. I’ll bring all of it. That’s what I’ve got.
She knows.
I don’t know what it means. I don’t know if it means anything. But I’ve said it out loud to myself maybe forty times in six days and every time I do, something in my chest does something I don’t have a word for.
Becca would have tucked that piece of hair behind her ear and told me I was being weird. She’d have said it like it was obvious. She’d have been right.
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If this one got you, pass it along to someone who needed to read it today.
If you’re looking for more wild stories, you might want to check out “The PTA President Called Me the Wrong Name. I Had Receipts.” or even “My Husband Said “Not Here, Please” – So I Made Sure Everyone Heard”. And for a different take on a similar experience, read “I Followed a Stranger Out of a Building Because She Looked Like My Dead Daughter”.
