I (45M) lost my daughter Becca four years ago. She was nineteen. Car accident on Route 9, November, a Tuesday, like it was nothing. I’ve got two other kids – my son Derek (22) and my youngest, Pam (17) – and a wife, Gina, who I think is holding together better than me because she actually went to therapy and I didn’t. My friends and family are split on whether I’m “doing the work” or still in a hole I dug myself. They’re probably right about the hole.
I take the 7:40 bus to work every morning because we’re down to one car and Gina needs it. That’s the whole context. It’s a stupid, boring routine. I sit in the same spot, I drink terrible coffee, I get off on Merchant Street, I go to work. I’ve done it maybe two hundred times.
Last Thursday the girl was standing at the stop on Caldwell when I got on.
I almost dropped my coffee.
She had Becca’s hair – that specific dark auburn, not dyed, the kind that goes almost copper in the sun. She was wearing a green jacket. Becca had a green jacket she wore until it basically fell apart. This girl was probably twenty-two, twenty-three, standing with her back half-turned, earbuds in, and I just – I couldn’t breathe right.
I sat down three rows behind her.
I know how that sounds. I KNOW. I wasn’t going to talk to her. I just needed to – I don’t know. Be near it for a second. Whatever “it” was.
She got off at the stop before Merchant. I got off too.
I told myself I was just stretching my legs, I’d walk the extra block. But I followed her for almost half a street before she stopped and turned around.
She didn’t look like Becca at all from the front.
Different eyes, different nose, different everything. And the way she looked at me – she was scared. She had her phone in her hand already.
I stopped. I put my hands up. I said, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, you reminded me of someone.”
She said, “You need to step back.”
I stepped back. She walked away fast and I just stood there on the sidewalk.
I got to work twenty minutes late and didn’t tell anyone why.
I told Gina that night. She didn’t say I was a bad person. She said, “You scared that girl, Kevin.” And then she said something else, quiet, that I’ve been turning over ever since.
She said, “Becca would have been scared of you too.”
I didn’t say anything back. I went to bed.
But at 6am this morning, Gina’s phone was on the counter and the screen lit up with a message from a number I didn’t recognize.
What I Did Next
I didn’t touch her phone. I want to be clear about that.
I’m not the kind of guy who goes through his wife’s stuff. Twenty-three years of marriage. I’ve never had a reason, and I’m not about to manufacture one now by pretending a lit screen is an invitation.
But I saw the first line of the preview before I looked away. That’s just physics. The phone was right there, six inches from my coffee mug, and the screen was bright in the early gray of the kitchen.
Can’t stop thinking about what you said last night.
That’s all I saw. Then the screen went dark.
I stood there for a second. Then I poured my coffee down the drain because it had gone cold, and I made a fresh cup I also didn’t drink, and I sat at the kitchen table until I heard Gina’s alarm go off upstairs.
I’ve been sitting with that preview text all day. I’ve been building cases for it in my head. It could be her sister Karen, who Gina talks to late sometimes. It could be her friend Donna from the grief group she joined two years ago. It could be someone from work. It could be exactly what it sounds like and I could be the reason why.
That last one I keep picking up and putting down.
The Hole I Dug
Here’s the thing about the hole. You don’t dig it all at once.
You don’t wake up the morning after your daughter dies and decide to stop being a functional human. It happens in increments. You skip one therapy appointment because you’re not ready. You skip the second because you skipped the first. You stop going to the grief group because sitting in a circle of strangers talking about your dead kid feels like a performance you’re not qualified to give.
You keep going to work because work is easy. Work doesn’t know Becca. Work doesn’t have her drawings on the fridge or her old room full of stuff Gina still hasn’t touched.
Gina went to therapy. She cried at the dinner table for the first year, actual crying, not the dry-eyed frozen thing I do. She let Derek and Pam see her fall apart. She let me see her fall apart. And somewhere in the last four years she came back from wherever she went, and I’m still down here.
I’m not unaware of this. That’s the thing people don’t get. You can be completely aware that you’re drowning and still not swim.
The bus routine started about six months after Becca died. We sold the second car because the insurance was a stretch and I told Gina I didn’t mind taking the bus. That was true. I liked having forty minutes in the morning where no one could ask me anything. Just the window and the coffee and the same streets in the same order.
I never thought about what it would cost me to be alone with my own head that much.
Route 9
The accident was on Route 9. Not near the bus route. I’ve never had to figure out a way around it or anything like that. But Route 9 is a number now the way some numbers get to be numbers. My daughter died on a Tuesday. November. Route 9. I see it on gas station signs and I feel it behind my sternum like a key turning.
Becca was coming back from a friend’s place. Her name was Steph – Stephanie Doyle, she came to the funeral, she sends us a card every November, Gina writes back and I never know what to say so I don’t say anything. The roads were fine that night. No ice. The other driver ran a red. Twenty-four years old himself, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to hate him the right amount and failing in both directions.
Becca had called me two days before. I didn’t pick up. I was watching a game and I told myself I’d call her back after.
I didn’t call her back after.
This is not a secret in my family. Gina knows. Derek knows. Pam was thirteen and I don’t know what she knows or doesn’t know and I’ve never been able to ask.
The green jacket the girl on the bus was wearing. Becca’s green jacket was a thing she found at a thrift store on Clement Street sophomore year of college. She wore it in her last Instagram photo. She wore it the last time I saw her in person, which was a Sunday in October, when she came home for a weekend and I made pancakes and we watched something on TV and I do not remember what we watched and I have tried.
What Gina Said
“Becca would have been scared of you too.”
I’ve been turning it over because I can’t figure out if it was cruel or just accurate. With Gina lately I can’t always tell the difference, and I don’t know if that’s her changing or me getting worse at reading people.
She wasn’t wrong. That’s the part that sits. A middle-aged man you don’t know follows you off a bus, keeps pace with you down the sidewalk, and then when you turn around he’s right there with his hands up saying you reminded me of someone. If Becca had told me that happened to her, I’d have been furious. I’d have wanted to know what the guy looked like. I’d have told her to trust her gut.
I was the guy.
I know that.
But Gina saying it out loud, in that quiet way she has now – that careful, therapy-voice way she didn’t used to have – it landed different than her just being right. It landed like she was done waiting for me to get there on my own.
Maybe she is. I don’t know. I don’t know what I don’t know about my own marriage anymore, which is a sentence I couldn’t have said four years ago.
We were good. I want to put that on the record. We were a genuinely good marriage. We argued about money and the kids and once, memorably, about whether a particular shade of gray for the living room was too cold, and that was basically it. We liked each other. We still like each other, I think. But liking someone and being able to reach them are different things, and I have not been reachable.
6am
I went to work. I came home. Gina was making dinner, and the phone wasn’t on the counter anymore, and I didn’t ask about it.
We ate. Pam talked about something happening with her friend group at school, some falling-out I couldn’t follow. Gina listened and asked the right questions. I ate my food.
After dinner I washed the dishes because that’s my thing, and Gina dried, and we didn’t talk about the phone, and we didn’t talk about Thursday, and we didn’t talk about what she’d said the night before.
At some point she put her hand on my back, between my shoulder blades, just for a second.
I don’t know what that meant. I didn’t ask.
Pam went upstairs. I sat in the living room and looked at the same paragraph of a book for forty-five minutes. Gina watched something on her laptop with headphones in.
At ten I said I was going to bed.
She said, “Okay.”
I said, “I’m going to call someone tomorrow. A therapist.”
She didn’t look up immediately. Then she did.
She didn’t say finally or good or anything like that. She just looked at me for a second.
“Okay,” she said again.
I went upstairs. Lay in the dark. Thought about a girl with auburn hair standing at a bus stop on Caldwell, earbuds in, back half-turned. Thought about a green jacket on a thrift store rack on Clement Street, sophomore year. Thought about a phone ringing in a room while I watched a game.
I didn’t call her back.
I’m going to call someone tomorrow.
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For more stories about grief and surprising connections, check out My Husband Told Me Three Times Not to Come to His Work Dinner or The Man Who Tackled Me in the Pickup Line Lost His Daughter Because of It. You might also appreciate My Partner Blew Our Case. Then Kevin Brennan’s Brother Started Watching My Kid.
