I (33F) lost my sister Dani six years ago – car accident, two weeks before her 29th birthday, no warning, no goodbye. We shared a bedroom for twenty-two years. I still reach for my phone to text her at least once a week.
I know what grief does to a brain. I’ve been in therapy. I understand, on a logical level, that I am not the first person to see a dead loved one in a stranger’s face and do something embarrassing. My friends are split on whether what I did was understandable or genuinely frightening to an innocent person.
Last Tuesday I was on the 47 bus coming home from work, standing because it was packed, holding the overhead bar and staring at nothing. And then a woman got on at the Millbrook stop and I almost fell over.
Same height as Dani. Same way of pulling her hair to one side before she sat down. She was wearing these green canvas sneakers that Dani had in EXACTLY that color – the ones I helped her pick out at the outlet mall in 2017, the ones she was wearing when she died.
I know that’s not a reasonable thing to assign meaning to. Lots of people have green sneakers.
But I couldn’t stop looking.
She got off at the Fenwick stop, which is three stops before mine. And I got off with her. I don’t fully remember deciding to do it. I just did it.
She walked half a block and then she stopped and turned around because she could hear me behind her, and I could see she was scared, and I should have just said sorry and walked away.
Instead I said, “I’m sorry, I know this is weird, but you look exactly like my sister.”
She took a step back. Her whole body changed.
She said, “I don’t know you.”
I said, “I know. I’m sorry. She passed away. I just – I saw your shoes and I – “
And that’s when she looked at me like I was dangerous, not sad, and said, “You need to leave me alone.”
She was right. I know she was right. I turned around and walked back to the bus stop and sat on the bench and cried for twenty minutes.
I told my therapist, Gwen, and she said the behavior was understandable but that I needed to think about what I was really looking for. My brother Marcus thinks I did nothing wrong. My mom thinks I scared someone for no reason and that Dani would be mortified.
I’ve been turning it over for days. The woman was scared. I made her scared. That’s just true, no matter how much pain I was in.
But here’s the thing that’s been eating at me since I got home that night – the thing I haven’t told my therapist or Marcus or my mom.
When the woman turned around on that sidewalk, before she saw me, just for one second – She said a name.
Not into a phone. Not to anyone. Just under her breath, like she was talking to herself.
And the name she said was Dani.
What I Did With That
Nothing. I did nothing with it.
I stood there on that sidewalk while she told me to leave her alone, and I thought: did I actually hear that? Or did I want to hear it so badly that my brain manufactured it?
That’s the thing about grief. It’s not just sadness. It’s this constant low-grade hallucination where the world keeps almost giving her back to you. You see someone who walks like her and your chest does this horrible lift. You hear a laugh from the next table at a restaurant and you go completely still. Your brain is always running this background program, scanning, scanning, scanning for her, and sometimes it finds her in places she absolutely is not.
So I walked back to the bench and I sat down and I thought: I imagined it. I had to have imagined it.
I went home. I ate cereal standing over the sink because I couldn’t be bothered to sit down. I went to bed at 8:30 and stared at the ceiling until midnight.
I did not imagine it.
The Shoes
Here’s what I need you to understand about the shoes, because I think people are going to say I fixated on them for no reason.
Dani and I drove to the outlet mall in Carlisle on a Saturday in March 2017. It was her idea. She wanted new sneakers for a trip she was taking with her boyfriend at the time, some guy named Kevin who I never liked, and I tagged along because we always tagged along with each other. That was just the thing we did.
She tried on maybe eight pairs. She kept holding them up and making me weigh in and I kept saying they all looked fine and she kept saying that wasn’t helpful. And then she found these green canvas ones, this particular green that was almost army but not quite, kind of washed out, like something you’d find in a thrift store except they were new. She put them on and walked to the little mirror at the end of the aisle and looked at herself and said, “Yeah. These.”
She wore them everywhere after that. They were her errand shoes, her airport shoes, her I-don’t-care shoes. She had them on the night of the accident. I know because they told us what she was wearing and I recognized them immediately and I remember thinking, those are the shoes from the outlet mall, and then I had to sit down on the floor of the hospital hallway.
I have looked for those shoes since. Not obsessively. But I’ll notice green sneakers on strangers and I’ll look. I’ve never seen that exact color again until Tuesday.
I know it’s a coincidence. I know they’re just shoes. But my body doesn’t know that, and apparently my body is the one making decisions now.
What Marcus Said
I called Marcus the night it happened, before I’d had time to process anything, and I told him everything except the name.
He was quiet for a second and then he said, “Yeah, that sounds like something you’d do.”
He meant it kindly. He and Dani were close too, three years between them, close enough that they had their own thing separate from what Dani and I had. He gets it. He’s had his own moments. He told me once that he saw a guy at a gas station who had Dani’s exact laugh and he sat in his car for ten minutes after the guy drove away.
He said he didn’t think I was an asshole. He said I was a person in pain who made a stranger uncomfortable for thirty seconds, and that the stranger would forget about it, and that I should be gentle with myself.
I love Marcus. He is almost always wrong about things that involve me being gentle with myself.
My mom’s reaction was different. She went quiet in that specific way she goes quiet when she’s deciding whether to say the thing. Then she said it. The thing about Dani being mortified.
And the terrible part is she’s not wrong. Dani would have been mortified. Dani was private in a way I’ve never been. She hated scenes. She hated making people uncomfortable. If she’d watched me follow that woman off the bus she would have texted me seventeen question marks and then called me immediately and said, “What is WRONG with you.”
I would have laughed. She would have made me feel better about it while also being completely honest that it was a lot.
That’s the specific thing you lose when you lose someone. Not just them. The particular way they made you feel like yourself.
Six Years
People think grief gets smaller. I used to think that too, because that’s what people say. It gets smaller, you get bigger, eventually you can carry it.
What they don’t tell you is that it doesn’t shrink evenly. It’ll be totally manageable for three months and then something will happen, something stupid, like a song on the radio or finding an old grocery list in her handwriting in a jacket pocket, and it’s just as big as it was in the beginning. Not always. But sometimes. Without warning.
Six years and I still reach for my phone to text her. I still buy the brand of crackers she liked even though I don’t really like them. I still sleep on the left side of a bed even though I live alone and there’s no reason for it, except that Dani slept on the left when we were kids and I was on the right and I can’t make myself switch.
I’m not stuck. I have a job I like, friends I see, a life that functions. I’m okay most of the time.
But grief is patient. It just waits.
The Name
I have gone back and forth on whether to tell Gwen.
The logical explanation: I was in a heightened state, I was already projecting Dani onto this stranger, my brain was primed to hear that name and so it heard it. Auditory pareidolia. The same thing that makes you hear your name in a crowded room even when no one said it.
The other explanation: she said it.
And if she said it, then who is she? Someone who knew Dani? Someone who knows someone who knew Dani? The city isn’t that big. Dani had friends I never met, people from work, from the pottery class she took the last year of her life, from the running group she joined and then immediately quit.
Or it’s nothing. It’s the most likely thing. It’s nothing.
I’ve been trying to figure out if I want it to be something more than I believe it actually is something. That’s the test, right? Because wanting doesn’t count.
But I keep coming back to Tuesday night, to the specific quality of quiet on that sidewalk, to the way she said it under her breath with this weight to it, not like she was talking to herself but like she was talking to someone.
The 47 bus runs the same route every day. Millbrook stop. Fenwick stop. Green shoes.
I don’t know what I’m going to do.
I don’t know if I’m an asshole or a grieving person or both, which is maybe the only honest answer.
I know that I scared someone who didn’t deserve to be scared, and I know that I’d probably do it again, and I know that somewhere in this city there’s a woman who said my dead sister’s name to no one on a Tuesday afternoon in October, and I don’t know what to do with that except sit with it.
Which is, apparently, what grief is. Just sitting with things you can’t fix.
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If this hit somewhere real, pass it along to someone who might need to know they’re not the only one carrying something like this.
For more stories about complicated family dynamics, check out My Brother Made a Packing List for the Trip They Secretly Banned Him From or this one about when My Daughter Handed Me a Drawing. She Said, “That One’s Not Pretend.”. And for a little more drama, read about She Left the Only Disabled Kid Out of the Party. Then She Called Me the Night Before the Meeting.
