Am I a terrible person for following a stranger out of a building because she looked like my dead daughter?
I (40F) lost my daughter Becca four years ago. She was nineteen. Car accident, two weeks before Thanksgiving, and I have not had a single normal day since. I still go to the grief support group at the community center on Wednesdays, still see my therapist Dr. Fowler on Fridays, still take the same two pills every morning that keep me functional enough to drive and work and pretend.
I was in the waiting room at my GP’s office last Tuesday. Just a routine thing, blood pressure follow-up, nothing I was stressed about.
She walked in at 10:40.
I don’t know her name. She was maybe twenty-two, twenty-three, dark hair cut the same way Becca used to wear hers – that specific way, shorter on one side, kind of tucked behind one ear. Same jacket. Not similar. The SAME jacket, this green army surplus thing with a tear near the left pocket that Becca had sewn back up with red thread. This girl had red thread in the same spot.
My chest went tight in a way I haven’t felt since the funeral.
I told myself to stop staring. I looked at my phone. I looked at the floor. I looked back up and she was filling out paperwork and she held her pen the exact same way Becca held pens, tucked under the ring finger instead of the middle finger, which I used to tease Becca about constantly.
I didn’t say anything to her. I just watched her. For forty-five minutes I sat in that waiting room and I watched this girl like a crazy person, and when the nurse called my name I almost didn’t go.
I went in, saw the doctor, got my refill, came back out.
She was gone.
I walked out to the parking lot faster than I should have. I spotted her by a gray Honda, keys in her hand.
I know how this sounds. My friends are split – half of them say I was just grieving and it’s understandable, the other half went quiet in a way that told me everything. My therapist doesn’t know I did this yet.
I called out to her. She turned around.
And the moment I saw her face straight on, I understood something about myself that four years of therapy had not managed to teach me.
I opened my mouth. She was already looking at me with that expression – the one that says who is this woman and why is she walking toward me – and I said –
What I Actually Said
“I’m so sorry. You look exactly like my daughter.”
That’s it. That’s all that came out.
She didn’t run. She didn’t scream. She just stood there by the gray Honda with her keys in her hand and her face did something complicated, and she said, “Oh.”
We stood there in that parking lot for maybe four seconds, which is a long time when a stranger is looking at you with her dead daughter’s face.
Then she said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
And I said, “Thank you, I don’t know why I followed you, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” and I turned around and I walked to my car and I sat in the driver’s seat and I did not move for twenty-two minutes.
I know it was twenty-two minutes because I watched the clock on my dashboard the whole time. 11:17 to 11:39. I don’t know why I kept track. I just needed something to count.
The Jacket
Here is the thing about the jacket that I keep coming back to.
Becca found it at a Goodwill in September, two months before she died. She came home with it and held it up and said “Mom, look, it was three dollars, three dollars,” like she’d won something. She wore it constantly. The tear near the left pocket happened maybe three weeks in, she caught it on a nail coming out of a friend’s garage, and she sat at the kitchen table that same night with a needle and the only thread she could find, which was this specific red, and she fixed it herself because she didn’t want to wait.
I have that jacket in her closet. I have not moved it. I haven’t washed it. I go in there sometimes and I hold the sleeve and I don’t think about anything at all.
So when I saw the same jacket, the same tear, the same red thread, on a stranger in a waiting room, something in my brain just. Stopped processing correctly.
I know army surplus jackets are common. I know Goodwill has multiples of everything. I know another twenty-two-year-old girl could have bought the same jacket at a different Goodwill in a different city, torn it on a nail, and fixed it with whatever thread was nearby.
I know all of that. I knew it in the waiting room too. It didn’t matter.
What I’ve Been Carrying
The grief group on Wednesdays is run by a man named Don, who lost his son to an overdose seven years ago. Don says grief isn’t linear, which I have heard so many times it has lost all meaning, but he also says something else that I think about more. He says grief is a shape that changes but doesn’t shrink. You just build a bigger life around it.
I have not been building a bigger life.
I still work at the same insurance office I worked at when Becca was alive. I still live in the same house. I moved her furniture once, her desk six inches to the left, and then moved it back two days later because I couldn’t stand it. I eat the same things. I drive the same route. I have become, without really deciding to, a person who is very careful not to disturb anything, because if I disturb anything I might disturb the last four years, and the last four years are the only thing still connecting me to the nineteen years before them.
Dr. Fowler would have a lot to say about that. She doesn’t know about the parking lot yet.
I’ve been thinking about why I haven’t told her. I see her every Friday, I’ve seen her every Friday for three and a half years, and I have told her things I have never told another person. But I haven’t told her this.
I think it’s because telling her means explaining what I understood in that parking lot, standing there looking at a stranger’s face that was not my daughter’s face, and I’m not sure I have the words for it yet.
What I Understood
I have been waiting.
Not in any way I could have articulated before Tuesday, not in any way I would have admitted to. But standing there looking at that girl’s face, watching it rearrange itself into someone completely different from Becca, someone with different eyes and a wider jaw and a small scar through one eyebrow that Becca never had, I felt something crack open.
I had been waiting for Becca to come back.
Not in a clinical, delusional way. I’m not unwell in that direction, I know she’s dead, I sat in the front row at her funeral and I watched them put her in the ground and I have never once believed she wasn’t in that ground. But underneath all of it, underneath the therapy and the pills and the Wednesday group and the four years of functional pretending, some part of me had been treating every day like a waiting room. Just sitting there. Watching the door. In case.
The jacket made that part of me think the door was opening.
And when I saw the stranger’s face and the door didn’t open, when it just stayed closed, that part of me understood for the first time that it was never going to.
Four years. It took me four years and a Goodwill jacket to actually understand that Becca is dead.
I sat in my car for twenty-two minutes and I cried in a way I haven’t cried since the week she died. Not the quiet kind I do in the shower sometimes. The ugly kind. The kind that makes sounds.
After
I drove home. I sat on the couch. I didn’t eat anything until about 7pm when I had crackers and peanut butter because that was the only thing that seemed manageable.
I called my friend Patrice, who was one of the ones who went quiet when I told her about the parking lot. She answered on the second ring and I said, “I need to tell you what I figured out,” and she said “okay” and I talked for probably an hour.
Patrice lost her mother two years ago. Not the same thing, not even close, but she’s sat with enough of my grief that she knows where to be quiet and where to push back a little. She said, “You’ve known she was gone. You just didn’t know you were still expecting her.”
That’s probably the most useful sentence anyone has said to me in four years.
I’m going to tell Dr. Fowler on Friday. I’ve been rehearsing it, which is a thing I sometimes do before hard sessions, just going over the words in my head so they don’t fall apart when I try to say them out loud. I’m going to tell her about the waiting room and the jacket and the red thread and the parking lot. I’m going to tell her what cracked open.
I don’t know what comes after that. I genuinely don’t.
But I’ve been thinking about the stranger. I hope she’s okay. I hope she went home and told someone, “the weirdest thing happened to me today,” and laughed about it. I hope I was just a strange five-second story she got to tell.
I hope the jacket keeps her warm.
Am I a Terrible Person
That’s the question I started with, so.
No. I don’t think I’m a terrible person. I think I’m a person who has been sitting in a waiting room for four years and briefly, desperately, believed the door was opening.
I think I scared a stranger in a parking lot, and I’m sorry for that, and I hope she’s forgotten me already.
I think I have a phone call to make to Dr. Fowler before Friday, actually. I don’t think I can wait until Friday.
Becca would have thought this whole thing was both tragic and a little bit funny. She had that kind of brain. She could hold both things at once. She used to say, “Mom, you’re being dramatic,” and then hug me like she meant it.
I’m going to go sit in her room for a while.
Not to wait. Just to sit.
—
If this hit somewhere familiar, pass it along. Someone else might need to read it today.
If you’re looking for more emotional stories, perhaps you’d like to read about my best friend who left me something to open at her own will reading or when my stepdaughter grabbed my sleeve, and I made a call I can’t take back.
