Am I a terrible person for following a stranger out of a laundromat and demanding to know who she was?
I (40F) lost my daughter Caitlin four years ago. She was nineteen. Car accident on a Tuesday in November, and there is not a single day that passes where I don’t think about her face. My husband Dennis (44M) thinks I’ve been doing better. My therapist thinks I’ve been doing better. I tell them both what they need to hear.
Last Thursday I was at the laundromat on Mercer Street because our dryer’s been broken for two weeks and Dennis keeps saying he’ll fix it and he hasn’t.
I was folding a fitted sheet, which I hate, and I looked up.
She was standing at the machine in the far corner. Dark hair pulled back the same way Caitlin always wore it. Same way she wore it in the last photo I have of her, the one from her roommate’s birthday party three weeks before she died. This girl was maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. She had Caitlin’s exact way of standing – one hip out, shoulders slightly forward, head tilted down toward her phone.
My body just stopped.
I stood there for I don’t know how long holding that stupid sheet while this girl moved her laundry from the washer to the dryer and didn’t notice me at all.
I told myself to stop. I told myself this was a young woman just doing her laundry and I was a forty-year-old grieving mother and I needed to fold my clothes and go home.
She put her stuff in the dryer, set the timer, and walked out the front door.
I left everything. Wet clothes still in the machine. My purse on the folding table. I just walked out after her.
She was about half a block ahead of me on the sidewalk and I called out – I said, “Excuse me. Hey. EXCUSE ME” – and she turned around.
And when she turned around I saw her face and I just – something in my chest cracked open in a way I can’t describe.
She looked at me like I was crazy. Maybe I was. I walked right up to her and I said, “I’m so sorry, I know this is going to sound insane, but you look exactly like someone I lost and I just – I needed to see your face.”
She took a step back. She had her keys out between her fingers.
I started to cry. Just standing there on the sidewalk in front of this stranger, ugly crying, and she was staring at me and I could see her deciding whether to run.
And then her expression changed.
She said, “Wait.” Her voice went quiet. “What was her name?”
My whole family thinks I’m wrong for what I said next. But I have to know if they’re right, because what this girl told me after that –
What She Told Me
I said, “Caitlin.”
The girl’s face did something I don’t have a word for. Not recognition exactly. More like she’d been bracing for something and then the thing she’d been bracing for actually arrived.
She said, “Caitlin Marsh?”
I don’t know what sound I made. Something came out of me that wasn’t language.
Because yes. Caitlin Marsh. My daughter. My daughter who has been dead for four years and whose name I have not heard spoken by a stranger in a very long time, because the world moved on even though I didn’t.
This girl – her name was Becca, I’d find out a few minutes later, Becca Doyle, twenty-three years old – she put her keys in her pocket and she said, “I went to Whitmore with her. We weren’t close, but I knew her. Everyone knew Caitlin.”
We stood there on the sidewalk for I don’t know how long. Cars going by. Someone’s dog pulling at a leash across the street. Normal Tuesday-afternoon world just continuing to exist.
I asked her how she knew. How she recognized the name.
She said, “Because people talked about her after. And because I’ve thought about her. About that night.”
That Night
I need to back up.
The accident happened on Route 9 heading north, just past the Sunoco station near the Whitmore campus exit. A Tuesday. 11:40 at night. Caitlin had been at a study session at the library and she was driving back to her apartment. The other driver ran a red light doing sixty in a thirty-five. He walked away. Caitlin did not.
What I knew: she’d been alone in the car. What I knew: it was fast. What the police told us: she wouldn’t have felt anything.
What I did not know, what I have been living without for four years, was this:
Becca had been at that same library that night.
She’d seen Caitlin leaving. They’d exchanged about four words, something about the parking lot, something about the cold. Becca had her car. Caitlin was parked in the other lot, the far one. Becca had almost offered her a ride. Had thought about it. Had decided against it because they didn’t really know each other and it would have been awkward.
She’d thought about that decision every day since.
She told me this standing on a sidewalk on Mercer Street, this girl I’d chased out of a laundromat, and her voice was steady but her hands were not.
The Part My Family Thinks Was Wrong
I hugged her.
That’s what they think was wrong. My sister Karen says I put that girl in an impossible position. That she was probably terrified of me already, that I’d followed her down the street and then cornered her with the worst possible information, and then I grabbed her. Dennis didn’t say much but I could see it on his face – that look he gets when he thinks I’m making something harder for myself than it needs to be.
My therapist, when I told her, was very careful. Very measured. She said something about how grief can make us reach for things, and that it’s worth examining what I was hoping to find.
What I was hoping to find.
I don’t know. I don’t know what I was hoping to find when I followed Becca down that sidewalk. I wasn’t thinking. My body was moving and my brain was somewhere behind it trying to catch up.
But here’s what I know about that hug.
Becca hugged me back. Hard. She held on.
She cried too. This girl who’d been carrying around a quiet version of this thing for four years, this almost-offered ride, this small moment that she’d turned into a splinter in herself. She cried and I cried and we were two strangers on a sidewalk and it was ugly and ridiculous and it lasted maybe thirty seconds.
Then we both kind of stepped back and wiped our faces and she laughed a little, this short broken laugh, and I laughed too because what else do you do.
What She Said Before We Went Our Separate Ways
We walked back to the laundromat together. My purse was still on the folding table, untouched. My wet clothes were still in the machine.
Becca’s dryer still had twenty minutes on it.
We sat on the plastic chairs by the window and she told me things about Caitlin. Small things. The kind of things I never get anymore because everyone who knew her has moved on and they don’t want to bring her up around me because they think it’ll hurt me.
It does hurt. That’s not the point.
She told me Caitlin used to bring coffee to study sessions and always made extra for whoever was around. She told me Caitlin had a laugh that was too loud for the library and she never seemed embarrassed about it. She told me Caitlin once spent forty-five minutes helping a freshman figure out the library’s interlibrary loan system when she had an exam the next morning.
I knew all of this. I knew it in my bones, the way you know things about your own kid. But hearing it from someone else’s mouth, someone who had no reason to tell me anything flattering, someone who was just reporting what she remembered –
I put my hand on the folding table and kept it there.
Becca’s dryer buzzed.
She got up and got her clothes out, and she folded them, and I finished folding my fitted sheet. We didn’t talk much after that. There wasn’t much left to say that wouldn’t have ruined it.
At the door she stopped and she said, “I’m glad you followed me.”
Then she said, “I’m sorry I didn’t give her a ride.”
I didn’t know what to tell her. I still don’t. There’s nothing to tell her. She was twenty years old making a split-second decision about whether to offer a ride to someone she barely knew. The world is full of those moments and they don’t mean anything until they do, and then they mean everything, and that is not her fault.
I said, “It wasn’t your fault.”
She nodded like she’d heard it before and didn’t quite believe it yet. I know that nod.
Am I Wrong
Here’s where I’m at with my family’s reaction.
I think they’re worried about me. I think when they see me chase a stranger down a street and cry on her and then come home with this whole story, they hear instability. They hear a woman who is not doing as well as she’s been claiming. And they’re probably right about that last part.
But I don’t think I did anything wrong.
Becca was scared for about ninety seconds. Then she wasn’t. She made her own choice to stay and talk. She’s an adult. She had her keys between her fingers and she could have walked away and I would not have followed her further, I know that about myself.
Instead she asked me Caitlin’s name.
She was carrying something too. She’d been carrying it alone. And maybe that sidewalk conversation didn’t fix it, probably it didn’t, but she hugged me back and she said she was glad I followed her and I’m going to believe her.
My therapist says I should think about what I was looking for.
I think I was looking for someone who remembered my daughter as a person, not as a tragedy. Someone who knew the too-loud laugh. Someone who knew about the extra coffee.
I found that. I found it in the last place I expected, from a girl who looked like a ghost and turned out to be just a person with her own quiet grief, and I don’t know what to do with any of it except that I’m grateful I looked up from that fitted sheet.
Dennis still hasn’t fixed the dryer.
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For more intense stories from the fringes of human emotion, check out these pieces about standing up and walking out of a school awards ceremony or carrying a letter for fourteen months, and this one about following a stranger through a park.
