Am I a terrible person for following a stranger out of a laundromat because she looked like my dead daughter?
I (40F) lost my daughter Becca six years ago. She was nineteen. Car accident, two weeks before her sophomore year of college started, and I have not had a single day since then where I didn’t see her face somewhere – in a crowd, through a window, in a dream I can’t shake when I wake up at 3am. My therapist says this is normal. My husband Derek (44M) says I need to stop looking. My friends are split on which one of them is right.
So I was at the laundromat on Meridian, the one I’ve been going to since our washer broke in February, folding a pile of Derek’s work shirts, not thinking about anything. And then the door opened.
She had Becca’s hair. The exact color – not just brown, but that specific dark auburn that Becca had to dye back every summer because the sun kept pulling it lighter. She had Becca’s way of walking, one shoulder slightly lower than the other, like she was always about to set something down. She pulled out her phone and I could see she had the same chipped nail polish Becca used to pick at during car rides.
My body just – went.
I left Derek’s shirts on the folding table. I didn’t think about it. I walked to the window and I stood there watching her load a machine, and I kept telling myself: stop, you’re doing the thing again, this is a stranger, go back to the shirts.
She had Becca’s laugh.
I heard it when the woman at the next machine said something to her, and it came out of her – that short, surprised laugh, almost like a hiccup, and Becca used to cover her mouth when she did it and this woman did the exact same thing and I started crying in the middle of the laundromat.
She saw me.
She looked right at me, and her face did that thing – that polite, uncomfortable thing people do when a stranger is crying near them – and she gathered her stuff and left before her cycle was even done.
I followed her out to the parking lot.
I don’t know what I was going to say. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen. She turned around when she heard my footsteps and the look on her face was – I still can’t think about it – and I said, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, you just look exactly like my – “
And she said something that made me stop walking completely.
What She Said
“I know. I’ve seen your picture.”
I just stood there. The parking lot was half-empty. There was a cart with a broken wheel someone had left against the wall, and I remember staring at it while I tried to understand what she’d just told me.
She knew my face.
She said her name was Kayla. She was twenty-four. She’d gone to Briar Hills Community College for a year before transferring, and she’d known Becca – not well, she was quick to say that, not well at all, they’d had one class together, Intro to Sociology, fall semester of Becca’s freshman year. But Becca had shown her a photo once. Her mom and dad at some lake, she’d said. She’d been showing someone else on her phone and Kayla had seen it over her shoulder.
“She talked about you,” Kayla said. “Like, not a lot. We weren’t close. But she mentioned you.”
I don’t know what my face did.
Kayla looked like she was trying to decide whether to get in her car or keep talking, and I could tell she was scared of me a little, this red-eyed woman who’d chased her into a parking lot, and I wanted to tell her I wasn’t dangerous, I wasn’t crazy, I was just a mother who hadn’t figured out what to do with six years of nowhere to put it.
“What did she say?” I asked. “About me.”
Kayla shifted her laundry bag to her other shoulder. She said, “She said you used to leave notes in her lunch until she was like, way too old for that. And that you never stopped.”
The Notes
I did that. I did that from kindergarten straight through to the summer before she died, when she came home for three weeks between freshman and sophomore year and I packed her a lunch for a day trip she was taking with her friends, and I put a note in it, and she texted me from the car: mom I am NINETEEN, and I texted back: you’ll always be five to me, and she sent a string of eye-roll emojis and then a heart.
That was June. She died in August.
I’ve thought about that text exchange probably ten thousand times. I have it backed up in three places. I’m not being dramatic about that. I actually have it backed up in three places because I am terrified of losing it, terrified of a software update or a dead phone or some act of God that takes the last record of her rolling her eyes at me.
Kayla was watching me. She’d said the right thing without knowing it was the right thing, and now she was watching me cry again, in a parking lot, next to a cart with a broken wheel.
“I’m sorry,” I said, for the second time. “I’m so sorry, I don’t know why I followed you, I just – you have her laugh.”
Kayla went quiet for a second.
“People used to tell us that,” she said. “In class. That we laughed the same way. It embarrassed her.”
Of course it did. Becca hated her laugh. She thought it sounded like a goose. I used to tell her it was the best sound I knew and she’d groan and tell me I was biased and I’d say yes, obviously, that’s the whole point.
What Kayla Offered
She didn’t have to do what she did next.
She could’ve gotten in her car. She’d been polite, more than polite, she’d given me something real and she didn’t owe me anything beyond that. But she asked if I wanted to sit down somewhere. There was a diner two blocks up, she said. She had time.
I said yes before I’d finished processing the question.
We sat in a booth by the window. I had coffee I didn’t drink. She had a grilled cheese she ate half of and then pushed to the side. And she told me what she remembered about Becca, which wasn’t a lot, but it was new. New to me. Things I hadn’t heard.
That Becca had been bad at the Sociology readings but good at the discussions. That she’d had a thing about people not returning shopping carts and would say something about it out loud, to no one, every time she saw it happen. That she’d worn the same green jacket to every class and Kayla had assumed it was her lucky jacket and never asked.
I knew that jacket. Army green, from a thrift store in her first week of college, and she’d called me to tell me about it like she’d found treasure. I didn’t tell Kayla that. I just sat there and let her talk and it was like being handed a photograph I’d never seen before.
A photograph of my daughter being a person. Not my daughter. Just a person, in a classroom, with a green jacket and strong opinions about shopping carts.
I hadn’t known I needed that.
What Derek Said
I told him that night. He was already in bed, reading, and I sat on the edge of the mattress and told him the whole thing, start to finish. The laundromat, the hair, the laugh, following her out, what she said, the diner.
He put his book down.
He didn’t say anything for a while. Derek is not a man who fills silence with noise, which is mostly a good thing and sometimes the opposite of that.
Then he said, “Are you okay?”
I said I didn’t know.
He said, “You scared that girl.”
I said I knew. I said I’d apologized. He said he wasn’t criticizing, he was just stating a fact, the way Derek states facts, carefully, like he’s placing something fragile on a shelf.
“I know you can’t stop looking,” he said. “I know that. I’m not asking you to.”
That surprised me. I looked at him.
“I just want you to be careful,” he said. “With yourself.”
He picked his book back up. I sat there another minute. Outside, it was raining, the kind of thin April rain that doesn’t really commit to anything, and I could hear it against the window.
I thought about the green jacket. I thought about Becca in a classroom I’d never seen, in a building I’d never been inside, being a person I only half knew.
What I Keep Thinking About
Here’s what I can’t shake.
Kayla said Becca mentioned me. Not in some big way, not like a speech, just in passing, the way you mention things that are just true. She said her mom left notes in her lunch. She said it like it was a fact about herself, like saying she was from Ohio or that she hated mushrooms.
My therapist talks about integration. About incorporating loss. I’ve always hated that language, it sounds like a business memo about grief, but I think I maybe understand it a little better now. Not that Becca is gone. Not that I’ve accepted it. But that she existed in rooms I wasn’t in. That she was a whole person who mentioned her mother to near-strangers and carried her green jacket to class and laughed like a hiccup and covered her mouth.
And some part of that is still out there. In Kayla, who remembered. In whoever else she sat next to in whatever other class.
I’m not going to follow strangers out of parking lots again. Probably. I mean, I’d like to say definitely, but I also said that the last four times something like this happened, and I know what I’m like.
Derek knows too.
He’s still here.
The shirts, by the way. Someone had folded them for me. When I went back inside to get my laundry, Derek’s shirts were in a neat pile on the table, folded better than I do it, with the collars straight. I never found out who did it. I just picked them up and carried them out to the car and sat in the driver’s seat for a long time before I started the engine.
The rain was still doing its thin, noncommittal thing.
I thought: she said my name. Not my name, but me. She said my mom.
That’s enough. For today, that’s enough.
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If this stayed with you, pass it on to someone who might need it.
For more stories about complicated family dynamics, check out My Daughter Said She Felt Like She Wasn’t Supposed to Be There. She Was Right. and My Daughter Was in the Room When He Said It. I’ll Never Forgive Him for That.. And for another tale of family drama, read I Walked Out of My Grandmother’s Will Reading With Something in My Bag. My Family Says I Stole It..
