Am I a terrible person for following a stranger out of a laundromat because she looked like my dead sister?
I (33F) lost my sister Donna four years ago – car accident, black ice, February, the kind of thing that doesn’t leave a clean scar. She was 29. We were the kind of sisters who talked every single day, and then one day we just didn’t, and I’ve been walking around with that gap ever since. My friends say I’m doing better. My therapist says I’m doing better. I’m not sure either of them is looking very hard.
This was three Sundays ago. I was at the laundromat on Eckerd, the one I go to because the dryers run hot and it’s never crowded. I was folding a fitted sheet – which I still can’t do right, and Donna used to tease me about it every time she came over – when I looked up.
And I just stopped.
The woman by the far machines had Donna’s hair. Not similar to Donna’s hair. Donna’s hair. That specific dark auburn that went almost red in direct light. Same length, same way it fell across one shoulder. She was maybe 27, wearing a gray sweatshirt, not paying attention to anything except her phone.
My hands went cold.
I know it wasn’t her. I’m not having a breakdown, I’m not delusional, I KNOW. But something in my body didn’t get the message, because I stood there for I don’t know how long just watching this stranger pull clothes out of a dryer.
I didn’t say anything to her. I finished folding. I loaded my bag. I told myself to walk to my car.
I didn’t walk to my car.
I followed her out. Not close. Not in a scary way, I don’t think – I was maybe twenty feet back – but I followed her through the door and into the parking lot because some part of me needed to see her face straight on, needed to confirm that she wasn’t, that she couldn’t be, that this was just my brain playing its usual tricks.
She turned around before I got there.
She saw me. Clocked that I’d followed her out. And the look on her face – she wasn’t scared, she was just confused and a little annoyed, and she said, “Can I help you?”
And I just stood there in the parking lot, bag over my shoulder, and I said, “I’m sorry, you look exactly like my sister.”
She said, “Okay,” and kept walking.
That’s when I saw what was on the back of her sweatshirt. A name. A number. And below that, a year.
The same year Donna was born.
My friends and family are completely split on whether what I did was creepy or understandable, and honestly their opinions don’t even matter to me right now because I can’t stop thinking about that sweatshirt.
I went back to my car and I sat there and I Googled the name on it. And what came up –
What the Sweatshirt Said
The name was Kelsey Pruitt.
The number was 14. The year was 1994.
I sat in my car with my phone in both hands and I typed it in like I was defusing something. Kelsey Pruitt, 14, 1994. And the first result was a memorial page for a girls’ high school soccer team. A tribute section. A small photo and four sentences about a girl who’d been killed by a drunk driver the summer before her senior year.
1994 was the year she was born. The sweatshirt was a memorial sweatshirt. The girl I’d followed through a parking lot, the girl with Donna’s hair, was walking around wearing a dead girl’s name on her back.
I sat there for a long time.
The car got cold. I didn’t start it.
I don’t know what I was expecting to find when I Googled it. I don’t know what I thought the sweatshirt meant. But I hadn’t been prepared for that. Another dead girl. Another year on a piece of clothing like a gravestone that goes in the wash.
I thought about Donna’s friends. The ones who’d gotten her name tattooed. The one who still posts on her Facebook page on her birthday, just little things, “miss you girl,” and a picture from some trip they took in 2018. I thought about how grief makes people do strange things, like follow strangers through parking lots, like talk to Facebook profiles that will never answer back.
I drove home and I didn’t tell anyone what I’d found.
The Thing About Donna’s Hair
I should explain the hair, because it sounds like a small thing and it isn’t.
Donna’s hair was the kind of thing strangers mentioned. Not in a creepy way, just in the way people can’t help. Checkout clerks. The woman at the DMV. Our aunt Cheryl, every single Thanksgiving, “Donna, that color, I swear.” It was this deep reddish-brown that looked painted-on in certain light, like someone had decided to make a point with it.
She hated it when she was a teenager. Wanted to dye it black. Our mom practically had a heart attack.
By the time she was in her twenties she’d made peace with it. Started wearing it longer. She’d do this thing where she’d pull it over one shoulder when she was thinking, when she was reading something, when she was listening to you and actually listening, not just waiting to talk. That shoulder thing. That’s what I saw first, before I even registered the color.
That’s the thing that stopped my hands.
I’ve seen women with red hair before. I’ve seen women with auburn hair. I’ve seen women at a distance who made my chest do something for half a second before my brain caught up. But this was different. This was the shoulder thing. The specific fall of it. And my body responded before I had anything to say about it.
That’s not delusion. That’s not a breakdown. That’s just what four years of missing someone does to your nervous system. It turns you into a tuning fork for a frequency that doesn’t broadcast anymore.
What I Actually Did When I Got Home
I opened the box.
I don’t keep a lot of Donna’s stuff out. My mom has most of it – the furniture, the books, the clothes she couldn’t bring herself to donate. I have a box in my closet that I don’t open very often. Maybe four or five times in four years. It has a particular smell now, that box. Her lotion, mostly. She used the same vanilla one for years, the cheap kind from CVS, and somehow it still hasn’t gone all the way away.
I sat on my bedroom floor and I went through it slowly.
There’s a birthday card she gave me when I turned 30. She’d written a whole paragraph inside in her cramped handwriting, and it ends with “you’re my favorite person and I’ll never tell you enough.” I’ve read that line maybe a hundred times. It still does the same thing to my chest every single time.
There’s a photo from a camping trip we took in 2017. Both of us look exhausted and filthy and completely happy. Her hair is pulled back but a piece of it is coming loose and going red in the sun.
I put the photo on the floor in front of me and I just looked at it.
Not crying, exactly. Something quieter than crying. The thing that comes after you’ve already done all the crying and what’s left is just this flat, clear-eyed knowing.
She’s not coming back. I know that. I know it the way I know my own address, my own handwriting. But knowing it and being done with it are not the same country. I’m not sure they’re even on the same map.
Whether It Was Creepy
My friend Steph says yes, objectively, following someone is a thing you don’t do. She said it nicely. She said she gets it, but she said it.
My coworker Renee said she’d have done the same thing, probably worse, because she lost her brother six years ago and she said, “The brain doesn’t care about stranger danger when it thinks it sees something it needs.”
My mom, when I told her, went quiet for a while and then said, “I would have followed her too, honey.”
My therapist, when I told her, said it was a grief response and asked how I felt afterward. I said I felt stupid. She said that wasn’t what she asked.
Here’s the actual answer: I felt something I can’t fully name. Not relieved. Not worse. Something in between, like a door that you thought was locked turned out to just be stuck, and you pushed it open a crack, and you didn’t go through it, but you know now that it moves.
The woman in the parking lot probably forgot about me within an hour. She probably told her roommate or her boyfriend, “some weird lady at the laundromat followed me outside,” and they said “ugh” and that was the end of it for her. I’m okay with that. She doesn’t owe me anything. She was just a person doing her laundry.
But she was wearing Kelsey Pruitt’s name, and Kelsey Pruitt was born the same year as Donna, and both of them are gone, and the girl in the gray sweatshirt got to walk away across that parking lot while I stood there watching.
And I thought: someone made that sweatshirt. Someone ordered it. Someone who loved Kelsey Pruitt enough to put her name and her number on a piece of clothing and wear it to a laundromat on a Sunday, so that the name would keep going places. So that Kelsey would keep going places.
After
I found the memorial page again that night. There was a contact form.
I didn’t fill it out. I started to, twice. What would I even say. “Your dead friend’s sweatshirt ended up in a laundromat on Eckerd and a stranger was wearing it and I followed her into a parking lot because she had my dead sister’s hair.” That’s not a thing you send to people.
But I looked at Kelsey’s photo for a long time. She had a wide smile and she was holding a soccer ball and she looked like someone who was going to be fine. Like someone with a whole list of plans.
Donna looked like that too.
I closed the tab. I put the box back in the closet. I didn’t fold it shut all the way, which I never used to do, which maybe means something and maybe doesn’t.
Three Sundays ago. I still think about the woman in the gray sweatshirt. I don’t think about whether I was creepy. I think about Kelsey Pruitt, born 1994, number 14, gone before she got to be old enough to do her own laundry somewhere on a Sunday. I think about how grief is just love with nowhere to land. And sometimes it lands on a stranger in a parking lot who has the right hair.
That’s all it was. That’s the whole thing.
Donna would have thought it was funny, honestly. She would have said, “You followed some poor woman to her car?” and laughed until she had to put her hand on something. Then she’d have said, “That’s so you.” Then she’d have changed the subject, because she was good at that, at knowing when a thing had been felt enough.
I’m still working on that part.
—
If this one stayed with you, pass it on to someone who’d understand why.
If you’re still reeling from this story, you might find some solace (or more questions) in reading about the PTA president who called a kid a “struggle kid”, or perhaps the woman who encountered someone with her dead husband’s walk. And for a different kind of domestic drama, check out this tale of a husband’s grocery run.
