Am I a terrible person for following a stranger through a grocery store for twenty minutes because she looked like my dead sister?
I (33F) lost my sister Becca (she was 29) in a car accident fourteen months ago. We were close in the way that only sisters who shared a bedroom for eighteen years can be – she was my best friend, my person, the one I called about everything. I’m not going to pretend I’ve handled the grief well. My therapist, my mom, my husband Darren (35M) – they all say I’m still in the thick of it. I believe them.
I want to be clear that I KNOW what I did sounds unhinged.
It was a Tuesday, just a regular grocery run, nothing special. I was in the cereal aisle when I saw her – a woman, maybe late twenties, dark curly hair pulled into that specific messy bun Becca always wore, same slouchy green jacket, same way of tilting her head to read a label. My whole body just stopped.
My brain said: that is not Becca. Becca is dead.
My body did not get the message.
I followed her. Not close – I wasn’t breathing down her neck – but I stayed one aisle behind, kept finding reasons to turn down whatever row she turned down. I told myself I just needed to see her face. Just once, straight on, so I could confirm she wasn’t Becca and I could go home.
She caught me looking twice. The second time she gave me that tight smile people give when they’re deciding if they’re scared of you.
I should have stopped. I know that.
But then she reached up for something on the top shelf and her sleeve slid back, and I saw a tattoo on her left wrist – a small crescent moon – and Becca had the EXACT SAME TATTOO in the EXACT SAME SPOT. They got it together, her and her college roommate, sophomore year.
My vision went blurry. I grabbed the nearest shelf to steady myself.
The woman turned around and looked at me directly, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t explain myself, couldn’t do anything except stand there like a complete lunatic.
She said, “Are you okay?”
And I said, “You look like my sister.”
And she said, “Oh.” Just that. Then, softer: “Is she gone?”
I don’t know how she knew. I don’t know why I nodded. But then she said something that made my cart handle slip right out of my hands –
The Thing She Said
She said: “Mine too.”
Not I’m sorry. Not that must be hard. She said mine too and she said it the way you say something you don’t put down very often because it’s too heavy to carry around all day.
I stared at her.
She held up her left wrist. The crescent moon. Turned it so I could see it clearly under the fluorescent lights. “My sister and I got them when I was nineteen. She died four years ago.”
I don’t have a word for what happened to my face right then. Nothing in my body was doing what I was telling it to do. My hands were shaking. I was gripping the shelf so hard my knuckles had gone white and I didn’t even notice until later when I saw the marks.
“I’m sorry I followed you,” I said. It came out in pieces.
She shook her head. “Don’t be.”
Her name was Carrie. She was twenty-eight. She was there buying ingredients for a birthday cake she was making for her mom, who was turning sixty-three that weekend, who had not been doing well since the anniversary. She told me all of this standing next to the canned soup, neither of us moving toward the checkout, like we’d both forgotten we had anywhere else to be.
I told her about Becca. The accident. The intersection. The other driver, who walked away with a broken arm and who I have spent fourteen months trying not to think about because when I do I become a version of myself I don’t recognize.
Carrie listened. She didn’t do the thing people do where they wait for you to pause so they can say something helpful. She just listened.
What Fourteen Months Actually Looks Like
I should back up, because I think people read “fourteen months” and think that sounds like enough time. Like grief has a runway and fourteen months is somewhere past the midpoint.
It isn’t.
Fourteen months is still waking up and having four seconds of normal before you remember. It’s still picking up your phone to text her something stupid – a meme, a complaint about Darren leaving cabinet doors open, a photo of a dog you passed on the street – and getting halfway through typing her name before it hits you all over again.
Becca and I talked every single day. Sometimes it was just a voice memo, thirty seconds of her complaining about her commute or telling me about a book she was reading. I have 214 of those voice memos saved on my phone. I’ve listened to each one probably a hundred times. My therapist, Dr. Harmon, says that’s okay. She says I’ll know when I’m ready to listen to them less. I don’t know if I believe her, but I appreciate that she doesn’t push.
Darren has been patient in a way I don’t fully deserve. He knew Becca. He loved her too, in the brother-in-law way, the way where you bicker about sports teams and remember her birthday and that’s the shape of it. But he didn’t lose her the way I lost her. He comes home to me every night and he’s grieving a version of his wife who isn’t quite back yet, and he hasn’t complained once. That probably sounds sweet. It is sweet. It also makes me feel like a project.
I went back to work in February. I’m a dental hygienist. People sit in my chair and tip their heads back and I clean their teeth and we talk about the weather and their kids and their vacations, and for those forty minutes I’m just a person doing a job. It helps. It’s the only time I’m not slightly underwater.
The Aisle Before the Crescent Moon
I want to explain what those twenty minutes actually felt like, because I’ve told this story to Darren and to Dr. Harmon and they both nodded in that careful way that means they’re concerned but trying not to show it.
It wasn’t like I thought it was her. I knew it wasn’t her. Grief doesn’t make you delusional, at least not for me. My brain was completely clear on the facts.
But there’s this other thing that happens. This thing where your body just wants so badly to be wrong. Like if you could just get close enough, gather enough evidence, maybe the conclusion changes. Maybe there’s been some mistake. Maybe if you follow her to the next aisle and the next aisle and the one after that, you’ll see something that doesn’t add up, and you’ll realize you’ve been operating on bad information this whole time.
I know.
I know how that sounds.
But the green jacket was the same. Not similar. The same worn-in olive color with the zipper that was slightly off-track at the bottom, the same way of hanging off one shoulder because she’d shoved her left hand in the pocket. Becca had a jacket like that for six years. She wore it until the lining came out and then she safety-pinned the lining back in and kept wearing it.
I bought myself a green jacket three months after she died. I don’t wear it. It’s in my closet and I can’t explain why I bought it and I can’t explain why I can’t get rid of it.
When I saw this woman reach for the top shelf – and her sleeve slid back, and I saw that moon – something in my chest just gave out. Like a floor giving way. I wasn’t sad exactly. It was more like vertigo. Like the ground was somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be.
Carrie
We stood in that aisle for probably forty-five minutes. I know because my phone buzzed twice from Darren asking if I wanted him to grab anything on his way home, and I looked at it both times and put it back in my pocket without answering.
Carrie’s sister was named Pam. Pamela, technically, but nobody called her that. She was thirty-one when she died. Ovarian cancer, diagnosed late, seven months from diagnosis to the end. Carrie said the seven months felt like both forever and no time at all, which is a thing I understood immediately even though my situation was nothing like hers. The accident was sudden. There was no seven months. There was a phone call at 9 PM on a Wednesday and then the world was different.
“Which is worse?” I asked, and I felt rude the second I said it.
But Carrie just thought about it. Actually thought about it, didn’t rush to reassure me. “I don’t know,” she said. “I think about that sometimes. Whether it would have been easier to have time. But then I think – seven months of watching her. Seven months of knowing.” She shook her head. “I don’t think there’s a good version.”
I nodded.
“The tattoo,” I said. “Did you get it before or after?”
“Before. Way before. We were just kids.” She looked down at her wrist. “I used to hate it. I went through a phase where I wanted to get it covered. Something bigger, something that meant something else.” She paused. “I couldn’t do it.”
I told her about Becca’s tattoo. The college roommate, sophomore year, the two of them walking into some parlor near campus on a dare. Becca called me that night, so excited, Mom’s going to lose her mind, and she did, and it was one of those family arguments that turned into a running joke that turned into just a story we told. Part of the Becca archive.
Carrie said, “You’re going to be carrying her for a long time.”
Not it gets easier. Not she’d want you to be happy. Just: you’re going to be carrying her. Present tense. Like it’s a fact and not a problem to be solved.
I almost started crying in the soup aisle. I held it together, barely.
What I Didn’t Expect
We exchanged numbers. Her idea, not mine. She said she had a grief group she went to, not a formal thing, just four or five people who’d all lost siblings, who met at someone’s house every other Thursday and ate too much and talked or didn’t talk. She said I didn’t have to come. She said she’d send me the address in case I ever wanted to.
I drove home with the groceries. I made dinner. I told Darren what happened and he went very still the way he does when he’s trying to figure out if he should be worried, and I said I’m okay, I promise, and I think I even meant it.
That night I looked at my phone for a long time. Carrie had texted me the address. Just the address, no pressure, no follow-up message.
I looked at it for a while.
Then I looked at my photos. I have about four thousand pictures of Becca on my phone. I have the last photo I ever took of her, which is her in my kitchen making a face at me because I was trying to photograph her eating a sandwich and she hated being photographed mid-bite. She’s laughing and annoyed at the same time. Her hair is in a messy bun. She’s wearing a green jacket.
I put my phone down.
I thought about what Carrie said. You’re going to be carrying her for a long time.
And for the first time in fourteen months, that felt less like a sentence and more just like the truth.
Thursday
I went.
It was a house in a neighborhood twenty minutes from mine. A woman named Donna answered the door, fifty-something, reading glasses pushed up on her head, and she said “you must be Carrie’s friend” and handed me a glass of wine before I’d even taken my coat off.
There were five of them. Now six, with me. All of us had lost a sibling. All of us were somewhere in the middle of it. There was a guy named Pete who’d lost his brother to a fentanyl overdose two years ago and who made the darkest jokes I’ve ever heard and I laughed at every single one of them. There was a woman named Gail who cried for the first twenty minutes and then stopped and ate three pieces of cheese and seemed fine.
We didn’t fix anything. Nobody said anything that rearranged my understanding of loss or death or what comes after. We just sat in Donna’s living room and talked about people who weren’t there anymore, and for two hours I wasn’t underwater.
I texted Becca’s name into my phone on the drive home. Got halfway through typing before I caught myself.
Then I finished it. Sent it to Carrie instead.
I went. Thank you.
She sent back a crescent moon emoji.
That was it.
—
If this hit close, pass it on to someone who might need it.
For more stories about life’s complicated moments, read about how my husband left his phone on the counter and I recognized a name I wasn’t supposed to see or how my father-in-law left me something in his will, and his son called it a mistake.
