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 Donna four years ago – car accident, black ice, November, she was 29. We were eleven months apart. People used to think we were twins. I have not had a single therapy session since the funeral because every time I book one I cancel it, and my friends are split on whether I’m “processing in my own way” or completely falling apart in slow motion.
So I’m at the Kroger on a Tuesday afternoon, grabbing stuff for dinner, not thinking about anything, and I turn down the cereal aisle and I just – stop.
There’s a woman about halfway down the aisle, late twenties, dark hair pulled back in this messy clip Donna wore constantly, and she’s reading the back of a granola box with her head tilted at this specific angle.
My cart stopped moving.
She had Donna’s shoulders. Donna’s way of standing with her weight on one hip. I know how that sounds. I know.
I told myself I was going to grab the oatmeal and leave. I didn’t leave. I followed her to the dairy section. Then to the bread aisle. I stayed maybe fifteen feet back and I just – watched her. Watched her pick things up and put them down. Watched her check her phone. She laughed once at something on the screen and I had to put my hand on a shelf to stay standing because the sound wasn’t right, it wasn’t Donna’s laugh, and something about that was worse than if it had been.
I was in that store for forty minutes. I bought nothing. I just followed this stranger around like a ghost.
She finally stopped in the frozen foods section and turned around and looked right at me.
Not at me – past me, reaching for something. But I saw her face straight on for the first time.
And I don’t know what I expected. I don’t know what I was hoping for.
My hands started shaking. Not because of what I saw – but because of what I felt standing there, and what it meant, and what it says about me that I had been following this woman for twenty minutes like she owed me something she didn’t even know existed.
She looked at me. Directly at me this time. And she opened her mouth to say something.
What She Said
“Do you need to get in here?”
She was gesturing at the freezer case. I was standing directly in front of it. Had been for probably a full thirty seconds, cart sideways, blocking the whole section, just staring at her face.
I said, “Sorry.” Moved the cart. She grabbed a bag of frozen edamame and walked away.
That was it. That was the whole thing.
She didn’t know. Of course she didn’t know. She was just a woman buying edamame on a Tuesday and some stranger had been orbiting her for forty minutes like a sad, broken satellite.
I stood in the frozen foods aisle for another minute or two after she left. The cold was coming through the glass doors and I could feel it on my shins. I thought about how Donna hated being cold. How she’d layer two sweaters in October, before it was even necessary. How she had this one green fleece she wore until it had a hole in the elbow and she wore it anyway.
I left without buying anything. Sat in my car for a while.
Eleven Months
People don’t really understand what eleven months means until you’ve lived it.
It means you were both in diapers at the same time for a stretch. It means you were in the same grade for one year because of where the birthday cutoffs fell, and your mom had to go in and fight with the school about it. It means your whole childhood, someone was always there, physically there, in the next room, at the breakfast table, in the backseat.
Donna was the one who got the dark hair. I got the lighter brown, the kind that looks dishwater blonde in summer. She got the cheekbones. I got the nose. She got our dad’s laugh, this loud, sudden thing that made people turn around in restaurants. I got our mom’s laugh, quieter, more of a wheeze.
We fought constantly from ages thirteen to eighteen. Vicious stuff, the kind only sisters can manage, the kind where you know exactly which words will do the most damage and you use them. Then we turned into adults and it was like the fighting never happened. We talked on the phone three or four times a week. We sent each other stupid videos. She’d text me photos of bad restaurant menus just to mock the font choices.
The last text she sent me was a picture of a sign outside a car wash that said TUESDAYS ARE HOLE DAYS with a cartoon donut. She sent it with no caption. She didn’t need one. I knew exactly what she meant.
That was two days before November.
What Grief Actually Looks Like, From the Inside
Here’s the thing nobody tells you: it doesn’t stay sharp.
The first year, it’s sharp. Everything is sharp. You wake up and for half a second you forget and then you remember and it’s like a physical impact, every single morning. You get through that year, barely.
Then it gets duller. And people around you think that means you’re better. They stop checking in. They stop saying her name. They move on, the way living people are supposed to, and you don’t blame them for it. You just start carrying it alone.
By year four, it doesn’t feel like grief anymore. It feels like a fact. Donna is dead the same way Tuesday is a weekday. The same way your nose is on your face. It’s just a condition of the world you live in now.
And then you’re standing in a Kroger and a stranger tilts her head at a granola box and the fact becomes a wound again, just like that. Zero warning. Full depth.
I didn’t follow that woman because I thought she was Donna. I’m not delusional. I know Donna is in a cemetery in Akron. I know she’s not buying groceries.
I followed her because she was the closest thing to Donna that I had encountered in four years, and some part of me that doesn’t respond to reason just needed five more minutes. Then five more. Then five more.
The Cancelled Appointments
I’ve booked eight therapy appointments since the funeral. I’ve cancelled all eight.
The reasons I tell myself: too busy, wrong time, that particular therapist had bad reviews, I was having a good week and didn’t need it, I was having a bad week and couldn’t face it.
The actual reason: I don’t want to process it. Processing implies finishing. Finishing implies it’s over. And Donna is not a project I want to complete.
I know how that sounds too.
My friend Karen, who is a social worker and therefore cannot turn off the professional brain, told me once that grief avoidance often looks like functioning. You go to work. You buy groceries. You answer texts. You seem fine. And underneath the seeming-fine is this enormous thing you’ve been carrying in a box with the lid held down by both hands, and every cancelled appointment is just you pressing a little harder on the lid.
She said this over dinner, not as an intervention, just as a thing she was observing. Then she asked if I wanted to split the tiramisu.
I said yes. I pressed harder on the lid. I ate the tiramisu.
What My Friends Think
The ones who think I’m processing fine: they point out that I have a job, an apartment, a social life. I exercise sometimes. I don’t drink more than is socially acceptable. I show up.
The ones who think I’m falling apart: they’ve noticed that I don’t talk about Donna. Not past a certain surface level. They’ve noticed that I change the subject when November comes around. One of them, my friend Beth, told me I went “somewhere else” at her wedding when the DJ played a song that Donna used to love, and I came back thirty seconds later and pretended it hadn’t happened.
I don’t remember doing that. Which is maybe the point.
I think they’re both right. I think I am functioning and falling apart at the same time, and those things are not mutually exclusive, and I’ve been managing the ratio for four years and mostly keeping it stable.
The Kroger thing threw off the ratio.
What I’ve Been Thinking About Since
The woman’s name was probably something like Jess or Sarah or Megan. She has no idea I exist. She went home, made dinner, probably didn’t think twice about the weird woman blocking the freezer case.
I keep thinking about the laugh. How it wasn’t Donna’s. How that was the moment my hands started shaking, not the resemblance but the difference. Because the resemblance let me pretend, for a few minutes, in the blurry peripheral way of pretending you do when you know you’re doing it but you do it anyway. And the laugh ended the pretending.
Donna’s laugh started loud and got quieter. Like it peaked too fast and then tapered off into this surprised little exhale, like she was always slightly caught off guard by her own amusement.
I haven’t thought about the specific mechanics of her laugh in a long time. I didn’t know I still had that. I didn’t know it was still in there, that detailed.
So I guess I’m grateful to the woman in the Kroger, in a way she will never know and would probably find alarming.
I drove home and sat in my parking lot for a while. I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t do anything dramatic. I just sat there with the thing I’d been keeping in the box, and for once I didn’t press the lid down.
I let it be open for a few minutes.
Then I went inside and ordered a pizza and watched three episodes of a show I’ve already seen and went to bed.
I have not booked a therapy appointment.
But I’ve been thinking about it.
That’s probably not nothing.
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If this hit close to home, pass it on to someone who might need to feel a little less alone in what they’re carrying.
If you’re still in the mood for some intense personal dilemmas, you might find yourself engrossed in the story of a wife’s suspicious “conference” photo or perhaps another tale of mistaken identity where a stranger reminded someone of a lost sister, this time at a laundromat. For a different kind of confrontation, check out how one parent handled a PTA president’s harsh words about their son.
