I (45M) lost my daughter Becca four years ago. She was nineteen. Car accident on Route 9 during a February ice storm, eleven-thirty at night, nobody else involved. My wife Diane and I had been separated for two years by then, so I was the one who drove to the hospital alone, and I was the one who drove home alone, and I’ve been alone in most of the ways that count ever since.
I still go to Garfield Park most mornings. Becca and I used to walk there on weekends when she was little. I know it sounds like punishment but it doesn’t feel that way. It just feels like the one place I still know how to be.
Last Thursday I was on the east path, the one that runs along the creek, and I saw a young woman about fifty yards ahead of me.
Same height as Becca. Same dark hair pulled up the same way Becca used to pull it up. Same walk – that slight lean forward, like she was always about to break into a run.
My feet stopped.
Then they started moving again, faster than before.
I told myself I just wanted to see her face. That’s all. One look, and I’d know, and I’d stop, and everything would be fine. I know how that sounds. I’m not an idiot. I knew it wasn’t her. I KNEW.
But I kept walking faster.
She turned left toward the pond. I turned left. She stopped to look at something on her phone. I slowed down. I was maybe thirty feet back at that point. Close enough that I could see the small tattoo on her left shoulder, which Becca didn’t have, which should have been enough.
It wasn’t enough.
She started moving again and I started moving again and at some point she looked back over her shoulder and saw me and her whole body changed – shoulders up, pace faster, hand going for her pocket.
She knew.
I stopped walking. I stood there on the path like an idiot while she put real distance between us, and eventually she was gone and it was just me and the creek and the sound of it going wherever it goes.
I told my brother Derek about it that night. He said it was grief and I wasn’t in my right mind and he wasn’t judging me. My friend Paul said I was lucky she didn’t call the cops. My therapist, when I told her, got very quiet for a second and then said something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
She said, “Tell me – what were you going to do if she had turned around and looked at you?”
And I opened my mouth. And I – ## The Answer I Didn’t Have
I didn’t have one.
I sat in my therapist Karen’s office, which smells like old carpet and the lavender plug-in she keeps near the window, and I had nothing. My mouth was open and my brain was just static.
I’d followed that woman thirty feet down a park path and I had not once thought past the moment of seeing her face. There was no plan. There was no version of events I’d constructed where I introduced myself, or apologized, or explained. There was just the wanting. The forward momentum of it. Like my legs had made a decision my head wasn’t consulted on.
Karen didn’t fill the silence. She’s good at that. Most people aren’t.
I finally said, “I don’t know.”
She nodded like that was the right answer. Maybe it was.
I drove home thinking about it. Forty minutes on the highway, and I kept coming back to the same place: I wouldn’t have done anything. I would have seen her face, seen that it wasn’t Becca, and stood there feeling like an idiot. Same as I did anyway. I just would have been thirty feet closer to her when it happened.
That’s what I told myself.
I’m not sure I believe it.
What Becca Actually Looked Like
She had Diane’s eyes. That’s the thing people always said first. Dark brown, almost black, the kind that look different depending on what she was wearing. She had my mother’s nose, which she hated from about age thirteen onwards, and I always wanted to tell her she’d grow into it, and I never said it enough, and now I think about it probably more than I should.
The walk was entirely her own. She’d had it since she was maybe seven. This forward lean, like gravity was working slightly harder on her than on everyone else, like she was always just about to tip over into a run. I used to tease her about it. I called it her “charging walk.” She called it efficient.
She had this laugh that started quiet and then got away from her. You’d tell a mediocre joke and she’d do a polite small smile, and then thirty seconds later the laugh would show up, like it had to travel some distance to get there. Diane has the same laugh. I don’t know if she knows that.
The woman in the park had the walk. That’s what got me. Not just the hair or the height. The lean. The specific angle of it.
I know there are other people in the world who walk that way. I know that. It’s not a rare walk. It’s just a walk.
But I hadn’t seen it since February four years ago and then suddenly there it was, forty yards ahead of me on the east path, and my body just went.
What Derek Said vs. What Paul Said
Derek is fifty-one. He’s the kind of older brother who never makes you feel like he’s older. He drove forty minutes to sit with me the night I got the call about Becca. He didn’t say anything useful. He just sat there, which was the right thing.
When I told him about the park, he was quiet for a few seconds and then said, “You’re not crazy, you’re just wrecked.” He said grief does things to the body that the brain doesn’t sign off on first. He said he didn’t think I was a bad person.
I appreciated that. I also knew he was being kind in a way that wasn’t entirely honest.
Paul is different. Paul says the true thing even when it costs him. We’ve been friends since we were both broke and twenty-six and working the same warehouse job, and he has never once softened something to make me feel better. I love that about him and it also makes him hard to call sometimes.
He said, “You scared that girl.”
Just like that. No warm-up.
“You scared her. She didn’t know you were grieving. She just saw a man following her. That’s what happened.”
I said I knew that.
He said, “Okay. Then you know you can’t do it again.”
I said I knew that too.
He said, “Good,” and then asked if I wanted to come over Sunday for the game, and that was that. The whole conversation was maybe four minutes. Paul doesn’t linger.
Both of them were right, is the thing. Derek was right that I wasn’t in my right mind. Paul was right that it didn’t matter.
The Tattoo
I keep coming back to the tattoo.
Small thing, left shoulder blade. I only caught a glimpse but it looked like a bird in flight, or maybe just a shape, I couldn’t tell. Becca didn’t have any tattoos. She’d talked about getting one once, sophomore year of college, something about a constellation she liked. I don’t remember which one. I should remember which one and I don’t.
So I saw the tattoo. I registered: Becca didn’t have that. And I kept walking.
That’s the part that’s hard to explain. Because it wasn’t like I forgot. I didn’t think the tattoo wasn’t there. I saw it, processed it, filed it under “not Becca,” and then my feet kept moving anyway.
Like the information went in but it didn’t go anywhere useful. It just sat there while the rest of me kept doing what it was doing.
Karen said something about this. She said grief can make the brain do a thing where it holds two contradictory facts at the same time without resolving them. You know something and you also don’t know it yet. The knowing and the accepting are different steps, and sometimes they’re very far apart.
I think that’s true. I also think it sounds a little too clean for what actually happened, which was a 45-year-old man following a stranger through a park because he missed his kid.
The East Path
I’ve been going to Garfield Park for eleven years. Started when Becca was eight and we had this phase where we both liked getting up early on Saturdays, before Diane was awake, before the day had any obligations in it. We’d drive over and walk the east path and she’d tell me about whatever book she was reading, or about her friends, or about nothing in particular.
She liked the part where the path dips close to the creek. There’s a spot where a big oak has grown out over the water at an angle, and she used to walk out on it a few feet and balance there. Every time. It was a ritual.
I still walk past that tree. I don’t stop at it, I just walk past it, and I don’t look at it directly, but I know exactly where it is and I always know when I’m about to pass it and I always know when it’s behind me again.
I don’t know what I’m doing when I go there. I genuinely don’t know if it’s good for me or not good for me. Karen thinks it might be both simultaneously, which again sounds very clean and therapeutic, but she might be right.
What I know is that it’s the only place I’ve been able to breathe right since February four years ago. So I keep going.
Last Friday I went back. The day after I told Karen about it. I walked the east path again, the same route, past the spot where I first saw the woman, left at the fork toward the pond.
There was nobody there who looked like Becca.
I walked the whole path and then I sat on the bench near the oak tree and I looked at the creek for a while. The water was moving fast because it had rained two nights before.
I thought about the question Karen asked. What would I have done if she’d turned around?
I still don’t have a clean answer. But I think the real answer, the one I didn’t want to say out loud in Karen’s office, is this: I wanted her to turn around so I could see that it wasn’t Becca. Not because I thought it was. But because I needed to see a young woman’s face that wasn’t her face, and feel that specific grief, the real shape of it, instead of the shapeless version I carry around every day.
I wanted to grieve correctly, for one second. In the right direction. With something in front of me to grieve at.
That’s still not an excuse for scaring someone. Paul’s right. It’s not an excuse.
But that’s what was happening.
What I’d Say to Her
I’ve thought about this too. The woman. I don’t know her name. I don’t know anything about her except that she walks like Becca and she has a small tattoo on her left shoulder and she was smart enough to know when something was wrong and to put distance between herself and the thing that was wrong.
If I could say something to her I’d say: I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t fix what it felt like. I know from where you were standing I was just a man following you, and that’s a frightening thing to be on the receiving end of, and you didn’t deserve it, and it wasn’t about you.
I’d also say: thank you, in a strange way I can’t fully explain. Because seeing her shoulders go up, seeing her hand go for her pocket, seeing her walk faster – that snapped something back into place. It made me see myself from outside myself for a second. A man, alone on a path, moving toward a woman who hadn’t asked for his company.
That’s not who I want to be.
I don’t think I’m an asshole. I think I’m a man who is still, four years later, not done being broken by something. I think those two things can both be true.
But I won’t do it again.
I go back to the park. I walk the east path. I pass the oak tree.
And when I see someone who looks like her, I stop walking.
I let them go.
—
If this one stayed with you, pass it on to someone who gets it.
For more tales of grappling with loss, read about a father’s unexpected inheritance in “My Dad Left Me His Old Truck. I Had a Folder.”, or explore another similar experience in “I Followed a Stranger Off a Bus Because She Had My Dead Daughter’s Hair”. You might also find something relatable in “My Husband Told Me Three Times Not to Come to His Work Dinner”.
