Am I a terrible person for following a stranger through a park because she looked like my dead daughter?
I (38F) lost my daughter Mia four years ago. She was nine. I won’t go into the details because that’s not what this is about, but I will say that grief does things to you that you cannot explain to someone who hasn’t lived it. My therapist, Dr. Okafor, has been working with me on what she calls “intrusive attachment” – basically my brain latching onto things that remind me of Mia and refusing to let go. I thought I was getting better. I really did.
My friends are split on whether what I did was wrong. Half of them say I need to stop being so hard on myself. The other half went quiet when I told them, which honestly scared me more than if they’d just said it outright.
So here’s what happened.
Last Saturday I was in Riverside Park doing my usual morning walk, headphones in, minding my own business. There’s a section near the fountain where the path curves and the light comes through the trees in the morning, and it was there that I saw her.
A little girl. Maybe eight or nine. Dark curly hair, that specific shade of reddish-brown that Mia had, the kind you almost never see. She was wearing a yellow raincoat even though it wasn’t raining. Mia used to do that. She loved that yellow raincoat.
My legs stopped moving on their own.
I know it wasn’t her. I’m not delusional. I know my daughter is gone. But something in my body just – broke open. And instead of turning around and going home like a normal person, I started walking in the same direction she was walking.
I told myself I just wanted to see her face. Just once. Just to confirm it wasn’t – I don’t even know. I don’t know what I was confirming.
I followed her for maybe four minutes. Past the fountain, past the dog run, down toward the lower path. I kept a distance. I didn’t call out to her or approach her or do anything that I would call threatening. But I was FOLLOWING A CHILD through a park and I knew it and I kept doing it anyway.
That’s when her mother noticed me.
She was maybe thirty feet ahead and she turned around – probably just to check on her daughter – and she saw me. And I don’t know what my face looked like but whatever it was, it scared her. She grabbed the little girl’s hand and pulled her close and stared at me.
I stopped walking.
We just looked at each other.
And then she said something to her daughter, something I couldn’t hear, and started walking toward me instead of away.
What My Face Must Have Looked Like
I want to try to describe the four seconds between her turning around and her starting to walk toward me, because I think that’s where everything happened.
She was maybe my age. Black hair pulled back, jogging clothes, one of those hydration packs strapped to her back like she’d been running before her daughter caught up with her. She looked at me the way you look at something you’re trying to classify fast. Threat or not a threat. Calculating.
And I just stood there.
I wasn’t reaching for her kid. I wasn’t saying anything. I was just standing on a path in a park with my headphones around my neck, frozen, probably with an expression on my face that no sane person should be wearing while looking at a child they’ve never met.
I’ve thought about what I must have looked like from where she was standing. A woman. Alone. Staring. Following.
There’s no version of that which looks okay.
When she started walking toward me I actually took a step back. My brain finally kicked in and it said: run. Not because I was afraid of her. Because I was suddenly, completely, horribly aware of what I’d been doing.
But my feet didn’t move. And she kept coming.
She Walked Right Up to Me
She stopped about six feet away. The little girl was behind her now, half-hidden, peeking around her mother’s hip. Dark curly hair. Yellow raincoat.
Up close she didn’t look that much like Mia. The shape of her face was different. Her eyes were lighter. She was maybe a year younger than Mia was.
The mother looked at me for a second before she said anything.
“Are you okay?”
Not what are you doing. Not why were you following us. Are you okay.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. Then I started crying, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes a stranger feel better about approaching you in a park. Real helpful. Very normal.
She didn’t back away. She said, “Okay. Take a breath.”
I did. Sort of.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry. She looks like my daughter. I know that’s not – I know how that sounds. I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to scare you.”
The mother was quiet for a moment. I couldn’t read her face. I was still crying, which I hated, because there’s a version of crying that looks like remorse and a version that looks like manipulation and I genuinely could not tell which one I was doing.
Then she said, “How old?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Your daughter. How old is she?”
And there it was. Present tense. The question every parent asks. And I had to do the thing I’ve had to do four hundred times in four years, which is correct it.
“She was nine. She died four years ago.”
The Thing She Did Next
The mother put her hand over her mouth.
Just for a second. Then she dropped it.
She turned around and said something to her daughter – I caught the words go look at the ducks, and there were ducks, there’s a little pond off the lower path, and the girl ran toward them without question the way kids do when they’re given permission to go somewhere interesting.
Then she turned back to me.
“I’m Donna,” she said.
I told her my name. She didn’t shake my hand. She just nodded, like we were past handshakes.
“What was her name?”
“Mia.”
She nodded again. “I’m sorry about Mia.”
I said thank you. I’ve gotten better at saying thank you instead of doing the whole oh it’s fine deflection. Dr. Okafor worked on that with me for about six months.
We stood there for a minute. Her daughter was crouched at the edge of the pond, pointing at something. Donna kept one eye on her the whole time, this automatic thing, the way you track your kid without thinking about it. I used to do that. I remember doing that.
“I should have turned around,” I said. “I knew what I was doing was wrong and I kept going anyway. I’m sorry. I really am.”
“You scared me,” she said. Flat. Not mean about it, just true.
“I know.”
“If I’d looked back and you’d been any closer I would have called someone.”
“You should have. That would have been the right call.”
She looked at me. “Are you in therapy?”
I almost laughed. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”
“Good.” She said it like she meant it.
What I’ve Been Sitting With Since
I’ve replayed that conversation maybe fifty times since Saturday.
Not because it ended badly. It didn’t. Donna and I stood there for another few minutes. She told me her daughter’s name is Rosie. She’s eight. She said Rosie has been wearing that yellow raincoat since March because she saw some cartoon character wearing one and decided that was her whole personality now. She said it like a complaint but she was almost smiling.
I told her about Mia’s raincoat. Same thing, basically. Mia had seen some movie, I can’t even remember which one, and after that it was the yellow raincoat or nothing.
Donna said, “Kids pick the weirdest things to be obsessed with.”
“They really do,” I said.
And then Rosie yelled something from the pond and Donna said she had to go, and I said of course, and she looked at me one more time and said, “Take care of yourself.” Not the throwaway version. The version where someone means it.
She walked toward her daughter. I walked back toward the fountain.
That should be the end of the story. And in a lot of ways it is.
But here’s what I haven’t been able to shake.
The Part I Haven’t Told My Therapist Yet
I have an appointment with Dr. Okafor on Thursday. I’m going to tell her all of this. I know I have to.
But there’s a piece of it I’ve been holding back from everyone, including myself, and I think the reason I posted this is because I need to say it somewhere before I can figure out how to say it out loud.
When Donna walked toward me instead of away, something happened in my chest that I don’t have a clean word for. It wasn’t relief. It wasn’t shame, though there was plenty of that. It was something else.
I think it was that she treated me like a person who was suffering instead of a person who was dangerous. And I’m not sure I deserved that. I’m not sure I would have done the same thing if our positions were reversed. I think I would have called someone. I think I would have grabbed my kid and left.
She didn’t. She walked toward me and she asked if I was okay and she listened to me say my dead daughter’s name and she told me her daughter’s name back, like that was a fair trade, like we were just two mothers in a park.
I don’t know what to do with that kind of grace from a stranger. I don’t know if I’m supposed to feel grateful or guilty that she had to extend it in the first place.
Probably both. Probably that’s the whole answer.
My friends who went quiet when I told them – I think they were scared of what it meant. That grief can make you do something that looks, from the outside, like something else entirely. That the line between broken and dangerous is thinner than we want it to be, and sometimes the only thing that shows you which side you’re on is whether a stranger decides to walk toward you or away.
Donna walked toward me.
I’m still not sure what I am. But I’m going to tell Dr. Okafor on Thursday. And I’m going to keep walking in that park, past the fountain, past the dog run, because Mia loved that park too, and I’m not ready to give it up.
I’m just going to keep my headphones in and my eyes forward.
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If this stayed with you, pass it on to someone who needs to know they’re not alone in the hard stuff.
If you need more stories about difficult encounters, check out what happened when she turned around and asked if I was Caitlin’s mom or how one person reacted when she turned the phone toward me and I didn’t want to look. And for a different kind of unexpected discovery, read about the time my husband said he lost his grandmother’s ring, but I found it on a stranger’s hand at his work party.
