Am I a terrible person for following a stranger out of a coffee shop and grabbing her arm?
I (40F) lost my daughter Becca four years ago. She was nineteen. Car accident on a Tuesday morning, which is the cruelest part somehow – not a holiday, not a dramatic night, just a regular Tuesday. I have a therapist. I have a support group. I have, by most measures, been doing the work.
My friends are split on what I did. Half of them say they understand. The other half haven’t called me back since I told them.
I was at Groundwork on Morrison, the one near my office, waiting for my latte. It was packed. I wasn’t thinking about anything except whether I’d have time to eat before my 9 o’clock.
And then I saw her.
Same height as Becca. Same way of pulling her hair over one shoulder when she looked down at her phone. She was wearing this green jacket – Becca had the exact same one, bought it junior year, wore it until one of the sleeves frayed. This woman’s sleeve was frayed in the same spot.
I know how that sounds.
She started moving toward the door and something in me just – I left my drink on the counter. I didn’t think. I followed her out onto the sidewalk and I grabbed her arm and I said, “Becca.”
She spun around and she was NOT my daughter. Of course she wasn’t. She was maybe twenty-two, a complete stranger, and she looked scared. I mean genuinely scared, pulling her arm back, saying “What the hell, lady.”
I started crying right there on the sidewalk. Ugly crying. I tried to explain – my daughter, she looked just like her, I’m so sorry – and this woman’s face went from scared to something else and she said, “You need help. Seriously. You cannot just grab people.”
She was right. I know she was right.
But then she took a step back, looked at me for a long moment, and said, “How long ago?”
I told her. Four years.
She was quiet. Then she reached into her bag and pulled out her phone and said, “I want to show you something. This is going to sound insane, but I think you need to see it.”
She turned the screen toward me, and I looked at the photo she was pointing to, and my knees went out from under me.
What My Knees Already Knew
I grabbed the brick wall behind me. Actually grabbed it, fingernails scraping the mortar. A woman walking past gave me a look and kept going.
On the phone was a photo of Becca.
Not someone who looked like Becca. Not a similar girl. My daughter’s face. Her actual face, sophomore year I think, from the tilt of her jaw in that specific way she held it when she was laughing at something that had already passed. She was laughing in the photo. She was laughing and she was so obviously, completely, one hundred percent Becca that I made a sound I’d never made before in my life. Like a word that didn’t get finished.
“That’s my daughter,” I said. “That’s Becca.”
The woman – her name was Caitlin, I’d learn that in about forty seconds – said, “I know.”
She said it soft. She wasn’t scared anymore.
I couldn’t talk. I was pressing my back against the brick wall on Morrison Street at eight forty-seven in the morning, holding myself up, looking at a photo of my dead daughter on a stranger’s phone.
“Who are you,” I said. Not a question exactly. More like a thing I said into the air.
Caitlin was quiet for a second. She pushed her hair over one shoulder – that same move, God, that same move – and said, “I think I was her roommate’s friend. Or – I don’t know. We have to sit down. Can we sit down?”
Her Name Was Caitlin Burke
We went back inside. The barista had put my latte on the side counter. It had been sitting there long enough to go cold. I drank it anyway. My hands were shaking in this specific way where you can see the liquid moving but you’re not sure you’re the one doing it.
Caitlin was twenty-three. She was a grad student, urban planning, which is a fact I remember for no good reason except that the brain holds onto strange things when the rest of it is coming apart. She grew up in Beaverton. She’d met Becca through a girl named Kayla Simmons, who had been Becca’s roommate in the dorms her freshman year.
I didn’t know Kayla. Or – I knew the name. Becca had mentioned her maybe twice. Freshmen scatter by sophomore year, that’s just how it goes. I’d had no reason to hold onto Kayla Simmons.
Caitlin had.
“We all stayed friends,” she said. “Me and Kayla and a few others. And Becca was – she was around sometimes. Not a lot. But enough.”
She said it carefully. Like she was aware she was telling a mother things about her daughter that the mother didn’t know.
I was aware of it too. It’s this particular strange grief, finding out your kid had a life you weren’t in. You know they do. You’re supposed to want that. But then someone hands you evidence of it and it’s like being told about a country you’ll never visit.
“How do you have that photo,” I said.
She turned the phone back around. Looked at it herself for a second. “Kayla’s birthday, two years before – before the accident. We were at this place in the Pearl. I just never deleted it.”
She looked at me then, direct. “I almost did. Like a month ago I was cleaning out my camera roll and I got to that one and I just – I don’t know why I kept it. I almost didn’t.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m really glad I did,” she said.
The Part I Keep Turning Over
Here’s the thing I can’t explain, and I’m not going to try to dress it up as something it’s not.
I’m not a mystical person. I don’t believe in signs. My therapist, Dr. Renner, she’s been very patient about my relationship with the concept of meaning – which is to say, I stopped being able to trust it after a Tuesday morning in March four years ago. If there was a plan, I don’t want to know what it is. I’m not interested in a universe that planned that.
But.
Caitlin told me something while we were sitting there with our cold coffees and the morning crowd thinning out around us. She said that the jacket – the green jacket, the one with the frayed sleeve – she’d bought it at a Goodwill on Hawthorne maybe six months ago. Just grabbed it off a rack. She liked the color.
She didn’t know anyone named Becca. She’d never heard of her. She had no idea whose jacket it had been before hers.
I knew it was Becca’s. I don’t have proof. The jacket went into one of those donation bags that Becca’s roommate, a girl named Stephanie, dropped off somewhere after the accident. Stephanie told me she’d brought a few bags to various places. She couldn’t remember where exactly. She was twenty years old and she’d just lost her roommate and I’m not going to fault her for not keeping records.
But I knew.
The fraying is on the left cuff. Becca was always pulling at it with her right hand when she was thinking. She’d done it since she was little. Did it to every long-sleeved thing she owned.
I didn’t tell Caitlin that. I’m not sure why. Some things you just hold.
What She Did Next
Caitlin asked if she could give me her number.
I said yes before she finished the sentence.
She said she had more photos. Not many – she wasn’t close with Becca, she wanted to be clear about that, she didn’t want to overstate it – but a few. From Kayla’s birthday, from some other thing she couldn’t remember the occasion of. She said if I wanted them she’d send them. If I didn’t, that was fine too.
I said I wanted them.
She sent four photos that afternoon. I was in a meeting when they came through – a budget review, completely meaningless, I was nodding at slides – and I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket and I excused myself and stood in the hallway outside the conference room and looked at my daughter.
Becca at a table with people I didn’t know, holding a drink, laughing at something off-camera. Becca standing outside somewhere, squinting into the sun, that specific squint she had where her whole nose scrunched. Becca with her arm around a girl I didn’t recognize, both of them making a face.
Alive. Just alive. Alive in pictures I’d never seen.
I stood in that hallway for a long time.
The Friends Who Haven’t Called Back
I understand why some of them are weird about it now. I do.
From the outside it probably looks like I assaulted a stranger in the street and then turned it into some grief story with a tidy ending. Like I’m making it mean something to avoid sitting with the fact that I grabbed a twenty-three-year-old woman’s arm and scared her.
I did scare her. That part is real and it doesn’t get laundered by what came after.
But here’s what I want to say to the friends who haven’t called back: I’ve been sitting with the ugly part of this. I told Dr. Renner. I told my support group. I am not pretending it was okay that I did that. I’m not using the photos as proof that grief makes everything permissible.
What I am saying is that Caitlin forgave me on a sidewalk in about ninety seconds, and she didn’t have to, and she did anyway, and she gave me something I didn’t know I needed.
I have 214 photos of Becca. I’ve had them memorized for four years. I know every one. I know which birthday each one is from, what she was wearing, who she was with.
Now I have 218.
Four More
Four photos of a version of Becca I wasn’t there for.
I’ve looked at them so many times the thumbnails practically load before I tap them. The squinting one is my favorite. She hated how she looked when she squinted – she’d complain about it, say it made her look like she was perpetually confused. She wasn’t confused. She was just looking into the sun.
Caitlin and I have texted a few times. Not a lot. I don’t want to make her responsible for my grief. She’s twenty-three, she’s got her own life, she was kind to me in a moment she had every right not to be. That’s enough. That’s more than enough.
She sent me one more thing last week. A voice note she’d found in an old group chat. Just Becca, saying something like, “Okay but hear me out,” and then laughing before she got to whatever the thing was. Fourteen seconds. You never hear the idea.
I’ve listened to it forty-something times.
Just her voice saying okay but hear me out and then laughing.
I keep waiting to hear the rest of it.
—
If this one got you, pass it on to someone who’d understand why.
If you’re looking for more emotional stories, you might find solace in The Pastor Looked Me in the Eye and Said “We Found Something Else” or perhaps My Daughter Said Something at Bedtime That Made Me Block Derek’s Number could resonate with you. We also have another story about following a stranger out of a coffee shop because she looked like a lost loved one.
