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, two weeks before her sophomore year of college. I have her photos on my phone, her handwriting on a sticky note I keep in my wallet, and a grief therapist named Dr. Okafor I see every other Thursday. I have been doing, by most measures, okay.
Until Tuesday.
I was at the Dunkin on Mercer Street, the one near my office I go to every morning. I was waiting for a medium coffee, scrolling through work emails, not thinking about anything in particular.
And then I saw her.
Same height. Same way of standing with her weight on one hip. Dark hair pulled back in that specific messy bun Becca always did, with the two pieces falling out in the front. She was wearing a green jacket and she was laughing at something on her phone and I swear to God my body just stopped working.
I knew it wasn’t her. I KNEW. I’m not delusional. I have been through enough therapy to understand what grief does to the brain. But my feet were already moving.
I followed her out the door. Onto the sidewalk. She was walking fast and I called out “excuse me” and she didn’t hear me and I just – I grabbed her arm.
She spun around and she was NOT Becca. Of course she wasn’t. Maybe twenty years old, completely different face, scared half to death by a woman in a work blazer grabbing her on the street.
I said I was sorry. I said she looked like someone I knew. She pulled her arm away and said “what the hell” and walked off fast.
I stood there on the sidewalk for probably five minutes.
My friends are split. Half of them say I need more support than I’m getting and this was a mental health moment, not a character flaw. The other half have gone quiet in a way that tells me they’re more bothered than they’re saying.
My sister Patrice thinks I should tell Dr. Okafor what happened and I probably will. But what’s eating at me is not the grief part. It’s something else. It’s something I said to that girl after she pulled away, something I said before I could stop myself, and I don’t know if it makes me the asshole or just a broken person or both.
I’ve been turning it over in my head for three days. I told my husband Derek last night and he went very still and said – ## What Derek Said
He said, “What did you say to her?”
Not “are you okay.” Not “oh honey.” He looked at me across the kitchen table with his hands flat on the wood and he asked what I said, which told me he’d already picked up that there was something I was leaving out.
Derek has known me for eighteen years. He knew Becca her whole life. He was the one who identified her at the hospital because I couldn’t stand up. When I say he went still, I mean the particular stillness he gets when something matters enough that he won’t let himself react until he understands it.
So I told him.
After the girl pulled away and said “what the hell” and started walking, I said: “I just wanted to see her face.”
Out loud. To a stranger’s back, already half a block away. I said it loud enough that she might have heard me, loud enough that a man walking past with a dog turned to look at me.
Derek was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “Okay.” And then he got up and poured himself more coffee even though his cup was still mostly full.
I don’t know what “okay” meant. I still don’t. I didn’t ask.
What I’ve Been Telling Myself
That it was harmless. That grief makes people do strange things and this was just one of those things and the girl was startled but fine and I didn’t hurt anyone and it won’t happen again.
That’s the version I’ve been running on for three days.
But here’s the part I keep snagging on: I wasn’t sorry. Not the way I should’ve been. I was embarrassed, yes. Mortified. I wanted to dissolve into the sidewalk. But underneath that, underneath all of it, there was this other thing. This small, ugly thing.
I was angry at her for not being Becca.
Not at the situation. Not at the universe. At her, specifically. This twenty-year-old girl who had the nerve to have the same haircut and the same jacket and the same way of standing, and who turned around with the wrong face.
I know how that sounds. I know.
It lasted maybe two seconds. And then it was gone and I felt sick about it. But it was there. I felt it. And when I said I just wanted to see her face, part of what I meant was: I wanted to see Becca’s face, and you weren’t it, and that felt like a small betrayal even though you owe me nothing and didn’t do anything wrong.
That’s the part I haven’t told Patrice. That’s the part I only got halfway through telling Derek before I ran out of nerve.
The Last Four Years, Compressed
People think grief gets smaller. It doesn’t. You just get bigger around it, slowly, until you can carry it without listing to one side every minute of the day.
Four years ago I couldn’t get through a grocery run. The cereal aisle was the worst – Becca had strong opinions about cereal, very specific, would only eat the kind with the marshmallows and would eat it dry out of the box while doing homework. I stood in that aisle for eleven minutes one Saturday morning, ten months after the accident, holding a box of Lucky Charms, and a teenage girl asked me if I was okay and I said yes and then sat in my car for forty minutes before I could drive home.
I don’t do that anymore. I can do the cereal aisle.
I go to Dr. Okafor every other Thursday. I have a standing Wednesday lunch with my friend Carol from work, who lost her brother years ago and doesn’t make me explain things. I have Derek. I have a photo of Becca on my desk at work and one on my phone wallpaper and one in a frame by the bed, and I can look at all of them without my chest caving in.
I thought that meant I was past the part where grief ambushes me.
Tuesday was a reminder that there is no past that part. There is only the space between ambushes.
The Dunkin on Mercer Street
I’ve been going there almost every workday for two years. Sandy at the counter knows my order. There’s a regular I think of as Crossword Guy who’s always in the corner with a pen and a newspaper. The bathroom lock sticks. I know this place.
I was not in a vulnerable state Tuesday morning. I hadn’t been having a bad week. I wasn’t thinking about Becca any more than usual, which is to say she was there the way she’s always there, in the background, like a frequency I’ve learned to live with.
The girl in the green jacket walked in at 8:14. I know because I’d just checked my email and there was a message timestamped 8:13 from my boss that I was in the middle of reading.
She ordered something – I didn’t catch what – and while she waited she pulled out her phone and laughed at something on the screen. Head tilted down, shoulders shaking a little. And her hair was up in that bun, with those two pieces coming loose at the front, and she was standing with her hip out, and I just.
I put my phone in my pocket.
My coffee came up and I didn’t take it.
I watched her get her drink and turn toward the door and I followed her. I don’t remember deciding to. My body made that call without consulting me and by the time I caught up to the decision I was already on the sidewalk with my hand on her arm.
The whole thing, start to finish, maybe ninety seconds.
What I’m Actually Scared Of
It’s not that I scared her, though I did, and I’m sorry for that.
It’s not even the anger I felt for two seconds when she turned around. That was grief misfiring. I know what that is.
What scares me is how good it felt, for those ninety seconds, to follow her.
Not good like happy. Good like relief. Like the specific feeling of moving toward something instead of just carrying it. Like my body thought: there she is, go, and for ninety seconds I got to be a person whose daughter was still somewhere in the world, just around the corner, just ahead on the sidewalk, just about to turn around.
That’s what I wanted when I said I just wanted to see her face.
Not this stranger’s face. Becca’s face. One more time. Moving and laughing and not knowing I was there.
I wanted ninety more seconds of the world where she exists in it.
And I think that’s the thing Derek understood when he went quiet. And I think that’s the thing Patrice would understand if I told her. And I think that’s probably what Dr. Okafor is going to say is very normal and very human and also something we should work through carefully.
But knowing something is explicable doesn’t make it hurt less. It just makes it hurt in a different room.
Where I’m At Now
I went back to the Dunkin on Wednesday. I almost didn’t. I stood outside for a minute and then I went in because not going in felt like letting Tuesday win.
Sandy said “medium, right?” and I said yes and Crossword Guy was in his corner and everything was exactly the same.
I took my coffee and I stood by the window for a minute. Not looking for anyone. Just standing there.
The sticky note in my wallet has Becca’s handwriting on it. It’s a grocery list she made junior year of high school, left on the kitchen counter. Milk, Goldfish (big box), gum, the Lucky Charms ones. I found it in a drawer six months after she died and I’ve kept it ever since. The paper’s getting soft at the folds.
I didn’t take it out Wednesday. I just knew it was there.
That was enough. It’s usually enough.
Tuesday it wasn’t. Tuesday my body needed something it can’t have, and it went looking anyway, and it grabbed a stranger’s arm on Mercer Street at 8:14 in the morning, and said something out loud that was meant for someone else.
I don’t think that makes me terrible. I think it makes me someone who misses her daughter in ways that don’t always stay inside the lines.
But I’m going to tell Dr. Okafor on Thursday. All of it. The following, the grabbing, the two seconds of anger, and the ninety seconds of relief.
And the thing I said. And what I meant by it.
Derek will probably come with me. He usually does when something shifts. He hasn’t brought up Tuesday again, but last night he reached across the couch and held my hand for a while without saying anything, and I held his back.
We’ve gotten good at that. Holding on without saying anything. Four years of practice.
Becca would have had opinions about all of this. She had opinions about everything. She would’ve told me I was being dramatic and then she would’ve climbed onto the couch and put her head on my shoulder and stayed there.
I know her face. I don’t need to see it on a stranger.
I know.
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If this stayed with you, pass it on to someone who might need to read it.
For more stories about confronting others in public, read about My Stepdaughter’s Teacher Said I Wasn’t Qualified. Becca Was Listening to Every Word. and My Wife’s Coworkers Knew Before I Did, or if you’re interested in other ways partners have been caught, check out My Husband Was Checked Into a Hotel Twelve Minutes From Our House. I Found Out by Accident..
