Am I a terrible person for asking a complete stranger to leave a waiting room because of what she looked like?
I (38F) lost my husband Danny three years ago. Cardiac event. He was 41, no warning, no history – just gone in the time it takes to make coffee. We had a daughter, Petra, who’s seven now, and a mortgage, and a whole life we were supposed to be building together.
I’ve done the grief counseling. I’ve done the support groups. I function. I pick Petra up from school, I make dinner, I answer emails. My friends say I’ve handled it better than anyone they know, and I’ve started to think that might not be a compliment.
I was at the imaging center last Thursday – routine follow-up, nothing serious – and the waiting room was almost empty. Just me and an older man reading a magazine and a woman who came in maybe ten minutes after I sat down.
She was maybe 35. Dark hair, shorter than mine. She sat across from me and started scrolling her phone and I don’t know how to explain what happened next except that something in the way she held herself, the angle of her jaw, the way she tucked her hair back with one finger – she looked so much like Danny’s sister Colleen that my whole chest just caved in.
Colleen died two years before Danny. Car accident. Danny never really recovered from losing her, and then I lost him, and I haven’t seen his family much since the funeral because it got complicated in ways I don’t have the space to explain.
I sat there for maybe four minutes just staring at my phone, not reading anything, trying to breathe through it.
And then I went to the front desk and told the receptionist – and I know how this sounds, I KNOW – that the woman sitting across from me was someone I had a restraining order against, and could she please be moved to the other waiting area down the hall.
There is no restraining order. There never was. I just couldn’t sit in that room for another forty minutes with that face across from me.
They moved her. She went without a fuss, probably just thought it was a scheduling thing.
I sat there alone and I felt like the worst person alive.
My friends are split on this. Half of them say grief makes you do things you can’t always explain. The other half went quiet in a way that told me everything.
But here’s the thing I haven’t told any of them.
When I was checking out, the receptionist handed me my paperwork – and she handed me a second sheet by mistake.
The woman’s name was on it.
And I recognized it.
The Name
Maureen Doyle.
I stood at that counter and read it twice. Three times. The receptionist was already helping someone else, hadn’t noticed the mix-up, and I just stood there holding two sheets of paper like an idiot.
Maureen Doyle was Danny’s college girlfriend. Not a casual thing either. Four years. They’d been engaged for about six months before it fell apart, before Danny met me at a work thing in the fall of 2008, before all of it. I knew her name because Danny told me about her early on, the way you do when you’re trying to be honest with someone new, and because Colleen had mentioned her exactly once at Christmas in 2014, and the way Colleen said her name made me not ask follow-up questions.
I’d never seen a photo. Danny didn’t keep any that I knew of. I had no idea what she looked like.
And she looked like Colleen.
I put the second sheet face-down on the counter and walked out.
What the Drive Home Was
Thirty-one minutes. I know because I checked my phone when I got in the car and I checked it again when I pulled into the driveway and I sat there doing the math, which is the kind of stupid thing your brain does when it’s trying not to do the thing it’s actually doing.
The thing it was actually doing was this: Danny had loved this woman. Genuinely, seriously, for four years. She had his sister’s jaw, apparently, or close enough that my body didn’t know the difference. And she was sitting in an imaging center getting some kind of scan at 10:40 on a Thursday morning, which usually means something, and I had told a lie to get her moved to a different room so I wouldn’t have to look at her.
I didn’t feel guilty about the lie anymore. That had burned off somewhere on the highway.
What I felt was something I don’t have a clean word for. Not jealousy. That’s not quite right. Something older than that. Like I’d reached into a box that was supposed to be empty and found something still warm.
Petra was at school. I went inside and sat on the kitchen floor for a while. Not crying. Just sitting.
What I Know About Danny and Maureen
Not much. That’s the honest answer.
He told me they’d been good together until they weren’t. That she’d wanted to move to Portland for a job and he hadn’t wanted to go and neither of them was wrong, exactly. He said it the way people say things they’ve made peace with. He didn’t seem sad about it. He seemed like a man describing weather from a long time ago.
Colleen had liked her. That much I inferred from the way she said her name that Christmas. Colleen was not a woman who masked her feelings well. If she’d disliked Maureen she would have said something pointed and then changed the subject. The fact that she said Maureen’s name and then went quiet and looked at the middle distance for a second meant something different.
I never asked Danny about it. We were three years married by then and Petra was eighteen months old and I was not going to open that particular door.
Now I was sitting on my kitchen floor wondering what was behind it.
The Part I’m Less Proud Of
I looked her up.
Of course I did. I’m a 38-year-old woman with a smartphone and a kitchen floor and too much time in my own head. I typed her name into three different platforms before I found a profile that was probably her. No photo. Portland address, which tracked. Something in nonprofit work. That was all I got.
I put my phone face-down on the tile.
Here is what I noticed about myself in that moment: I was not angry at her. I wasn’t even really thinking about her as a person, which is its own uncomfortable thing to admit. I was thinking about Danny. About the version of Danny that existed before me, before Petra, before the cardiac event that took him on a Tuesday morning while I was in the shower. The Danny who’d driven to Portland or hadn’t driven to Portland and had ended up at that work thing in 2008 where he’d spilled a drink on my sleeve and apologized so sincerely that I’d laughed.
That Danny was a stranger to me in a lot of ways. You don’t get to know the person your person was before they were yours. You get stories, and you get the shape that history left on them, but you don’t get the actual thing.
Maureen Doyle got four years of him I’ll never know anything about.
And she had Colleen’s face, or close enough, and she was in an imaging center on a Thursday, and I had gotten her moved to another room because I couldn’t breathe.
What I Actually Did
I called my friend Barb. She’s the one who went quiet when I told her the waiting room story. Barb has been my friend since we were both 24 and she is constitutionally incapable of telling me what I want to hear, which is mostly why I’ve kept her around.
I told her the whole thing. The name. The profile. The kitchen floor.
She was quiet for a long moment.
“So she’s sick,” Barb said.
“Probably. I don’t know.”
“And you’re sitting on your floor thinking about Danny.”
“Yes.”
“Are you thinking about her at all?”
I didn’t answer fast enough.
“Okay,” Barb said. Not unkindly. Just: okay.
She didn’t tell me I was a terrible person. She also didn’t tell me I wasn’t. She asked if I’d eaten anything since breakfast and I said I didn’t think so and she said she’d come by at six with food and she did, and we ate pasta at my kitchen table and talked about something else almost entirely, and at one point she put her hand over mine for a second and didn’t say anything, and that was the most useful thing anyone’s done for me in a while.
What I Keep Coming Back To
I don’t know what I was supposed to do in that waiting room. Sit there and breathe through it, probably. That’s what the grief counselor would say. Sit with the discomfort. Let it move through you.
But I’ve been letting things move through me for three years and sometimes I’m just so tired of being the person who handles it well.
The lie was wrong. I know that. Some woman who may or may not be having a hard health week got shuffled to a different room because I fell apart for four minutes. She never knew why. She probably still doesn’t. In the scope of harms done in the world it’s minor, but it sits in me wrong, and I think it always will.
What I don’t know how to feel about is the rest of it.
That she existed. That she looks like Colleen. That Danny loved her for four years and then loved me for eleven and then died on a Tuesday and left me here to run into his history in waiting rooms by accident, without warning, the way he left me without warning, which is apparently just the thing Danny does.
Did.
The thing Danny did.
I still get that wrong sometimes. Three years and I still reach for the present tense like it’s going to be there.
Petra asked me last week if Daddy was still somewhere. Not heaven specifically, just somewhere. She’s seven and she’s working it out in her own way, the same as me.
I told her I thought so. I told her I didn’t know exactly where, but I thought so.
I believe that less than I used to. But she needed something to hold onto and so I gave her that, and maybe that’s another small lie in service of getting through a hard thing, and maybe that’s just what you do.
I don’t know.
I’m still not sure if I’m a terrible person. I’m pretty sure I’m just a person. That’s maybe the most honest thing I’ve got.
—
If this one got into you somewhere, pass it on. Someone else probably needed to read it too.
If you’re looking for more wild stories, you won’t want to miss “My Stepdaughter Texted Me Something I Wasn’t Supposed to See” or “My Wife Came Downstairs With a Folder and I Didn’t Know What Was In It,” and for another moment of public drama, check out “Am I the a**hole for what I said out loud at my father-in-law’s will reading, in front of his entire family?”.
