Am I a terrible person for following a stranger out of a waiting room and demanding to know who she was?
I (40F) lost my daughter Becca four years ago. She was nineteen. Car accident on a Tuesday morning, which is the most pointless detail I can never stop thinking about – a Tuesday, nothing special about it, and then she was just gone. I have her pictures everywhere. I have her voice saved in my phone. I am not, by any measure, over it.
My friends think what I did was grief talking. My sister thinks I need to go back to therapy. My husband didn’t say much, which is almost worse.
I was at the rheumatologist’s office last Thursday, waiting on a follow-up, sitting in one of those chairs that’s bolted to all the other chairs. The waiting room was maybe half full. I was looking at my phone when a woman walked in and checked in at the front desk.
She was young. Maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. Dark hair cut the same way Becca used to cut hers, that blunt line just below the jaw. Same height. Same way of standing with her weight on one hip while she filled out the clipboard.
My chest did something I don’t have a word for.
I told myself to stop. I KNOW it wasn’t Becca. I am not delusional. I know exactly what happened to my daughter and I have the death certificate in a folder in my filing cabinet and I have visited her grave more times than I can count.
But I couldn’t stop staring. And then she turned around to find a seat and I saw her face straight on.
She looked so much like Becca that the woman next to me actually touched my arm because I made a sound.
I don’t know what sound. I don’t remember making it.
The young woman sat down across from me and I just – I watched her. For twenty minutes. She was reading something on her phone. She had a small tattoo on her left wrist. Becca had talked about getting a tattoo on her left wrist. We’d argued about it. It was one of our last arguments and I have never forgiven myself for making it an argument.
When the nurse called this woman’s name, she stood up and I stood up at the same time.
I followed her to the hallway. I said her name – I said BECCA – before I could stop myself, and she turned around.
The look on her face.
I said, “I’m so sorry, you look like someone I lost, I’m so sorry,” and I was crying, which, god, I hate that I was crying in a medical hallway in front of a stranger.
She didn’t back away. She just looked at me for a second. And then she said, “What was her name?”
I told her. And something shifted in her face – not confusion, not pity, something else – and she said, “Can I ask where you’re from?”
My stomach dropped. Not because of the question.
Because of the way she already seemed to know the answer.
The Hallway
I told her the town. It’s small. Twenty-some thousand people, the kind of place where you know the families even if you don’t know the people.
She closed her eyes for just a second. Not long. Just a breath.
Then she said, “My mom talked about a Becca. From a grief group she used to go to. She said she had a friend there whose daughter was named Becca, and that she died in a car accident, and that the mom stopped coming after about eight months.”
I stopped coming after eight months because I couldn’t sit in that circle anymore and talk about Becca in past tense. That’s exactly why I stopped. I never told anyone that except my husband and maybe my sister.
I said, “What’s your mother’s name?”
She said, “Diane Pruitt. Was.”
Was.
I knew Diane. Not well. We’d sat next to each other maybe a dozen times in that church basement with the folding chairs and the bad coffee and the facilitator named Ron who meant well and said things like grief is not linear in a tone that made you want to flip the folding table. Diane had lost a son. Older. Thirty-one when he died, some kind of cardiac thing nobody saw coming, and she used to say the worst part was that he was old enough that people expected her to be more okay with it. She had a dry way of talking that I liked. She brought store-bought cookies every single week and never apologized for them being store-bought.
I had not thought about Diane Pruitt in probably three years.
I said, “She was kind. Your mom was really kind.”
The young woman – her name was Carrie, she told me that part a minute later, Carrie Pruitt, twenty-four years old, living forty minutes from the town where I still live – Carrie looked at the floor and said, “She died in February. That’s actually why I’m here today. Stress stuff. Everything kind of fell apart after.”
February. Four months ago.
What You Don’t Plan For
I want to be clear about something. I am not a person who believes in signs. I’m not wired that way. I think the universe is mostly indifferent and that bad things happen on Tuesdays because every day is equally capable of being terrible. I have never once felt Becca’s presence in a butterfly or a song on the radio or any of the things people said would happen.
But I am standing in a medical hallway with the daughter of a woman I knew from grief group, a woman who apparently talked about me and about Becca to this daughter, and this daughter looks enough like my dead child that I made a sound I can’t even remember making.
I don’t know what to do with that. I’m still not sure.
Carrie asked if I wanted to sit down. There was a little bench area near the elevator, one of those afterthought seating spots with a fake plant next to it. We sat there for probably twenty-five minutes. My appointment was still going to happen – the nurse had told me it’d be a few minutes – and Carrie’s had apparently just been a quick check-in that was already done.
She told me about her mom in the last year. How Diane had gotten quieter. How she’d started doing crossword puzzles obsessively, like six a day, and Carrie had thought it was sweet until a doctor told her it might be a form of checking out, keeping the brain busy so it didn’t have to sit still. How she’d asked Carrie, about a month before she died, whether Carrie thought the people you lost could tell that you were still thinking about them.
Carrie had said yes, obviously, because what else do you say.
Diane had said, “I hope so. I think about Gerald every hour. I’d hate for him to not know.”
Gerald was the son’s name. Thirty-one. The cardiac thing.
I told Carrie that her mom used to bring Pepperidge Farm cookies. The Milanos. Every single week without fail, and she’d put them in the center of the circle like she was setting a formal table, and she never once said I brought cookies or drew attention to it. They were just there.
Carrie laughed. It came out a little broken. “She did that at home too. Just left things places. Food, mostly. Like if there was food available then everything was basically okay.”
What Diane Said
Here’s the part I’ve been sitting with for six days now.
Carrie said her mom talked about the grief group a lot in the last year. She’d said it was the only place she’d ever been where nobody tried to fix her. And she’d mentioned, more than once, a woman named Carol – that’s me, Carol – whose daughter had died young, too young, and who had this way of describing her daughter that made Diane feel like she actually knew the girl.
Carrie said, “She told me you once said that the hardest part wasn’t the big moments. Not the birthdays or the holidays. She said you told the group that the hardest part was all the times you automatically went to tell your daughter something funny and then remembered.”
I don’t remember saying that. I said a lot of things in that room that I don’t remember. That happens when you’re in the worst year of your life and someone puts a folding chair in front of you and says take your time.
But it sounds like something I’d say. It’s true, actually. That’s still the hardest part. I’ll read something, or see something stupid on TV, and for half a second I’m already composing the text to Becca. My thumb knows the motion. And then.
Carrie said her mom wrote it down. Kept it. That she’d found it on a notepad in Diane’s bedside table after she died, in a list of things that had helped her, things people had said or done that she wanted to remember. Carol’s thing about the funny moments was on the list.
I did not hold it together when she told me that.
Neither did she, for the record.
The Tattoo
I asked about the tattoo eventually. I had to. It had been sitting in my chest since the waiting room.
She held out her wrist. It was small. A single line drawing of a bird, just the outline, like a child drew it, the kind that’s either very cheap or very expensive depending on the artist.
She said she got it after her mom died. That her mom had always wanted a tattoo and never got one because her mom’s mom had made her feel stupid about it, and Carrie had gotten one as a kind of thing. She didn’t have a better word for it than that. A kind of thing.
I told her about the argument. The last one, or close to it. Becca wanting a tattoo on her left wrist and me saying something about how she’d regret it, how she didn’t know what she wanted at nineteen, how she had her whole life to make permanent decisions.
I have thought about that sentence approximately ten thousand times in four years.
Her whole life.
Carrie didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she said, “I think she knew you’d come around.”
I don’t know if that’s true. I think maybe Carrie just needed to say something kind and that was the kindest available thing. But I’ve been turning it over anyway.
After
We exchanged numbers. I’m not entirely sure what the next step is, or if there is one. She’s twenty-four and dealing with her own fresh grief and I’m forty and dealing with my old grief that doesn’t feel old at all, and we met because I chased her down a hallway after mistaking her for my dead daughter, which is not a normal foundation for anything.
My husband asked who I was texting when I got home that night. I told him the whole thing and he was quiet for a long time and then he said, “That’s a lot to happen at the rheumatologist.”
Which is the most him sentence he has ever said, and I laughed, and it was the first real laugh I’d had in a while.
My sister still thinks I should go back to therapy. She might be right. She’s right about more things than she’s wrong about, which is annoying.
I don’t know what Diane would think about all of this. I’d like to think she’d find it funny in her dry way. I’d like to think she’d bring Milanos.
I still don’t know if I’m a terrible person for following Carrie down that hallway. But I know that for twenty-five minutes on a bench by a fake plant near a hospital elevator, two people who both lost someone sat together and talked about them like they were still real.
They were still real.
—
If this hit somewhere close, pass it along. Someone else might need to read it today.
For more stories about life’s unexpected turns and the moments that change everything, check out My Wife Answered the Door in My T-Shirt. What She Said Next Broke Everything., My Husband Had a Drink in His Hand and Another Family at His Side, and My Stepdaughter’s Teacher Ignored Her IEP for Weeks. So I Stood Up at Parent Night..
