I (38F) lost my wife, Donna, fourteen months ago to a brain aneurysm – no warning, no goodbye, just a Tuesday morning phone call from a number I didn’t recognize.
We had been together for eleven years.
I still have her car in the driveway because I can’t make myself sell it.
So last Thursday I was at the ShopRite on Mercer picking up the stuff my kids keep asking for – the specific yogurt, the specific granola bars – just trying to get through a normal errand like a normal person.
And I turned the corner into the cereal aisle and I just – stopped.
There was a woman standing there, maybe 35, reading the back of a box, and she had Donna’s hair.
Not similar to Donna’s hair.
Donna’s hair.
Same color, same length, same way it curled at the back where she never bothered to blow it dry all the way.
My heart was going so fast I had to grip the cart.
I told myself to keep moving and I did, for about ten seconds, and then I turned around and went back.
I stayed two sections over and just – watched her.
I know how that sounds.
She moved to the bread aisle and I followed.
She moved to the dairy section and I followed.
I wasn’t going to DO anything, I wasn’t planning to talk to her, I just couldn’t make myself stop.
At some point she turned around and we made eye contact and I must have looked insane because her face changed – she grabbed her cart and walked faster and I stood there in the middle of the dairy aisle holding a bag of shredded cheese I didn’t even need.
I checked out and sat in the parking lot for twenty minutes.
I thought that was the end of it.
But then I got home and my daughter Bree – she’s sixteen – asked me why it took me so long and I told her what happened.
I don’t know why I told her.
She went completely quiet.
And then she said, “Mom, that’s not the first time.”
My friends and my sister are split on whether I need to hear what Bree said next.
I put down the groceries.
I looked at my daughter.
And she told me –
What Bree Said
She told me about the woman at the farmers market in September.
Bree had been with me. She said I stopped in the middle of the aisle between the apple cider stand and the lady who sells the honey, and I just stared at someone for a long time. She thought I was zoning out. Grief brain, she called it. She’d read about grief brain somewhere.
Then I apparently started walking toward the woman and Bree grabbed my sleeve and said “Mom?” and I snapped back and said I thought I’d seen someone I knew.
I have no memory of this.
She told me about the woman at the gas station on Route 1, sometime in October. Dark hair. Bree was in the passenger seat. She said I watched the woman at the pump across from us for so long that the gas overflowed and the pump shut off and I didn’t notice.
I remember the gas station. I remember thinking the pump shut off weird.
I don’t remember the woman.
Bree was sitting at the kitchen table telling me all of this in the same voice she uses when she’s trying not to cry in front of me. Steady. A little flat. Choosing each word carefully. She’s been doing that voice for fourteen months and I hate it and I love her for it.
She said, “I didn’t say anything because I didn’t think it was a big deal. I just thought you were having a hard day.”
Then she looked at me and said, “But I think it’s more than that.”
The Part I Keep Coming Back To
I don’t remember those other times.
That’s what sits in me weird. The ShopRite woman, I remember every second of. The specific way the fluorescent light hit the tile floor. The weight of that stupid cheese bag. The sound of my own cart wheels squeaking. I was fully there, I knew exactly what I was doing, and I did it anyway.
But September at the farmers market? Nothing. October at the gas station? A smear.
My sister Vicki thinks Bree is exaggerating. Vicki is the kind of person who deals with hard things by insisting they’re smaller than they are. She loves me and she’s been doing this since we were kids. “You’re fine,” she said on the phone. “You’re grieving. You had a weird moment. Bree’s sixteen, she’s also grieving, she’s probably reading too much into it.”
My friend Paula thinks I need to call my therapist first thing Monday. Paula lost her dad three years ago and she does not minimize.
I’ve been going back and forth between them in my head since Thursday. It’s now Sunday night. The kids are in bed. I’m sitting in the kitchen with the light over the stove on because that’s the light Donna always kept on at night, and I’m trying to figure out what’s actually true here.
Who Donna Was
I want to tell you something about her hair, because I think it matters.
Donna had this habit. She’d shower at night, always, because she said morning showers woke her up too fast and she needed to ease into the day. But she never fully dried her hair before bed. She’d towel it, brush it out, and let the rest go. So in the morning it would be this specific combination of mostly-dry with these little curls at the back where the moisture had stayed.
She hated it. She’d complain about it.
I loved it more than almost anything about her physical self, which is saying something because I loved a lot of things about her physical self.
When I saw the woman in the cereal aisle, that’s what I saw first. Not the color, not the length. Those curls at the back. The ones that meant she hadn’t bothered, the ones that meant she was warm and had just woken up and was still a little soft around the edges.
Donna died on a Tuesday. She’d showered the night before.
I don’t know if her hair was like that when they found her. I couldn’t make myself ask.
The Thing I Haven’t Said Out Loud
I haven’t told Bree this part.
The twenty minutes I sat in the parking lot after the ShopRite, I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t even sad, exactly, not in the way I usually am. I was – I don’t know the right word. Relieved, almost. Like I’d gotten to be near her for a few minutes and it had scratched something.
That’s the part that scares me.
Not that I followed a stranger through a grocery store. Grief makes people do strange things; I’ve read enough about it to know that. But the relief. The way it felt like getting a small drink of water when you’re very thirsty. The fact that my body wanted to go back, and I let it, and it felt like – not nothing.
Bree was right that it wasn’t the first time. But I wonder if she got the count wrong. I wonder how many times my brain just quietly found someone and looked at them and I filed it under “weird moment” and kept moving.
I wonder what I’m actually doing when I’m out in the world without noticing.
The Asshole Question
So am I?
The woman at the ShopRite was scared. I saw it. That’s real and it’s mine to sit with. She was a stranger doing a normal errand and some woman stared at her long enough that she felt like she had to move faster. That’s not okay and I’m not going to tell myself it is.
But the AITA framing is almost funny to me now, sitting here Sunday night. Because the question I’m actually asking is not whether I’m an asshole.
It’s whether I’m okay.
And I don’t think I am.
I’ve been going to therapy, the every-other-week kind, and I’ve been functioning, and I’ve been getting the specific yogurt and the specific granola bars and keeping the light over the stove on. I’ve been doing the thing where you keep moving because there are kids in the house who need the lights on and the fridge stocked.
But I think I’ve been doing the thing where you confuse moving with healing.
Fourteen months in and I’m following strangers through grocery stores because of the way their hair dried.
Donna’s car is still in the driveway.
What Happens Monday
I’m going to call my therapist first thing. Not because Paula told me to, though she’s right. Because Bree sat across from me at the kitchen table and used that steady, careful voice and told me something she’d been holding for months, and she looked tired in a way sixteen-year-olds shouldn’t look tired.
She’s been watching me.
She’s been cataloguing my bad moments and deciding which ones to keep to herself so I don’t feel worse, and she’s been doing that since a Tuesday morning fourteen months ago when her mom called her out of first period and told her that Mama was gone.
She’s been taking care of me.
That’s what I couldn’t stop thinking about after she told me. Not the farmers market, not the gas station. Just Bree. Sitting in the passenger seat watching me watch a stranger at a pump, and deciding not to say anything, and tucking it away somewhere to carry later.
I’m going to call the therapist Monday. I’m probably going to ask about grief counseling, the more intensive kind. I might even ask about the car, because I think the car is part of something I haven’t let myself name.
I don’t know if I’m an asshole.
I think I’m just a person who misses her wife so badly that her brain went looking and her feet followed and she didn’t even notice it was happening.
But my daughter noticed.
And she told me.
And I’m going to do something about it.
—
If this one hit somewhere real, pass it along. Someone else out there might need to know they’re not the only one.
For more stories about life’s curveballs, read about My Brother Practiced Sitting Still for a Ceremony She Never Meant to Include Him In, or how My Uncle Called It “Taking Advantage.” I Had Three Years of Sundays to Disagree. And don’t miss My Nephew Was Being Walked Off the Field. I Had His IEP Pulled Up Before the Coach Finished His Sentence for another tale of unexpected twists.
