I (45M) lost my daughter Becca eight years ago. She was nineteen. Car accident, two weeks into her first semester of college. I have a son, Derek (22), a wife, Pam (49), and what I thought was a mostly functional life. I go to work, I mow the lawn, I do the grocery run on Sunday mornings because it gives Pam a break and it gives me something to do with my hands.
Last Sunday I was at the Kroger on Whitfield, standing in the cereal aisle, when I saw her.
Not her. I know that. I’m not crazy.
But this girl – maybe twenty, dark hair pulled up the same way Becca always wore it, same slope to her shoulders, same way of tilting her head when she read the label on something – my chest just stopped working.
I told myself I was going to grab my box of granola and leave. I didn’t.
I followed her. Produce. Dairy. The frozen section. I kept about half an aisle back and I didn’t say anything, I just – I needed to see her face from the front. That’s what I told myself. Just once, from the front, and then I’d go.
When she finally turned around near the bread, she didn’t look like Becca at all. Different nose, different eyes. I don’t know what I was even seeing before.
She caught me looking. I must have had some expression on my face because she pulled out her phone immediately and took a step back.
I said, “I’m sorry, you just reminded me of someone.”
She said, “You’ve been following me.”
I said, “I know. I’m sorry. My daughter – she passed away and you – “
She said, “I don’t care,” and she walked away fast toward the front of the store.
I stood there by the bread for a while. Then I finished shopping. When I got home, Pam asked if I was okay and I told her what happened, the whole thing, and she just looked at me and said, “Terry. That poor girl.”
She wasn’t wrong. I know she wasn’t wrong.
But then Derek called that night, and Pam told him, and Derek said I needed to “get help” and that this “wasn’t the first time” something like this had happened, and I didn’t know what he meant by that, so I asked Pam.
The way she looked at me when I asked.
“Terry,” she said. “You really don’t remember the woman at the gas station? Or the girl at Derek’s graduation?”
My friends and family are split – Derek thinks I need to see someone, Pam’s more careful about what she says but I can see it in her face. Maybe they’re right that I went too far in the store. But what Derek said, about it not being the first time – I don’t have any memory of those other moments.
None.
And when I told Pam that, she sat down at the kitchen table and said, “Okay. Then there’s something I need to show you.”
She went upstairs. She came back down with a folder.
What Was In It
A manila folder, the kind with the little metal prong things inside. Letter-sized. She set it on the table between us and didn’t open it right away. Just kept her hand flat on top of it.
I looked at her face. She had the expression she gets when she’s about to say something that’s going to cost her. I’ve seen it twice before. Once when her mother was diagnosed. Once when we buried Becca.
“I started keeping notes,” she said. “About two years ago. When I realized I couldn’t remember the details myself afterward. How many times. What you said. Whether you knew later that it had happened.”
She opened it.
Lined notebook paper, folded in thirds, some of them. Index cards with her small, neat handwriting. A few printed emails she’d apparently written to herself, timestamped, like she was building a case she hoped she’d never need.
The gas station one was from fourteen months ago. A woman in her early twenties, dark hair, putting gas in a Civic. Pam had been in the car. She said I got out without saying anything and walked toward the woman and stood close enough that the woman noticed and moved around to the other side of her car. Pam called my name twice. The third time I turned around and got back in, and when she asked me what I was doing, I said I’d thought I’d seen someone I knew from work.
I don’t remember that.
I don’t mean it’s hazy or vague. I mean there is nothing there. It’s like being told you did something in your sleep.
Derek’s graduation. Two years ago, May. A girl in a yellow dress in the crowd outside the civic center. Pam says I stopped walking mid-sentence and tracked her for about three minutes, not speaking, until the girl moved behind a bus shelter and I lost sight of her. Derek had been standing right there. He saw it.
That’s why he knew. That’s what he meant by not the first time.
There were six entries in the folder. Six that Pam had written down. She said there were others she hadn’t recorded because she’d told herself each time it was a one-off. Grief doing what grief does. She said she stopped telling herself that after the graduation.
I sat there and read every page.
What I Actually Said
I want to be honest about what my first reaction was, because it wasn’t good.
My first reaction was something close to anger. Not at Pam – I knew even then it wasn’t at Pam – but this hot, defensive feeling, like I was being ambushed. Like she’d been collecting evidence against me in secret. Like I was a problem she’d been managing.
I didn’t say any of that. I know better than to say the first thing I think.
What I said was, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She looked at me for a long moment. “I did tell you. After the gas station. You said you’d look into talking to someone, and then you didn’t, and I let it go because you seemed okay for a while.”
I don’t remember that conversation either.
That’s the part that scared me more than the folder. Not the incidents themselves, not the way that girl at Kroger must have felt, not even Derek knowing. It’s that Pam and I apparently had a whole conversation about this, a real one, and it’s just gone. I have no edge of it. No fragment. Nothing.
I’m 45, not 75. I’m not confused in daily life. I know what day it is, I know where I put my keys, I function. But somewhere in my brain there is apparently a filing cabinet with no lock on it, and certain things go in and never come back out.
What Derek Said the Next Morning
He called at 7:40. I was still in bed, hadn’t slept much.
He wasn’t mean about it. I want to say that because I’ve seen some comments on posts like this where the kid comes off like a jerk, and Derek isn’t a jerk. He’s a serious kid, a little stiff sometimes, got his mother’s way of choosing words carefully. He said he’d been thinking about it since last night and he thought I needed to see a doctor, not a therapist, an actual doctor, because the memory thing wasn’t normal grief.
“It’s not about Kroger, Dad,” he said. “Kroger I get. That’s grief. The not remembering is different.”
I said I understood.
He said, “Do you remember when I was fourteen and we had that fight about the camping trip? You said some things.”
I said yes, I remembered that.
He said, “I don’t think you actually do. But that’s a different conversation.”
I didn’t ask him to explain. I should have. I didn’t.
What Pam Said That Night
We talked again after dinner. Derek had hung up, the house was quiet, Pam made tea she didn’t drink. She sat across from me at the same kitchen table with the folder still sitting there between us like it lived there now.
She said she wasn’t angry with me. She said she needed me to hear that.
Then she said something that I keep turning over.
“I think part of you knows when it’s happening,” she said. “I think some part of you knows it’s not her, and you follow anyway, because for those few minutes you don’t have to know.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I think that’s why you don’t keep it,” she said. “Because keeping it would mean knowing it didn’t work.”
I’m not saying she’s right. I’m not saying she’s wrong. I’ve got no way to check it from inside my own head. But I’ve been sitting with it for six days now and I can’t find a place to put it down.
What I’m Going to Do
I called my doctor Monday. I have an appointment in two weeks, which felt too long but that’s where they put me. I’m going to tell him everything, the incidents, the memory gaps, the folder. I’m going to let him decide what kind of doctor I actually need to see next.
Pam asked if she could come. I said yes.
Derek texted me Wednesday. Just: Let me know how the appointment goes. That’s Derek. Three words when he means a lot more.
I looked up grief-related memory suppression, which is apparently a real thing and not a small thing. I looked up dissociative episodes, which is a phrase that feels too large and clinical for who I am, for a guy who mows his lawn and does the Sunday grocery run. But I read about it anyway.
I still think about the girl at Kroger. The way she stepped back. The phone coming out. She was right to do that. A man following a young woman through a grocery store is a man following a young woman through a grocery store. It doesn’t matter what’s happening inside his head. She had no way to know I wasn’t dangerous. She had every reason to assume I might be.
I was the a**hole in that moment. Full stop. Whatever is going on with me medically or psychologically, whatever Pam’s theory is about why I don’t keep the memories – that girl didn’t sign up to be part of my grief. She was buying bread.
What I Haven’t Said Yet
There’s one more thing.
The folder. After I’d read all of it, I asked Pam when she’d started it. She said two years ago, I knew that. But I asked what made her start it then specifically.
She was quiet for a second.
She said, “Because two years ago was the first time you called me Becca.”
She said it was once, half-asleep, she hadn’t made a thing of it. But it was the moment something shifted for her. The moment she stopped thinking of it as grief and started thinking of it as something that needed watching.
I didn’t know what to do with that so I just nodded.
She reached across the table and put her hand over mine. We sat there. The folder between us, the cold tea, the kitchen light that’s been slightly too yellow since we replaced the bulb last spring.
“I should have pushed harder after the gas station,” she said. “That’s on me too.”
I told her it wasn’t.
She didn’t argue, but she didn’t agree either.
The appointment’s in eight days. I’ll find out what I find out.
—
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For more deep dives into complex family dynamics, 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? and My Wife Slid Something Under the Bedroom Door and I’m Not Ready to Look at It. You might also appreciate She Told Me It Was About “Liability.” Then She Said the Real Thing Out Loud. for another story about unexpected confrontations.
