I (45M) lost my daughter Becca four years ago. She was nineteen. Aneurysm, no warning, no goodbye – she was home for spring break and then she was just gone. My wife Donna and I have been holding the pieces of our marriage together with both hands ever since, and I’d say we’re doing okay, most days.
Most days.
I was at the DMV on a Tuesday afternoon, waiting on a number that had been sitting in my pocket for forty minutes, when I saw her.
She was maybe twenty-two, twenty-three, sitting three rows ahead of me with her coat folded in her lap. Same dark hair Becca had. Same way of pulling her sleeves down over her hands when she was sitting still. She was looking at her phone and she tucked one foot up under herself the exact same way Becca used to sit on the couch, and something in my chest just – stopped.
I know it wasn’t her. I’m not crazy. I’m not having a breakdown.
But I couldn’t stop staring. Every time she moved I found some other thing – the way she laughed at something on her phone, quiet, to herself. The way she rubbed the back of her neck. I sat there for twenty minutes just watching her and I felt like I was getting something back that I didn’t know I’d lost the shape of.
When her number got called she went up to the counter, finished in about five minutes, and walked out.
I followed her.
I didn’t plan it. I got up, left my number sitting on the chair, and followed her into the parking lot. I called out – I said, “Excuse me, I’m sorry, I just need one second” – and she turned around and I could see immediately that she was scared. She had her keys out between her fingers before I even got close.
I stopped. I told her I was sorry, I told her she looked like someone I’d lost, I told her I just wanted to – and then I stopped because I didn’t actually know what I wanted.
She stared at me for a second and then she said, “I think you should go back inside.”
I drove home and told Donna what happened. She didn’t say anything for a long time. My friends are split on whether I had some kind of grief episode that deserves compassion or whether I genuinely terrified a young woman in a parking lot and there’s no version of that that’s okay.
I think I already know which one Donna believes. She’s been in the bedroom with the door closed for two hours. But it’s what she slid under the door before she closed it that I haven’t been able to look at yet.
What’s Sitting on the Floor
It’s a photograph.
I can see the corner of it from where I’m sitting on the couch. Face-down, so I don’t know which one she picked. We have boxes of them, actual physical boxes, because Becca was born in 1999 and the first decade of her life lives in printed four-by-sixes in a Rubbermaid bin in the hall closet. Donna goes through them sometimes. I don’t.
I haven’t been able to cross the room and pick it up.
I’ve been sitting here for forty-five minutes writing this out instead, which tells you something about the state I’m in.
The thing about grief nobody warns you about – at least nobody warned me – is that it doesn’t stay the same shape. The first year after Becca died I was underwater. Completely. I went to work and came home and sat in the car in the driveway for stretches of time I couldn’t account for later. Donna was the one who held us together that year. She made the calls, she answered the cards, she figured out what to do with Becca’s apartment and her things and all of it. I was somewhere else.
Year two I came back up and got angry. At the aneurysm, at the doctors who told us it was undetectable and unpreventable, at Becca for being twenty-three minutes late to dinner the last night we had with her because she’d stopped to FaceTime a friend. That’s the one I’m most ashamed of. She was nineteen and she stopped to talk to her friend and I spent six months furious at her for it.
Year three was quieter. Not better, quieter. There’s a difference.
Year four – this year – I thought I was doing something like okay.
The DMV
I should explain the DMV part, or at least try to.
I wasn’t having a great day before any of this happened. It was a Tuesday in February, which is its own kind of miserable. I’d gotten a notice that my license was up for renewal and I’d put it off until there were eleven days left, which is very much something I would have done before Becca died and very much something she would have teased me about. She used to call me the King of Almost Too Late. Birthday cards postmarked the day of. Oil changes at five thousand miles past due.
So I was already in a low mood, sitting in a plastic chair under fluorescent lights, listening to a number system that seemed to be moving backward.
And then I saw this girl.
Here’s the thing I keep getting stuck on. It wasn’t just the hair, or the foot-tuck, or the sleeves pulled down. Those things registered one at a time, like separate small shocks. But there was also just something about the way she was sitting there being quietly alive – being bored at the DMV, being a young woman with a whole Tuesday afternoon ahead of her – that hit me somewhere I don’t have a name for.
Becca would have been twenty-three this March.
I don’t think I’m crazy. I think I was tired and sad and I saw something that looked like my kid, and my body made a decision before my brain finished the sentence.
But I also know what I looked like to her. A middle-aged man getting out of his chair and following her out of the building. Calling after her in a parking lot. She had her keys out. She was ready.
That part is not okay. I know that. I’m not asking anyone to tell me it was fine.
What Donna Didn’t Say
When I got home it was around four. Donna was in the kitchen and I told her right away, the whole thing. I don’t know why I led with it instead of burying it. Something about the look on that girl’s face in the parking lot was still sitting in my throat and I needed it out.
Donna listened. She didn’t ask questions while I was talking, which she usually does. She just stood there with her coffee cup and let me get through all of it.
Then she was quiet for a long time.
Long enough that I said, “Say something.”
She set her cup in the sink. She said, “I need a few minutes.” And she went to the bedroom.
About twenty minutes later something slid under the door. I heard it from the couch. I didn’t get up right away. I’m still not up.
Here’s what I know about Donna and photographs. She doesn’t reach for them casually. For the first two years after Becca died she couldn’t look at them at all. The boxes stayed in the closet and we didn’t talk about it. Then somewhere in year three she started going through them on her own, quietly, usually on Sunday mornings when she thought I was still asleep. I’d come downstairs and she’d have a few spread out on the kitchen table and she’d put them away before I got close, and I let her, because we’ve learned to let each other have things.
So she went to that box and she chose one and she slid it under the door.
She’s been in there for two hours.
The Friends Are Wrong
My buddy Craig – we’ve known each other since our thirties, his wife and Donna used to do a book club together – Craig thinks I need to “cut myself some slack.” His words. He said grief does weird things and I clearly wasn’t in my right mind and the woman in the parking lot was probably fine.
My friend Phil thinks I scared the hell out of a stranger and that’s not something you get to explain away with grief. Phil lost his father a few years back, so he’s not saying it without some understanding of what loss does. He’s just saying there’s a line.
They’re both right and they’re both missing the point.
The point isn’t whether I deserve compassion. I probably do. The point isn’t whether I crossed a line with that woman. I did.
The point is what it means that four years in, I’m still capable of standing up out of a plastic chair and walking out of a building after a stranger because she sat the same way my daughter sat.
What does that say about where I actually am?
I thought I was doing okay. I told Donna I was doing okay. I told my doctor I was doing okay. I believed it, mostly.
But okay people don’t do what I did today.
Nineteen
Becca was home for spring break. That’s the part that still gets me, four years later, in a way I can’t explain to people who haven’t lost a child. She was home. She was in her room, in her bed, in the house she grew up in, and her brain just stopped telling her heart to beat.
She’d been home for three days. We’d had dinner together twice. I’d complained about the dishes she left in the sink and she’d complained about the WiFi password being too long and we’d had the most ordinary Thursday night I’ve ever had in my life, and that was almost the last night.
The last night she was asleep by ten. I didn’t go in and say goodnight. I thought she was already out.
I keep a lot of that Thursday night in a box of its own, separate from everything else. I don’t go through that one.
The girl at the DMV was sitting there being twenty-two or twenty-three on a Tuesday afternoon with her whole week ahead of her. That’s all she was doing. And I looked at her and I saw Becca at nineteen, bored and alive, and I couldn’t stay in my chair.
That’s the truth of it. That’s the whole truth.
The Photograph
I’m going to get up in a minute and pick it up.
I don’t know what Donna is trying to say with it. Maybe it’s not a message. Maybe she just needed to be near something of Becca’s and that was what she had in the bedroom. Maybe she slid it under the door because she wanted me to have it too, and that’s it, that’s the whole thing.
Or maybe she’s been in there for two hours because she’s not just sad about what happened today. Maybe she’s scared about where I am. Maybe she’s been scared for a while and today just made it impossible to keep it in the background.
We have been holding this marriage together with both hands. I said that at the start and I meant it. Both of us, both hands, every day. That’s not nothing. That’s actually a lot, if you think about what we’ve been carrying.
But I don’t know what both hands looks like when one of us starts following strangers out of buildings.
I’m going to get up.
I’m going to pick up the photograph.
And then I’m going to knock on that bedroom door, and whatever Donna says when she opens it, I’m going to listen this time without trying to explain myself in the middle of it.
The number is still sitting on that plastic chair at the DMV. Fifty-seven. I never did get my license renewed.
Becca would have called that very on-brand.
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If this one stayed with you, pass it to someone who needs to know they’re not alone in it.
For more tales of family drama and unexpected twists, you might find yourself engrossed in My Father-in-Law Left a Secret Account to His Other Kids. I Found Out in the Worst Way Possible. or perhaps My Daughter Got Uninvited From a Birthday Party. Then Her Phone Buzzed. And if you’re curious about another “Donna” making waves, check out Donna Said It Loud Enough for the Whole Table to Hear.
