Am I a terrible person for following a stranger through a grocery store for twenty minutes because she looked like my dead sister?
I’m (38F) a widow – my husband Marcus (42M) died fourteen months ago – and I’ve been raising our two kids, Delia (9) and Coop (6), on my own since then.
My sister Joanna died six years before that.
I don’t talk about Joanna much anymore because when I do I can’t function for about three days after, so I’ve gotten good at just – not.
Last Thursday I went to the Kroger on Whitfield Avenue to get stuff for Coop’s school lunch project, just a normal errand, and I turned down the cereal aisle and I stopped completely.
There was a woman there.
She had Joanna’s hair. That specific dark auburn that Joanna had, the kind that looks brown until the light hits it and then it goes almost copper. The woman was about Joanna’s height, same narrow shoulders, same way of reaching for a box on the top shelf with her whole body leaning into it.
My whole chest locked up.
I stood there long enough that my cart was blocking the aisle and someone said “excuse me” and I still didn’t move.
I want to be clear: I KNEW it wasn’t Joanna. I’m not delusional. I have been to therapy. I understand that Joanna has been dead for six years.
But I followed this woman.
Cereal aisle to the dairy case. Dairy case to the deli counter. I kept maybe fifteen, twenty feet back. I wasn’t trying to talk to her. I didn’t have a plan. I just – could not make myself stop.
I watched her order a half pound of turkey breast and I watched her check her phone and I watched her put the phone back in her pocket with this little impatient exhale that Joanna used to make ALL THE TIME.
I started crying in the middle of the deli section.
Not quietly.
A Kroger employee, a teenager, asked me if I was okay and I said yes and he clearly did not believe me.
The woman – Joanna’s double – was maybe ten feet away when she noticed me.
She turned all the way around and looked directly at my face.
And then she walked toward me, and she said, “Hey – do I know you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
My mouth opened.
She was close enough now that I could see she didn’t look THAT much like Joanna. The eyes were different. She was younger, maybe early thirties. But something about being close to her, close enough to see she WASN’T Joanna, made it so much worse somehow and I couldn’t explain that to her, I couldn’t explain any of it, and she was standing there waiting for me to say something, and what came out of my mouth was –
What Came Out
“You look like my sister.”
That’s it. That’s all I had.
She didn’t back away. That was the first thing. She just stood there and said, “Oh.” And then, after a second: “Is she – are you two close?”
And I had to tell her. Standing in front of the deli case at Kroger, with a number ticket in her hand and the guy behind the counter pretending to rearrange the ham, I had to tell a stranger that no, we weren’t close anymore, because Joanna had been dead for six years. And that I’d been following her for twenty minutes. And that I knew, I KNEW how that sounded.
The woman’s name was Bri. Short for something, she said, but she’d stopped telling people the full version in middle school. She was thirty-one. She had on a gray zip-up and jeans and mud on her left sneaker that she hadn’t noticed yet.
She did not run away.
She said, “I’m so sorry about your sister.”
And I said, “I’m so sorry I followed you through the store like a complete lunatic.”
And she laughed. Not a mean laugh. A surprised one, short and real. She said, “I’ve had worse Thursdays.”
What I Didn’t Say to Bri
I didn’t tell her the part about Marcus.
I didn’t tell her that fourteen months ago I was already a person who’d lost her sister and had built some kind of functional life around that loss, and then Marcus had his cardiac event at 7:40 on a Tuesday morning in February while I was making Coop’s oatmeal, and I’d found him on the kitchen floor, and now I’m a person who has lost two people and is raising two kids and some days the Kroger on Whitfield Avenue is genuinely as far as I get.
I didn’t tell her that Joanna would have known exactly what to do when Marcus died. That Joanna had this way of showing up with food and not talking too much and just being physically present, in the room, which is the thing nobody tells you that you need. Just a body in the room that loves you.
I didn’t tell her that sometimes I go three, four days without talking to another adult. That Delia is nine and has started picking up on things, asking me in this careful voice whether I’m tired, which means she’s scared, and I hate that she’s scared, and I don’t know how to fix it.
I didn’t tell her any of that.
I said, “Thank you for not calling security.”
The Part Where It Gets Worse Before It Gets Weirder
Bri got her turkey. I got my cart, which was still sitting in the deli section with nothing in it because I’d spent twenty minutes following a stranger instead of shopping.
I thought that was it. I thought I’d go get Coop’s stuff and go home and cry in the car for a while and that would be Thursday.
But Bri was in the pasta aisle when I came around the corner five minutes later.
She looked at me. I looked at her. My cart had one box of animal crackers in it that I didn’t remember putting there.
She said, “Can I ask you something?”
I said sure.
She said, “The exhale thing. You mentioned I did something with my phone – an exhale. What did that look like?”
I showed her. The little impatient puff of air, chin down, the way Joanna used to do it when a text took too long to load or a light turned red.
Bri stared at me.
She said, “My mom does that. I grew up watching her do that. I didn’t know I’d picked it up.”
And I don’t know why that hit me the way it did. The idea of Joanna’s exhale traveling through time, through families, through genetics and imitation and the small unconscious things we absorb from the people who raise us. Like it was never really Joanna’s exhale to begin with. Like it belonged to something older.
I didn’t say any of that out loud. I’m not completely unhinged.
I said, “That’s kind of a nice thing to carry around.”
What Delia Said
I picked the kids up from school at 3:15. Coop immediately wanted to know if I got the stuff for his lunch project and I said yes even though I’d gotten approximately one box of animal crackers and a gallon of milk and nothing on the actual list, so that was a problem for later.
Delia got in the car and looked at my face and said, “Were you crying?”
I said, “A little bit. I’m okay.”
She said, “Was it about Dad?”
I said, “It was about Aunt Joanna, actually.”
Delia was quiet for a second. She was six when Joanna died so she doesn’t really remember her, just the photographs and the stories, Joanna as a character in family mythology rather than a real person who used to steal my clothes and leave the milk carton empty in the fridge.
Delia said, “Do you miss her a lot?”
I said, “Yeah. A lot.”
She said, “Do you miss Dad more?”
And that question. That question I was not ready for, in a Kroger parking lot, with Coop in the back seat already opening the animal crackers.
“I miss them both,” I said. “It’s not a competition.”
Delia thought about that. Then she said, “I think I miss Dad more because I knew him more.”
“That makes sense,” I said.
“But I feel bad about it,” she said.
I turned around and looked at her, this nine-year-old who has already started doing the math on grief, already started worrying about whether she’s doing it right.
“Don’t feel bad about it,” I said. “You’re not doing anything wrong.”
She nodded like she was filing that away. Then she stole some of Coop’s animal crackers and he screamed and that was the end of the conversation.
What I’ve Been Sitting With Since Thursday
I don’t think I’m a terrible person for following Bri through the store. I’ve decided that. I think I’m a person who has had two enormous losses and is running on very little sleep and sometimes the body just – does a thing. Makes a decision. Moves toward warmth.
Joanna would have thought it was hilarious, by the way. She would have wanted every detail. She would have made me describe the turkey order three times and she would have given Bri a nickname and she would have said something like “so you just FOLLOWED her?” with this big delighted scandalized face, and I would have had to tell her to stop making it funny because it wasn’t funny, and she would have kept making it funny anyway.
That’s the thing about losing someone. You don’t just lose the person. You lose the audience for your life. The specific person who would have heard this story the way it needed to be heard.
Marcus would have worried. He would have asked if I was sleeping, if I needed to call Dr. Heller, if I wanted him to go to Kroger for a while so I could go somewhere else. He worried about me in this steady, practical way that I used to find slightly suffocating and now would give basically anything to have back.
Bri didn’t give me her number or anything. We said goodbye near the self-checkout. She said she hoped I had a better week. I said the same.
She went out through the automatic doors and I watched her go and her hair did the thing in the parking lot light, went from brown to almost copper, and I looked away before I could start again.
I got in the car.
I sat there for a minute.
Then I called my mom, who is seventy-two and has her own losses and her own silences, and when she picked up I said, “Hey, can I just talk for a little while?” and she said, “Of course, baby,” and I did.
—
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If you’re still looking for more family drama, we’ve got you covered with stories like My Granddaughter Wasn’t Invited. I Showed Up Anyway. and My Granddaughter Wasn’t Invited to Her Cousin’s Birthday Party. So I Drove Her There Myself., or read about how The Coach Said My Brother “Doesn’t Belong.” I Made Sure Everyone Heard Him Say It..
