Am I a terrible person for following a stranger off a bus because she looked like my dead sister?
I (33F) lost my younger sister Becca (she was 27) in a car accident four years ago.
We weren’t on great terms when she died.
That’s the part I don’t like to say out loud.
The last time I talked to her was a fight over something so stupid — our mom’s birthday dinner, who was paying, who didn’t show up on time — and I hung up on her.
Three days later she was gone.
I’ve been in therapy, I’ve done the grief groups, I know intellectually that I need to stop looking for her in strangers’ faces.
My friends and family are split on whether I’ve actually gotten better or whether I’ve just gotten better at hiding it.
Last Tuesday I was at the Route 9 bus stop outside the Marshalls on Clement, waiting for the 38.
This woman — maybe mid-twenties, brown curly hair, that exact way Becca used to stand with her weight on one hip — sat down two feet away from me.
My chest caved in.
It wasn’t that she LOOKED exactly like Becca.
It was the laugh.
She was on the phone with someone, half-laughing at something, and it was Becca’s laugh — the specific, slightly-too-loud one that used to embarrass me in restaurants.
The bus came.
She got on.
I don’t even remember deciding to follow her.
I just — got on the bus.
I sat three rows back and I watched her for eleven stops.
I know how that sounds.
I KNOW.
She got off at Balboa, and before I could stop myself, I was off too.
She turned around on the sidewalk and looked right at me.
Her eyes were nothing like Becca’s — lighter, a little wary — and in that second I understood exactly what I was doing and I wanted to disappear into the concrete.
She said, “Can I help you?”
I said, “I’m so sorry. You remind me of someone.”
She studied me for a second.
Then something in her face changed — softened, almost — and she said, “Someone you miss?”
I nodded.
I couldn’t speak.
She looked at me for a long moment, then opened her mouth and said something that made my knees lock.
What She Said
“I lost my brother two years ago. I still follow people sometimes.”
That was it.
No preamble. No “oh how sad.” Just that, flat and factual, like she was telling me the bus ran late.
I stood there on the sidewalk on Balboa at 2:40 on a Tuesday afternoon and I did not cry, which surprised me, because I cry in the cereal aisle at Safeway sometimes. I just stood there with my mouth doing something.
She said her name was Deb.
Short for Deborah. She said it like she knew the full name was a lot, which, it is, but she wore it fine.
I told her my name. She didn’t make a big deal of it.
We ended up sitting on the low concrete wall outside a dry cleaner for about forty minutes. I don’t know whose idea that was. We both just kind of drifted toward it and sat down.
She told me her brother’s name was Phil. Thirty-one when he died. Aneurysm, no warning, he’d been at work and then he wasn’t anywhere anymore. She said she found out by a voicemail from a number she didn’t recognize and she still has it saved and has never listened to it again after the first time.
I told her about Becca. The fight. The birthday dinner. The hanging up.
I’ve said that out loud maybe four times in four years, and two of those times were to my therapist, Dr. Renata Marsh, who has a very calm face that I have tested repeatedly.
Saying it to Deb was different. She didn’t make the face people make. She just nodded, slowly, like she was filing it away somewhere.
Then she said, “What was the fight actually about?”
And I said, “I told you. The birthday dinner, who was—”
“No,” she said. “What was it actually about.”
The Thing I Don’t Say in Therapy Either
I’ve thought about this for four years and I still don’t have a clean answer, which is maybe its own answer.
Becca and I had a pattern. We’d be fine for months, close even, texting daily, and then something small would detonate it and we’d be cold for weeks. The birthday dinner wasn’t the first time. It was probably the sixth or seventh time.
What it was actually about — if I’m being honest, if I’m being the kind of honest you can only manage with a stranger on a wall outside a dry cleaner — was that I was angry at her for being younger and easier and the one my mom called first.
That’s the ugly part.
I was the responsible one, the one who showed up on time, the one who handled things. Becca showed up an hour late with wine and everyone thought she was charming. I showed up on time with the reservation confirmation and everyone thought I was uptight.
I was thirty-three years old and I was still jealous of my dead sister for being the fun one.
I told Deb this.
She was quiet for a second.
Then she said, “Phil borrowed two thousand dollars from me eight months before he died and never paid it back and I never brought it up again after he died because what kind of person brings that up.”
“The kind of person who lent two thousand dollars,” I said.
She laughed. Not Becca’s laugh. Hers was shorter, drier.
“I think about that money sometimes and then I feel like a monster,” she said.
“You’re not a monster.”
“You’re not either.”
We sat with that for a minute.
Eleven Stops
Here’s the thing about those eleven stops on the 38 that I keep coming back to.
I wasn’t delusional. I knew it wasn’t Becca. I knew that from the second she sat down, actually — the rational part of my brain was running fine the whole time, doing its little checklist. Wrong nose. Wrong shoes. Wrong hands. Becca had these very specific hands, narrow palms and long fingers, pianist hands she never used for piano.
But the laugh.
The laugh did something to my chest that bypassed the checklist entirely.
I’ve talked to Dr. Marsh about this. She says grief doesn’t live in the thinking part of the brain. She says something about the amygdala and pattern recognition and how the body processes loss differently than the mind does, and I believe her, I do, but sitting on that bus I wasn’t thinking about neuroscience. I was thinking about how Becca used to laugh at her own jokes before she finished telling them, this specific wheeze at the end, and how I used to roll my eyes at it and how I would give a lot to hear it one more time.
I sat three rows back and I watched Deb’s shoulders moving when she laughed and I let myself pretend, just for a minute. Just for a few stops.
I know that’s not healthy. Dr. Marsh would have a measured response to that.
But I also think there’s something in it that isn’t just broken. I think sometimes the brain does what it has to do to get through a Tuesday.
What I Didn’t Tell Deb
I didn’t tell her about the voicemails.
Becca left me a voicemail two days after the fight. I didn’t listen to it until after she died, and by then it was too late to call back, obviously, but the voicemail itself — she wasn’t calling to apologize. She was calling to tell me about a jacket she’d seen in a store window that she thought I’d like. That was it. The fight was apparently already over for her. She’d moved on. She was calling me about a jacket.
I’ve listened to it maybe two hundred times.
Sometimes I go weeks without listening to it. Then something happens — a smell, a particular angle of afternoon light, a laugh on a bus — and I’m in my car in a parking garage at 11pm with my phone pressed to my ear.
“Hey, it’s me. So I’m walking past this store on Haight and there’s this jacket in the window, it’s like this dark green sort of military thing, and I immediately thought of you, you’d actually wear this, unlike the stuff I usually think you’d wear. Anyway. Call me back. Or don’t, whatever, you’re probably busy being responsible somewhere.”
That last part. You’re probably busy being responsible somewhere.
Not mean. Just — Becca. That was just Becca.
After the Dry Cleaner
Deb and I exchanged numbers before we went our separate ways. She had somewhere to be, a dentist appointment she was already late for, and she said it without apology, which I respected.
She said, “I’m glad you got off the bus.”
I said, “I’m sorry I followed you.”
She said, “Don’t be. I’ve done worse.”
I walked back to the 38 stop and waited for the next bus and stood there in the 4pm light with my hands in my pockets thinking about Phil’s two thousand dollars and Becca’s jacket and the specific sound of a laugh that can make your chest cave in on a Tuesday.
I texted Dr. Marsh when I got home. She doesn’t love texts but she tolerates mine. I told her what happened and said I’d tell her the rest Thursday.
She texted back: I’m glad you’re okay. See you Thursday.
I sat with my phone for a while after that.
Then I listened to the voicemail.
I didn’t go to the parking garage. I just sat in my kitchen with the overhead light on and a half-eaten bowl of cereal going soft on the counter and I listened to my sister tell me about a jacket.
I haven’t called Deb yet. I will, I think. Maybe. There’s something about having told a stranger the true version of things that makes you want to protect it a little before you turn it into a regular friendship with regular social obligations.
She gets that, I think. She seems like someone who’d get that.
I still don’t know if I’m a terrible person.
But I don’t think that’s actually the question anymore.
—
If this one got you somewhere quiet, pass it on to someone who might need it.
For more stories where people find themselves in unexpected, emotionally charged situations, check out I Stood Up at My Son’s School Assembly and Started Reading Names Out Loud or read about My Dad Was in the ER and I Told a Stranger to Leave – Then the Doctor Called His Name Too. You might also connect with the raw feelings in My Wife Sat There Perfectly Still. I Couldn’t..
