I Hugged A Stranger Today

I hugged a stranger today. It was ... well, strange. It's not what I'm used to, it's not who I was before Kyla died.

She was probably a few years older than my parents. She had glasses and wonderfully graying, curly hair. (This is where good writers can make you feel like you know the person by describing their appearance through a beautiful combination of metaphors and visceral descriptions, but I'm not the best visual assessor of people's appearances, so I don't remember much else - sorry.) She came in to get some copies, pretty straightforward stuff. Black and white, regular paper, nothing fancy. As she started to show me what she needed done, she told me her father had just died and she needed to get copies of these things for life insurance, etc. I said I was sorry to hear that, then proceeded to make her copies. Like I said, simple stuff. Took me less than 3-4 minutes.

When I came back to the counter to hand her back the originals and the new copies, she had a credit card and her ID sitting there on the counter, ready for payment time. I looked at her and said, "This one's on me."
She looked a little confused, and I was already planning on explaining why, so I continued. "Back in January ..."
She interrupted, "Oh, you're going to make me cry."
"Sorry," I said, smiling in spite of it all. "I probably am. Back in January, our second daughter was stillborn." She looked at me with a look of pure sympathy, tears welling in her eyes. I swear she let out something like a sob or a whimper. "The funeral home didn't charge us for anything. I would have paid it, whatever it took - she was my daughter - but they did it free of charge. And I just know that meant so much to me."

Come to find out, she's got a Notebook-esque deathbed tale to tell about her father. He was 89 when he died. About 4 years ago, he had a stroke. It was a bad one, left him virtually unable to speak or walk and he'd been living like that since. But his mind was still there. And he really, really loved his wife - so much so that, two minutes before he died, he kissed his wife goodbye.

Oof. That one punched me in the chest cavity. I've tasted the hollow bitterness of loss, and now I am different, like it or not. I used to make copies for funerals and whatnot and I'd almost always give them a discount or not charge them, but I've never done it like this. Today that woman and I shared a connection of grief that I didn't know existed 11 months ago. Today we hugged, and I don't even know her name. Today I felt more like me than I normally do. The real me wants to talk about Kyla. The real me wants to cry and hold her and Chelsea and Riley. The real me wants to hug people I barely know because they've lost a child, too. Yet sometimes I push the real me back, stuff him underneath my introverted nature, hide him from the world. Sometimes I smile and talk about Chelsea's current pregnancy, extinguishing the burning desire inside that wants to talk about why we're already onto our 3rd child. But sometimes you've just gotta do that kind of stuff. Sometimes people don't want to know that you're forever in pain, floating on a wisp of hope for the next baby. Sometimes people just want to complain about how goddamned cold it is (and I'm happy to join in on that conversation, to be honest). Sometimes people want to be abrupt and harsh like I'm an idiot that doesn't know how to do his job. That's the way it goes. So sometimes I'm me, sometimes I'm not. I guess that's just who I am now.